Anthony is getting even worse with ripping fabric.  A couple of days ago, he ripped apart two pairs of shorts.  Today, he came home from school having ripped the shirt he had worn to school, plus an additional one in his backpack as a replacement, and his undershirt.  And, to seal the horror... he got off the bus wearing a sweatshirt supporting my alma mater's bitter rival (cue "Psycho" theme music).  Well, beggars can't be choosers, I guess.

And we could well end up beggars at the rate we're going.  As I have written in the past, we frequent a thrift shop for much of Anthony's clothing because of his relative indifference to what he wears, combined with his propensity to stain or damage things quickly.  But even then, if we're looking at $20, $30, or more every month, that will certainly start to add up.  Even more than the money involved, though--since ultimately we can divert from other expenditures to cover if that becomes necessary--is the added stress of having to replace clothing constantly.  We face the real possibility, for instance, of Anthony temporarily being without pants to wear if he keeps ripping things and the last remaining articles are in the wash.  The thrift stores we go to are not particularly close, and trips to them require planning to fit in with already very busy schedules.  And while closer big box discount stores may be on the inexpensive end for a new clothing item or two, they will often be twice or more the cost of what we would pay secondhand.

We're in one of those stretches with Anthony that seriously challenge us with regard to coming up with solutions or sufficient patience.  But maybe we need to think "outside the box".  Instead of always worrying about clothes for Anthony, perhaps there is a nudist colony that would take him off our hands....

"Dad, have you seen the spray paint I was using?" I knew my daughter was working on a project for her group date to a school dance that night.  "No, I haven't.  I guess you've asked Mom?" In many households, Mom can find anything, and my wife is no exception, but in our household Mom also has an amusing/maddening compulsion to immediately put away anything that is not where she deems it should be.

But Mom, who was out running errands, denied being the culprit in this instance.

I knew I had seen the spray paint in question, and thought I knew *where* I had seen it, so my thoughts then turned to Anthony.  What would Anthony do if he saw that can? First, if it had a label he could possibly remove, that would be gone.  And then....

I opened the trash can.  Nothing.  I rummaged down further, and there it was: a label-less metal can, easily avoiding detection by a scan of the contents at the top.

My daughter, who was by this time approaching a state of despair due to time constraints before her friends arrived, had Mom on the phone discussing the matter.  I, feeling highly satisfied with my sleuthing abilities, proudly produced the can and handed it to her while she was yet on her phone.  And then it came, through gritted teeth: "I. Hate. Anthony!"  I tried to get her to lighten up and joked that we just have to try to mimic his thought processes.

But while our daughter doesn't always "hate" Anthony, the rest of us understand her sentiment.  Later in the evening, I heard my wife exclaim, "Nooooo!" It turned out that Anthony had ripped the tag off an article of her cherished exercise clothing, ruining it.  And between those incidents, Anthony ended up with wet pants when my wife arrived with him at our younger son's soccer game, despite having taken him to the bathroom before the game--I'm guessing he didn't go--and making him wear a diaper.  I am resigned to thinking we're at the point where we would be surprised if Anthony did not cause us problems like these regularly.

My wife took Anthony to see a neurologist today as recommended by the doctor at the emergency room last week.  She called worriedly to ask if I could somehow leave work--I ended up finishing at home--to join her at the doctor's office because Anthony was showing signs of getting violent.  Thankfully, we didn't have an incident there.

The doctor told us, somewhat differently from what we heard at the emergency room, that the chance of having a second seizure is in fact 50% within the next six months for people in general, and higher than that for those with autism.  If Anthony makes it past six months without one, the likelihood for another episode goes down significantly.  We were grateful to have clarification about that, as well as information about what to do in general if it happens again.  We will also be getting an emergency nasal spray prescription that can stop a seizure if it goes excessively long--we learned that a seizure that lasts five minutes, for instance, is just as likely to continue for ten, and clearly intervention would then be in order if possible.

