My wife and I were taken by surprise, our dreams shattered by a diagnosis that we didn’t understand.  Daniel was our first born; his birth filled our lives with happiness.  Everything was happiness until my son turned 18 months of age.  My wife was a stay at home mom at the time.  I remember coming back from work and her telling me that Daniel was not responding when she called his name.  She was also concerned that he was not learning how to speak at the rate other children did.

I didn’t believe what my wife told me at first.  I just thought that was normal.  I heard many times that all children are different and developed at different rates.  We didn’t have any other children at the time, so it was very difficult for us to know for sure how children were supposed to be.  We have pictures and videos of Daniel before he was 18 months of age and now I look back and it still would have been hard to know he had any problems before he was 18 months old.  I remember playing with him basketball in a small basketball hoop and he used to get so excited, dunk the basketball, let me dunk the ball, laugh, look at my eyes and interact very appropriately for his age.  I still 4 years later and after all we have been through and learned, I still believe he was ok until he was 18 months old. 

Once Daniel turned 18 months old, my wife started to notice the deterioration of his behaviors.  His problems were very mild until he turned 2 ½ years old.  When he was 2 ½ years old he developed a chronic viral and bacterial infection.  He didn’t eat for 5 days and had a very high fever.  He lost a lot of weight during those 5 days, he had my wife and I very worried.  He just didn’t look good.   A few weeks later, my wife called the Early Child Intervention (ECI) program and asked them to come to our house to evaluate Daniel.  This is something she wanted to do for a few months.  ECI came over and evaluated Daniel.  In a matter of 20 minutes, the diagnostician told my wife “Your son has red flags for autism”.  My wife called me right away to my office and gave me the news.  I asked her, “What is autism?”  She was crying in the other side of the line, doing the best she could to explain what she was just told.  I told her not to worry about what the diagnostician said because it was not possible to look at child for only 20 minutes and give such a serious diagnosis.

Two months later after he recovered from the viral and bacterial infection is when we believe that he stopped developing.   At this point Daniel was already 2 years and 8 months old months old.  I just couldn’t deny any longer that my son was just behaving the way he was because he was just a toddler.  Since the viral and bacterial infection his behaviors deteriorated at an alarming rate.  The smile that he once had that used to "light up any room" was gone.  He just wouldn't look at our eyes any longer.  He became a very picky eater.  He started banging his head against his bedroom door, started lining up toys, looking at lines, looking at the wheels in his toy cars. 

He also developed a dime size Vitiligo spot in his buttocks at 2 years and 8 months of age.  Everywhere he got cuts or scrapes the skin healed as white as copier paper.  I didn't know why he developed Vitiligo and his worst autistic symptoms at the same time, but that was what never let me believe that autism was just some mysterious mental disorder.  I knew that it had something to do with the Vitiligo.  

It was just so painful watching Daniel not able to establish eye contact and to be in his own world.  The anxiety he suffered from not knowing how to play with many toys.  All the tantrums and all the stress this whole situation put in the family it was just too much to bear.  I remember taking Daniel to many doctors and therapist and asking what caused my son to develop autism.  None of these professionals or "autism experts" were able to give us an answer.  Therapists only told us all we could do for Daniel was speech therapist and occupational therapy.  A well known neurologist that I specially remember due to his recommendation and his warning.  This neurologist told us, i can prescribe seizure medications for Daniel.  I didn't understand why Daniel needed seizure medications.  The neurologist didn't explain why either.

The feeling of not understanding what was causing my son to have these "autistic" behaviors and listening to all these doctors say that there was not any known cause of cure was just devastating to our family.  I just never believed any of what these doctors told us and started doing my own medical research.  The medical research allowed me to find the right doctors that were able to treat Daniel medically.

Daniel has improved from being a severely disabled child to a child that is becoming as healthy and productive as any other healthy child can be.  The better he gets, the harder we work to push him to continue to improve.  I don't think our journey has finished yet, but the road to a better future for Daniel and many other children look very bright...