We are now so used to accessing anything we want or need to know online that pre-Internet days seem primitively distant. But my son’s autism struck before Google did and so there was, at that time, very little freely available knowledge about the condition. Although I could clearly see that certain foods were affecting him very badly I was very much on my own and stabbing in the dark in trying to sort out his problems. I could see that both wheat and cow’s milk-based foods provoked bad reactions but did not know why.

The radical improvement that came with an anti-candida regime seemed to go some way to explaining the dreadful effects that antibiotics had on him every time he took them. Common-sense indicated that they must strip the gut of all its good and necessary bacteria as they scatter-gunned his body.

I did not realise at the time that his constant congestion and respiratory infections were a characteristic he shared with many other autistic children. This made my determination to keep him off antibiotics difficult to achieve as ordinary colds seemed to progress quickly to chest infections with which I did not like to take chances. So by the time our referral to a paediatrician came around he was on yet another gut-blasting course. Each time he took them they provoked a worse reaction than the time before and this time was no exception. Between courses, and on probiotics, he would settle and improve only to disintegrate spectacularly with the next batch of luminous pink, anti-bug goo.

The day before our paediatric consultation I made careful notes of my observations and the correlations between his adverse symptoms and behaviours and the foods and medicines that seemed to trigger them.

My son was quite happy during the hour and a half’s drive to the hospital as he loved travelling in the aged campervan that we were then running. This soon changed, however, when we entered the paediatric clinic, which looked like a scene from a Hieronymous Bosch painting – all human life was here, jam-packed into one hot, noisy, bug-ridden space. Cranky children coughed, yelled, raced around and sneezed. Cranky parents tried, hopelessly, to entertain them. It was the closest to hell I’ve ever been and, like hell, we seemed destined to be there for all eternity. We waited..... and waited.

My son, by now, was a ball of hopping-bopping, spaced-out mania driven demented by penicillin and the autistic nightmare of close confinement with a motley collection of his own species.       

We were eventually called to wait in a consulting room, one step further at least...but there was no-one there.

Our file, containing my son’s referral letter from our GP, lay open on the desk. The room had an adjoining door, which was partly open. From this I could hear a secretary telling the paediatrician that a private patient had popped in and asked if she could see him. We were not, at the time, private patients.

The consultant engaged in very polite and considerate-sounding conversation with this lady...while we waited, and waited and my son hopped, bopped and focussed on a spot on the wall.

To pass the time, and out of curiosity, I read the referral letter upside-down. At which point the paediatrician finally entered.

            ‘That letter’, he thundered, ‘is between me and your doctor.’

The letter, as I had gleaned from my upside-down reading, contained scant reference to the points that I had asked our GP to include such as my son's adverse reactions to antibiotics and to a number of foods.

The consultative thundering had unsettled my son even further and he was now busy bopping for his adopted country.

                       ‘Is he always like this?’ His Medicinal asked brusquely.

I replied that actually, no he wasn’t, and tried to explain about the antibiotics and the food reactions..........

                                    ‘Abnormal, highly abnormal.'

Well, er, yes, that’s why we’re here.......

                ‘Abnormal, highlly abnormal.I’ll refer him for a global assessment.’

Which I then found out could take a long time to access.    

                                            ‘You can go now.’

But, um, I have some questions I would like to ask. Like what, in the meantime, should I be doing about the obviously damaging effects of his Weetabix addiction, the beastly pink bug-goo and his beloved, but gaga-making, custard ?

                                          ‘You can go now..’

he repeated, without even deigning to raise his eyes from the file as he said it.

So go we did, all the way back to West Cork at a speed that nearly rattled the doors off the van. Thankfully speed detection was unheard of then as my one determination was to catch our GP before surgery closed.

Silly me, I thought this dreadful encounter was a one-off...I had no idea that we were only just beginning our induction into the denigrations of disability.

Squealing to a halt outside our GP's surgery I ignored the  blue mist rising from the brake pads and stormed in to find him finishing for the day.

            ‘I am never,’ I said, ‘going to sit before one of these grey, pompous ‘great men’ of medicine to be treated like this again so don’t bother referring us to one.’

 ‘You know what you’re doing,’ he said, ‘and it seems to be working so the best thing to do is probably just to carry on.'

So I did.                  

                                                                                  GaiaCharis. 2010.