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As I have mentioned before, we are at a loss about what to do with Anthony wetting himself.  He has completely regressed to not even considering going to the bathroom on his own before doing so.  Maddeningly, he will come out to us or go into the bathroom immediately *after* he has done it, and it is apparent that he knows we won't be happy with him.  We don't know what to think.  It's almost as though the blessing we felt of him suddenly learning to go on his own at five years of age--after nothing we tried worked--has just as suddenly been revoked.

This impacts us not only in time lost due to dealing with him once, twice, and even thrice a day with the washing, changing, cleaning, et cetera, but there is an additional challenge for us, and part of it is almost amusing: we have to scramble to find pants or shorts for him to wear because things are constantly being soiled and waiting to be washed, and I realized today that the stack of plastic bags we get from stores for our garbage has been depleted because we keep using them for Anthony's wet clothes.  We will have to stop being ecologically friendly and ask for more plastic rather than paper bags for the time being, I guess.

I had been thinking I needed to follow up on the last post--we ultimately do have to find another service provider--as well as write about Anthony continuing to defy all attempts to stop his urinating problems, but today we experienced something new: he had a seizure.

As today was a holiday, I was off work.  And as fate would have it, I did not sleep well last night, so I had not yet gone outside to work in the garden as I had planned.  My wife and younger son were out, so only my daughter was with me when Anthony began making a commotion in his bedroom indicating something was seriously wrong.  My daughter's own initial reaction was that she was hearing an earthquake, but she quickly realized it was only in Anthony's room.  I rushed in to find him convulsing on the floor with a heavier chair on top of him, and called my daughter in to help me get the chair off him.  In the same small area, he has a table where he sits to work on puzzles; we moved that away as well and tried to sit him up as he was beginning to turn blue.  I realized the gravity of the situation, and both my daughter and I had brief thoughts that the unthinkable might be happening before our eyes.  Thankfully, I did manage to get him up and breathing again.  But Anthony is heavy, and trying to lift a limp body of that size is not an easy task.

My daughter ran to the computer to search on what to do when someone is having a seizure, and told me to turn him on his side and cushion his head.  We did that, but he was on the floor and it didn't look very comfortable, in addition to the fact that he was also lying on scattered puzzle pieces, so I tried to lift him without success to get him on his bed.  My daughter said a person who has just had a seizure will also be very groggy, and that was indeed the case with Anthony, but we did manage to get him to climb onto his bed, after which he rested nicely for about three hours.

Later, after some discussion and considering advice from others, my wife and I took Anthony to an urgent care section of the hospital, where they determined it would be best to have him go to the emergency room to run some tests.  The doctor said the results showed nothing out of the ordinary and, more importantly, told us that of those who ever experience a seizure in their lifetimes, 80% will never experience another.

On a personal note, hearing that figure was a tremendous relief to me.  For a few hours today, I was revisiting the struggles I had years ago to separate lack of control with regard to Anthony's condition from other areas, including professional, of my life.  I am grateful to likely not have yet more stress to combat.

We learned at the hospital, by the way, that Anthony weighs 215 pounds.  We now have a renewed determination to get him to lose weight, just in case this ever happens again.

We received a call from Anthony's community support provider on Friday saying Anthony had gotten violent, and asking us to come get him rather than them bringing him home as they normally would.  We are of course never particularly surprised to get such calls, and I went to pick him up without giving much thought to it.  I had not heard the details and casually told the waiting male staff that Anthony probably needed to have a bowel movement; I would take him home and have him sit on the toilet.

The full story was rather more serious than that. It turns out that he tried to rip a tag off another boy's shirt--yes, we are still dealing with that, along with the urinating problems--and a female staffer tried to stop him.  Anthony got upset and slammed his head into hers, sending her to the hospital with a concussion.  We were asked to keep Anthony home Saturday and Monday while the staff re-evaluates how (or whether) they want to proceed with him.

