Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Response to a topic on Wrong Planet forum



Question(para-phrased):

Did your parents know something was different with you, but others didn't?

My answer:

I was born early and was in and out of hospital a lot for a while before I can remember. My parents also thought something was up with me but the doctors of the mid-80s chalked it up to my being born early with some C.P. on the side and maybe a brain injury(was supposed but 27 years and a MRI later there's no proof to suggest there was a brain injury and certainly not one to any great degree). I couldn't sit up without support at a year old, but I had also just gotten back from a stay at the hospital before that and at that time I always regressed after being in the hospital and no one marked down milestones or remembers when I started talking since they were too busy with my medical stuff.



I asked my mother is they'd ever tired to get a diagnosis when I was little and she said they did talk to my doctors but they all said I was developmentally delayed and that was normal for kids that had been born early.





-------------

Me rambling about elementary school:

I went through public school with adaptive P.E. and was pulled out for a little while to be tested with flash cards and stuff in resource For me resource was me and the rough mannered lady(My family is very mild mannered compared nearly everyone else here). Her flipping cards while I had to read the words off them or say what the picture was or whatever the test was that time. Hated it, but never really questioned it except once. I'd been going since starting school so maybe I thought it was normal when I was little. I did wonder about it once when I was maybe around third or fourth grade and tried to make sense of it in my own head. I think my reasoning at the time was that if there were others that went to resource like I did they were probably in other rooms each with one adult testing them like I was or if they used the same lady then they likely saw her at different times. By sixth grade I knew of a kid in my class that went to something called 'gate' during class time every so often, because he was very smart so while I knew what I went to wasn't the same thing I figured it was normal for some kids to go to places kind of like I did.



I grew up in the days when if I hadn't actually seen 'disabled kids' passing through the resource room I'd have ever known or they were at the school at all. Nor would I have assumed, since I only saw them passing through resource and nowhere else that they had some room far away somewhere in the school that they stayed in the rest of the time(I assumed it was one room for some reason for all of them). I find it odd now that I assumed they all shared one classroom and that I never wondered anything about them having recess or where they would play since I never saw them on the yard with the other kids. Though the recesses were by grade so they may have had their own recess time and I wouldn't have known anyway if it wasn't at the same time as mine Of course I was pretty oblivious to most things as a kid and kept to myself at the far end of the yard all recess with my one friend and the other girl she'd meet that played with us.



I think it was mainly fourth and maybe even as early as third grade when I started hanging out by the far end of the yard where all the mowed grass was(which I told the others was hay - because I didn't know what it was and when I didn't know what something was I would use the closest word I could think of and strong smelling rows of cut grass looked like hay to me since I never saw how the 'hay' got there each day until later in the year and then I was so used to calling it 'hay' that I didn't care that it wasn't really 'hay' nor did it naturally just appear at the end of the yard every day as I'd assumed beforehand. Yes I have a yard and yes the grass is mowed but the grass clippings are not left on the grass, but thrown in the trash can afterward and back then I wouldn't have even known that yet as I wasn't to be outside when the yard was being mowed.