Where it all began...

This is really difficult for me to write about, it was a very lonely and sad time for me. Life as I knew it would take a change for the worse and I didn't know how to handle it. My sweet, talkative, happy, little boy would be taken away from us and become lost in his own world in the blink of an eye. I didn't know how to make sense of it all. I never saw it coming, so I had no way to prepare for it. Until David was 18 months old, he was a healthy and happy boy and soon he would lose almost all his speech, his ability to interact, and the worst of all and most hearbreaking for me, was he lost his smile. For me as a mom, this was almost too hard to deal with. The times we once spent together laughing and playing would never be the same again. Instead of sharing these incredible moments together, they became a struggle. There were no more laughter and smiles, it was tears and tantrums. I couldn't bear anymore to have people look at him the way they did. I hated the looks I got from other mothers. One day I couldn't handle it any longer and became completely isolated from people. That way no once could look at me with those disapproving stares or look at my son like he was a creature from outer space. I had to protect myself and my son from the pain that society was placing upon us. I soon became an expert on what parks would be empty and at what times. If I pulled up and their was 1 person there, I would pull out of the parking lot and head to the next one. That way if he had a complete meltdown, no one was there to judge me and my son. I stopped hanging out with family and friends who had kids around the same age as David. It was almost unbearable to watch their children act "normal" and have the skills they had compared to my son. I just didn't understand what happened...his physical body was there but everything inside was gone. He had a blank look on his face and didn't even understand the concept of playing anymore. He would just run around doing nothing at all. He stopped pointing, stopped looking at me in the eye, he wouldn't respond to his name, and he threw these unbelievably long tantrums all the time. He had a sadness in his eyes that broke my heart. Sadly out of the 19 words he spoke at 18 months, I have only heard 4 of those words a handful of times in the past 5 years. If that isn't heartbreaking enough, we had many new issues that we were about to face over the next couple of years. This was only the beginning...