Anthony is in some ways more difficult to deal with than many other autistic individuals.  Because he is pretty easy-going much of the time, he can lull his handlers into a false sense of security around him.  We are always quite specific about the dangers associated with him: he doesn't get violent often, but when he does, he will do anything he can to hurt his handler if he thinks he can get away with it.  The special needs school that he separately goes to, for instance, has a male staffer that they immediately call when Anthony gets upset.  But we understand that if a staffer sees Anthony for an extended period without a violent episode, he or she might default to thinking Anthony does not require as much diligence as do others.  And then something like this can happen.

Since violence with Anthony ultimately is a matter of when rather than if, we would prefer that he have an episode soon after entering a new environment to let people see that we weren't kidding about him.  Sadly, we don't have control over that. Perhaps we need to consistently reiterate what Anthony is capable of doing until they see it for themselves.

We are going through one of the more difficult stretches we have had with Anthony.  Along with his self-wetting not abating regardless of how diligent we are in having him go to the toilet in a timely manner, his oft-noted obsession with peeling and ripping things has been taken to a more destructive level: he now wants to rip tags off fabric.  That fabric might be towels, or it might be clothing, and depending on how he rips the tags off--as his only concern is doing it rather than taking into consideration the status of the article afterward--we have had several items of clothing ruined in the process, some of them of reasonable worth.

I think the combination of these two problems reasonably qualifies for "at wits' end" status for us.  Anthony wetting himself and whatever surface he is on can happen at any time like it did late last night when we were already very tired and past bedtime, or it can be during the period after taking him to the bathroom after a meal and before he has eaten or drunk anything else like today.  Because of his limited comprehension of speech, trying to talk to him and explain what we need from him is about as effective as saying the same things to a pet, although I do try.

With regard to the tag-ripping, if he gets his hand on an object, it's too late.  Amazingly, he *does* understand when we raise our voices and tell him to stop, but it doesn't matter; so strong is his desire to do it.  We have to be constantly vigilant about keeping him away from closets or laundry or any place else he might find something to rip, and that is just not always feasible.  Short of locking up all clothing and other fabric at all times, finding him ripping yet more items is very likely an eventuality.

Yet even with the negative aspects of these things, there is often a bit of lightheartedness.  My wife asked which of us were going to grate the cheese for our homemade pizza today.  My daughter jawed with me to try to get me to do it instead of her.  I was quite ready to make her a deal: I would happily make the admittedly-considerable effort to grate a lot of cheese, if she would clean up the sofa cushion Anthony had wet.  Surprisingly, she didn't take me up on my offer....

Anthony has suddenly started regressing with regard to using the toilet when he needs to.  Whereas the occasional problems with him wetting himself in the past could largely be attributed to change of routine, for the last month or so he has defied explanation in choosing to wet himself rather than going to the bathroom when he needs to.  We had a period wherein he wet himself every day for several in a row, and two or three times in some instances.  I thought he was getting better, but yesterday was yet again another day when he did it twice despite us feeling like we were reasonably on top of things with regard to sending him to the bathroom. We're not certain what to make of it.  The only other thing we have noticed is that he has twice gotten up out of bed at night and wanted to sit on the toilet.  Once when I thought he had sat there long enough, I got him up and sent him back to bed, but he wasn't happy.  The other time (last night), I allowed him to stay as long as he wanted, but he didn't appear to do anything before he was fine to go back to bed.

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I have mentioned that we have a rabbit.  For our rabbit's litter, we shred cardboard, newspaper, paper bags and the like.  Out of convenience, we keep the shredder in Anthony's bedroom and have a stash of shreddables piled up there.

Anthony has noticed us taking toilet paper cores and shredding them, and lately he has decided it was something he wanted to try.  I have watched to make sure he isn't getting his fingers into the machine, although the design makes that nearly impossible.

Unfortunately, Anthony is so interested in shredding that he will do whatever necessary to get to the toilet paper core.  If that means unrolling half a roll of toilet paper, so be it.  If it means pulling the core out of a cheaply-made roll--we have vowed never to buy that brand again!--he will do it.  To make matters far worse, toilet paper off the roll must, in Anthony's mind, be in the toilet.  So, yes, we have had entire rolls of toilet paper in the toilet.  Obviously, a full roll will not flush.  What is worse than that is the ones he has had to unravel and put in the toilet.  Those have taken more attempts than I want to count to unplug the toilet.

