All this time we’ve been “not otherwise specified”.

What’s Isabella’s diagnosis? Is it specified?
Not really.
So it’s not specified?
Well… not otherwise specified.

So, her diagnosis was a specific specified diagnosis, though not “otherwise specified.” Got it?

We thought we did. PDD-NOS. That’s what someone said early on and it stuck. It was either a nurse or a therapist who first threw that out, then everyone else just nodded. For example, we paid one neurologist over $500 to say, “Yeah, I guess that’s about right,” just before they pushed a button that opened a trap door beneath our feet and dropped us into a chute that spit us out onto the street with our wallets and jewelry missing.

So, no one really said PDD-NOS for sure; it was more like someone got that ball rolling and everyone else either pushed it a bit further or just moved out of its way.

Until a few weeks back. We went to a new doc, a psychiatrist. Isabella’s going through some serious separation anxiety problems (which makes hide and seek a bit difficult), so we went in to the doc. We brought in a monster packet of filled-out questionnaires that the doc had sent beforehand.

The office looked a bit like a furniture store because the waiting room was devoid of couches but had several identical leather living room chairs lined around the walls. I don’t think they reclined, so they probably got them on sale. In any case, cutting right to it, back in our examination room, while a nurse was asking follow-up questions about the forms at a desk that had a curious lean to it (another discount), the doc strolled in, rifled through the forms while still standing, asked a few brief questions, snapped his fingers at the nurse to write this down, then got a call and bolted.

The nurse followed him out and brought back a spiral notebook with random typed and printed papers with notes and stickers and tabs and random articles tucked in it. She explained that it was his as-yet unpublished book, soon to be the latest of his many published books. I later found out that this doc was world-renowned -- meaning that if he went on vacation to Greece or Tasmania they’d renown the crap out of him. Anyway, she said the doc wanted us to read a certain section. She opened it up, pointed, then walked out.

I walked over to the desk and looked at the heading on the page. Asperger’s Syndrome.

What? Huh? Isabella is nothing like Sam, the child that we use as the model of an individual with that diagnosis. She didn’t read early, she’s not super social, she isn’t fascinated by the make and model of cars. Although, she does have a strange fixation with toilets like Sam…

The doc came back in and we expressed our doubts. He held up one of the forms that we’d filled out; our answers basically maxed out the “this sounds like Asperger’s” scale. Ok. That one will take us a while to wrap our heads around.

He then mentioned medications that might help, throwing out terms like “seratonin” and “prefrontal cortex,” terms that tickled the seratonin in the science-loving section of my prefrontal cortex, but the dad in me said, “What’s it going to do to her?”

“It’s a massive tranquilizer,” were his first words. Thinking back to Isabella’s sleep issues , I thought, “bad idea.” He later explained that the dosage was so low that “it wouldn’t even affect a chicken.” That confused me to the point that I just checked out and tagged Carrie, who jumped in and dug deeper (thus confusing the metaphor) with the questions. She’s better at that anyway, and, if I’m honest, I think she was the one asking the questions in the first place. My job was to nod knowingly.

So, it was an eventful appointment. To be honest, we didn’t initially like the doc that much, him not being the “warm and fuzzy” type, though that phrase always makes me giggle and gives me the creeps at the same time. But, he definitely knew his stuff, he came back in and talked to us several times during the appointment, and he asked, “Have I missed anything?” toward the end of the appointment so that he could be sure that our needs were met. Bottom line: we finally liked the doc and felt that he addressed our concerns.

We’ll see how the medicine works. If she konks out in class, we’ll take her off. If it doesn’t make a noticeable difference, we’ll take her off. If it gives me a funny look, we’ll take her off. It better run like a Jamaican at the Olympics, or it’s out.

Now, though, I’ve got to go change my profile to replace “PDD-NOS” with “Asperger’s”. That will be easier than changing it in my brain though.