My mom has been my safety net for my whole life. She just sometimes doesn’t hold my safety net in the right places. When I first got sick she didn’t know where to hold my safety net because the professionals were all insisting that there was nothing physically wrong with me. They insisted that I had an eating disorder.
Because she was holding my safety net in the wrong spot, I fell. Hard. And whacked my head on the floor of an elevator when I passed out after a routine blood test. My dad had to rush me to the ER. At the ER a doctor with a monkey fingerling named Mr. Bananas clinging to his stethoscope examined me.
Jonathan (my 5-year-old brother) was struggling in kindergarten.
“I think he might be on the autism spectrum,” I heard his teacher say to my mom when we went to his classroom to pick him up. The school kicked me out after I got dizzy in class too many times. When they sent me to the nurse’s office for it, my blood pressure would be so low that they would have to call my mom to bring me home and make an emergency doctor’s appointment with Dr. Monroe
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They decided that I couldn’t go back to school until I was eating three meals a day and had a doctor’s note clearing me to return.
That day the teacher pulled my mom aside, my mom sounded angry.
“He is not, autistic” my mom glared at Jonathan’s teacher.
“He needs testing done if he ever wants to graduate kindergarten. At the very least he has severe learning disabilities.” The teacher told my mom, as Jonathan stared intently at a skid mark on the linoleum floor.
It was another whole year before Jonathan got the testing done. He had to repeat kindergarten. But again, Jonathan wasn’t in immediate danger of dying, so my issues were the ones put front and center, and all my parent’s energy was thrown into playing food police on me.
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