Wild Idea?

A year ago today I posted the following status on my facebook wall:

What a day. Along with flu jab and asthma review, a very successful meeting with the doc who listened to a whole load of my waffling and has put in a referral to the sort of docs who will try to fathom what’s going on between my ears!*

Feels like a huge relief and real progress.

*good luck with that then folks!

Since, at the time, I wasn’t telling very many people about the “autism hypothesis”, I didn’t elaborate further on my visit to the doctor. It was easy just to talk vaguely about what might or might not have been going on between my ears and also to refer, as I did in another post, to “head stuff” because it had been well known for years that I had considerable mental health problems and I was already totally open about them, so, for most people that probably covered it.

What I didn’t mention at the time was that we’d purposely made a double appointment with my GP, and that I took my husband and about a dozen pages of notes with me. We’d made the notes while out on a walk a few days earlier (“Starting to examine my childhood”, from Still Here), taking 25 kilometres and six hours and several cups of coffee to persuade my brain to start thinking back to my childhood, and to pause every so often while my husband wrote my rambling thoughts down in a notebook he was carrying. I think very much better while on the move – in the car, walking, running – so it seemed like a good way to approach things. It had been a strange process, forcing myself to think back and to remember things I hadn’t thought about for decades – as far as I was concerned, the “real childhood memories” file had been closed long ago and I just remembered the sanitized version as part of my life narrative. I certainly hadn’t tried to remember the difficult bits, the painful bits, the bits that were needed for an autism diagnosis.

We’d already been at the surgery for some time before the appointment with my GP because it was also time for asthma reviews and flu jabs, so we’d seen the asthma nurse and discussed inhalers and so on first. By the time we were in the waiting area for the doctor I was ready to go home. I regretted that the only way of getting to the surgery was by car and so I couldn’t even have a drink to try to calm myself down. We sat and stimmed in the waiting room (although we still didn’t refer to it as stimming at that point as we’d only seen the word a few times and weren’t quite sure what it actually meant), and I was determined not to bottle it and give up.

I didn’t even know, back then, what “self-diagnosis” was. It didn’t occur to me that, having found something that might be “wrong” with me, my first course of action wouldn’t be to go and see a doctor, not because I had any notion of being “fixed” but because I believed that, as with bipolar disorder, with which I had considerable experience, autism was something the medical profession might help me manage (that turned out to be somewhat optimistic on my part)! I also, even at that early stage, needed official permission to “be autistic” and the thought of telling anybody that I was without an official piece of paper seemed far too wild to even consider. My thoughts on official diagnosis were developed further as time went on, and I examined some of them in Why Bother?

Once we’d been called in for the appointment, the conversation ran something like this:

Me: Hi Doc, this is going to sound well random and well weird and you’ll probably think I’ve gone even more bonkers than I usually am, but I had a bit of a strange summer and my head went a bit wrong and a bunch of folk said they thought I might be autistic or something so I read a couple of books and we made some notes about all sorts of stuff and, er, here we are, and, yes, I know it’s a bit barmy and a seriously wild idea and stuff and… but anyway… erm… well…

(all the time, jiggling my leg, flapping my fingers, and staring fixedly at a bit of badly done paintwork in the corner of the room)

I then looked hopefully at my husband because I’d run out of what to say next.

The doctor saved both of us having to say anything.

Doc: Oh of COURSE! It’s so absolutely obvious now you mention it. So sorry for not knowing earlier, but with only short appointments and so much to get through and so little time to spend with you…

(then, the doc paused, as if a thought had just come out of the blue)

Doc: Didn’t you have an incident at the swimming pool a few years ago? And they called us here and said you were violent and aggressive and you came in and said you weren’t violent at all but you were scared and distressed and they’d got it all wrong…

(there followed discussions of meltdowns, of how these episodes had been happening all my life, and of various other things, and by this time I was rocking hard in the chair and the pennies were dropping fast in the doc’s head, just as they had in mine a couple of weeks earlier)

The referral for formal assessment was being started before we were even out of the door. My GP had needed no convincing whatsoever. I didn’t know then that that had been the easy bit, and that finding somebody who could actually diagnose me as autistic would take a whole load more work, and that “letting the medics take it from here and look after me” wasn’t an option, and that I’d have to do my own research, fill in forms seemingly infinitely (that’s what it felt like at the time), and that I was only at the beginning of a very long journey, but that journey was underway.

I left the surgery and went round to my best mate’s house for tea. I told him that yes, the doc thought I was autistic too. He already knew what was going on and was totally cool with the whole idea and thought it made absolute sense. I then went off to a rehearsal that evening, and then away for the weekend to play music, still very fragile and broken after the summer, still reeling from the discovery, but starting, already, to accept myself as an autistic person, even at that stage. I still hadn’t actually said that I WAS autistic at that point – every time I mentioned it to anybody it was “it’s been suggested that I might be autistic” taking the label (or diagnosis, or whatever you want to call it) for myself without anyone giving me permission to seemed to be terribly presumptious at that stage, so I stuck to “might” and “a possibility” and so on.

The fact that my GP believed it made a huge amount of difference though, and something that had been “just an idea being pondered by me and a few mates” became something a little bit official. We’d told someone “proper”, who hadn’t dismissed the idea, and had, in fact, confirmed it.

I regained a little bit of confidence. Maybe I wasn’t totally crazy after all. Maybe this wasn’t some sort of “weird thing that happened over the summer but now we’re back to normal life everything just goes back to how it was and the “holiday romance” is over!”

It still felt really odd. Two months earlier I’d had absolutely no inkling that I might be autistic at all. I wasn’t one of those people who’d “suspected for a while” because I didn’t have enough knowledge of anything to suspect. I’d only started taking the idea seriously and investigating it properly myself about three weeks earlier. The whole of life felt so very peculiar and weird and like it had all gone a bit crazy somehow. My mental state was still fragile, and was, in fact, although I didn’t know it at the time, getting worse. Things felt wrong…

…but things also, suddenly, after over 4 decades of a different sort of wrong, felt right.