Well we have had a really exciting week. My dear sister and mum and dad, came over to look after Ed for a day while the rest of us had some 'normal' family time which we spent with my dear brother and sister-in-law on their amazing boat - great fun. The good news was that Ed was apparently really well behaved and all had a good time. Latter in the week I took Ed and Tom for a visit to my parents, after all, Ed appeared to have turned a corner. How wrong can you be, he was so destructive, pulling things down, throwing things on the floor, screaming and crying for reasons unknown, the house and garden looked like a bomb hit it. In a weird way I was kinda glad, because it reminded me how he used to be everyday, and the difference now is extraordinary - not all the time - but its growing. I used the time at my parents to go to the 'farm' and buy some lovely raw milk. I mention it because milk will be my next post, and whilst I was there to calm him down I took a walk round the farm, as they suggested on a poster on the shop door. It was just heavenly, Ed had space to run off which he did happily. And we had a nice little wander around looking at their organic harvest and chickens. What struck me other than the peace and all the Little creature was the smell. I have been round cows and they stink, but not here. All I could smell was warm meadows and chamomile, even treading through the cow muck, it was unbelievable how nice it smelt. The reason is they feed their cows on grass and hay in the winter, not corn like the rest of the milk you buy, and trust me when I say it, their s@*t don't stink! In the world of autism, as you may have noticed, a lot of attention is paid to what comes out because its a good indication of what is happening inside. Well what is happening inside these cow and their milk is different to your normal intensively farmed animals.
Now on to a subject that literally made the hair on my neck stand on end with an eureka moment.
I talked about sensory things very briefly last post, two sensory thing Ed did that I didn't mention where toe walking and eye poking. Just as it says, he would walk on tiptoe even in shoes, and poke himself in the eye really hard, not in the eyeball but between the eye and eyelid. To see this behaviour is very distressing - because something is obviously very wrong, but the powers that be just say, well, some of them do it. It was at this time I found that google did a better job than the NHS. As I researched it I came across blood crystals, the bodies of our autistic children are very different inside, and the blood works done on some of them show crystals slightly smaller than a blood cell. This really got my interest and I research blood intensively. Apparently our blood cells are shaped in the way they are so they can bend and twist through very tiny capillaries in our bodies to nourish all of us. In autistic children, their blood cell are sometimes not so flexible and have a hard time moving round, they also have these weird crystals floating around, from what I read it was common in our children. This got me to thinking, if these crystals pooled in your feet like fluid does in all of us, wouldn't they pool in the bottom of your feet? would this feel good? or would it feel like walking on broken glass? and if you had to walk through broken glass wouldn't you do it on tiptoes? Also if they were moving round round the wee vessels in and around your eyes wouldn't it hurt and maybe you would poke it to ease the pain. If you could get rid of the crystal would this behaviour go? So me and google got together, there are all sorts of ideas about why these crystal form, but the one I went with actually made the hair on my neck stand up when I read it, it was a scholarly article written about the many roles of vitamin K. I spent some time this morning to find it but couldn't, so I will post the link to it latter when I find it (and by that I mean when the children are back at school!) In the meantime, the main thrust of the article was that calcium leaks out of the bones if there isn't enough Vit K to keep it in place and forms crystals in the blood. If you have enough Vit K, it escorts it back to your bones. Now, there are some natural sources of Vit K that you eat, but generally its something that is made in your body not by you, but by your friendly intestinal bacteria. The sources of food you find it in are animal fats, cream, full fat milk, lard (not the crappy store bought rubbish but the nice homemade stuff) etc. So, lets look at not just our autistic childrens diet, but the diet that we are all being recommended which is low fat, hence low in Vit K. I have a 30 year old friend with the bone density of a 60 year old, it's something that modern women suffer from today, its called osteoporosis, where there isn't enough calcium in the bones to make them strong. Even if you take your calcium supplements if you don't have Vit K, it will just leach out of your bones. We are not making it ourselves anymore because our internal gut flora is messed up with anti-biotic and unhealthy diets. Dairy is the one of the first foods you are recommended to remove when your starting an intervention with an autistic child, and by doing so, you are cutting out the main supply of Vit K. Within those animal fats you also have all your fat soluble vitamins that your eyes and teeth need to be healty, just look around at our children and you can see they are not getting enough. I haven't put this very well, its a complicated interelated subject, but I hope you can all think round this and see how far reaching and important it is. I completely understand that some people are intolerent of dairy products and so can't eat them, and to them I urge you to supplement this important and overlooked nutrient, I am sure as time goes on they will discover all sorts of other functions that its does.
So Richard was very happy when the clotted cream was back on the table, instead of telling him he was going to have a heart attack, I was telling the other children to eat up because it was good for them. So the full fat milk and proper block butter in a butter dish came back. The roast potatoes went in goose fat, and that was all about a year ago. I also introduced Vit K and Vit D supplements (because the two work together, and by the way, you dont make Vit D with sunscreen) in Eds diet to give him a boost, and the eye poking stopped and hasn't come back. The toe walking stopped as well, very rarley he will toe walk in the morning, but not for long. I see it as proving exactly that the toe walking was because the crystals were pooled in his feet, which is why if it happens, its in the morning. I don't supplement anymore with these vitamins, just rely on a natural source and I don't put sunscreen on him unless he will be out in the sun all day. Believe it or not, I just rub virgin coconut oil in my red headed angel, and dispite the fact he is out more than he is in, he hasn't burned this year. I read on one of my many heatlh blogs that other people have found that they have stopped burning in the sun once they started consuming these animal fats back in their diet. So, next time you go shopping, don't feel guilty putting that butter and cream in your basket, look at those poor folk doing what they are told, eating their awful margarine getting fatter and iller and feel sorry for them. X
As a post script, sorry for the grammer - I think it and type it, and spell check isn't working again!
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