Anthony likes music.  In fact, we are finding that his interests may be very similar to those of our music-loving daughter, two years his junior.  When our daughter has been listening to Taylor Swift in her bedroom, for instance, Anthony has shown up more than once at her open door to listen--I guess there's no accounting for taste!  We have also noticed that, when we are playing music in general, Anthony makes a lot of noise at a fairly constant pitch, unlike the random noises he makes at other times.  An acquaintance at church recently also heard him doing this and commented to us that it appears he is trying to sing; that is the conclusion we have come to ourselves.

Another similarity we have found between Anthony and his sister involves eating habits.  Anthony will often leave any meat in a dish until the end of his meal, and won't eat it unless we urge him to do so.  Our daughter would also refuse to eat most meat if we let her.  Relatively speaking, we don't eat a great deal of meat anyway, and are moving toward even less, but what we do eat is almost always chicken or something else on the lighter side, and it is there as a balanced part of the meal.  So, for the time being, they are required to eat it.

Speaking of eating dishes with a minimum of meat, my wife made Pad Thai the other day.  When I dished some up for myself, I doused it with a little lime juice from a plastic bottle.  I then asked Anthony if he also wanted any Pad Thai--he had been eating another dish--and he immediately got up and brought his plate to me.  After I dished it up for him and handed him the plate, he made a shaking gesture toward the bottle of lime juice.  He apparently had seen me shake some lime juice out for my meal, and wanted the same for himself.

I recently experienced what appeared to be a negative reaction toward Anthony.  We were in an aisle in a grocery store when Anthony sneezed.  Although he didn't sneeze on anything in particular, a store clerk who came into the aisle just as it happened commented on it, and continued to do so as he walked by us.  At first I wasn't sure what to make of his comments, but then determined he was trying to make a point about it, so I said something about Anthony being autistic and not having an understanding of what he was doing.

Offhand, I can think of only two other instances of people reacting negatively toward Anthony and being unsatisfied with my explanation of him being autistic.  One also happened in a grocery store when Anthony suddenly got into a silly sort of mood and started jumping around.  In so doing, he bumped into a lady who was close by.  The other instance was at a zoo when Anthony went over to a baby stroller near us and tapped on the tray in front of the baby before I could reel him in.

These instances are clearly the exception to the rule; otherwise, I would never attempt to take Anthony outside. Thankfully, people are almost unfailingly understanding toward Anthony, or are at least willing to give him the benefit of the doubt even if they don't understand him well.

One thing not directly related to Anthony that bothers me, however, is a general use of the word "retarded" in society.  I hear people that I otherwise like and respect using that word which offends those who deal with people who are involuntarily mentally disadvantaged.  But the people I hear using the word are generally also not close enough to me to actively appeal for a change in their behavior.  Thus I fully support the "Spread The Word To End The Word" campaign at http://www.r-word.org/.  The more people that are made aware of this, the better it will be for a great many people.

We have a sport-utility vehicle that is old enough to make us start thinking about what kind of vehicle we might want to buy in the future.  Of course, we have to take Anthony's seating into account.  Not only is he a stocky kid who takes up more room than his siblings would like, he can be annoying to them and even dangerous depending on his mood.  And even if neither of his siblings are present, he has been known to reach over the seat and try to hurt others in the row in front of him, which means we need three rows to provide a buffer between him and the driver.  As third-row head clearance varies considerably between models, we have been looking forward to going to the annual auto show to check out a lot of vehicles at the same time with Anthony in tow.

Here is a picture of Anthony at the show.  He appears to enjoy it, and seems to like sitting in the cars, even to the point that he stands by one waiting to get in even if we were just perusing from outside with the intent of moving on.

We told Anthony to "smile".  Not too bad, I suppose, for not understanding the concept....