Almost Autistic
Today at the park, I was once again overrun by both gratitude and pain. A child of four or five years old was watching my littles on a see-saw and we invited him to join. No answer. “He’s non-verbal,” his mom explained. As she skillfully helped him to navigate the playground in spite of having some major sensory issues, I tended to my own children and observed with awe. She was a master of her craft. Was her son autistic? Perhaps not, but it is certainly the most likely diagnosis. Not every special needs child is blessed with such a loving mother. My heart ached for both of them and for my own family not so many years before.
I remember those days. Our struggles were different and less but still similar and intense. My children have all learned to communicate at least reasonably well as babies, which is a gift I am tremendously grateful for, but still didn’t make life normal because of all of the sensory and other issues we have dealt with. As many parents can attest, a child with sensory issues needs to be able to communicate the things that are troubling him, otherwise his life is almost unbearable. Seamus’s life was often almost unbearable even though he was an early talker and would very clearly tell us, with screams if words didn’t suffice, that a place, or smell, or clothing item, or music, or feeling, or person was overwhelming for him. Just being able to communicate that you want something doesn’t mean you can have it, though – I didn’t have a smell-eliminating wand and couldn’t let him go naked everywhere.
When he was an infant, I remember another mom helping me realize that his intolerable behaviors became even more intolerable when I ate dairy or when he tried grains. I say “intolerable”because it was, but there is something cold about that word. I was perfectly miserable with lack of sleep and a mind-blowingly demanding child and lots of unhelpful advice. But Seamus must have been so much more miserable than I. What could make a child scream for so many hours on end even in his mothers arms?
If I couldn’t soothe him, it is needless to mention that he could not self-soothe. As he got older. it could take hours to “get over” the smallest issues. People say “obsession,” as in obsessive-compulsive disorder. People use the word “fixation” when discussing autism. People even use the more positive term “hyper-focus” to describe a common experience of people with ADHD. It doesn’t really matter what word you use or how you distinguish these similar phenomenae if the result is a whole morning derailed all because a favorite shirt was dirty or because an errand interrupted playtime. Nothing like a forty-five minute violent tantrum to put the family in the right frame of mind to start the day.
I also remember people politely asking, “Is he autistic?” Sigh. He wasn’t. He had decent eye contact, was verbal, and hit all his milestones in a timely fashion. He certainly wasn’t average, though, endlessly observing other children at the park, only interacting occasionally and without naturalness. He had a habit of talking at people instead of to them, major sensory and sleep issues, constant gut trouble, and crazy behaviors in response to certain foods. No, he never would have scored as “autistic,” but reflecting back, he must have been. What had masked it? Or prevented it? Or mitigated it?
A few different things. Firstly, Seamus has been having an abundance of good fats, including fermented cod liver oil, since since he was in utero. I had also been gluten-free and dye-free for years before conception. We have never tried food dyes or other “junk,” no kid needs those things, but we had tried gluten and with terrible results. After lots of healing he does fine with dairy, but as an infant and on and off as he got older it gave him awful colic and behavior issues. What dietary things do parent’s of autistic kids swear by? Omega 3s (like in the cod liver oil) and avoiding gluten, dairy, and food dye. What would have happened if he had been eating the “standard American diet?” I never tried, but I think I would have had a fully autistic child. At one point, when some chlorinated pool water wiped out his gut, I recall that his behaviors went from 7/10 to 10/10 on the “unbearable” scale. After a couple of weeks that felt like decades, I decided to try the GAPS diet for him and within 24 hours he was he usual self; he was still demanding, sleepless, etc, but back to his baseline and even somewhat better. . . not the post-pool over-the-top level. The GAPS diet was literally developed to treat autism, but I didn’t connect the dots.
We somehow survived until Seamus was about three and we took him to a chiropractor. Immediate results. At the time I simply observed that he could better cope with life, risks, and changes. Within the framework of autism, I would phrase it differently: he could better process with sensory input, was less anxious, and had the executive function to better adjust to change. The words used are beside the point. He was so much happier, quite literally more comfortable in his own skin, more able to learn and to fit in. Needless to say, chiropractic care became part of our regular routine. I see many families with autistic children come regularly to our chiropractor;they try it, they find it so helpful it immediately becomes a top priority as it did for our family. It still didn’t occur to me that my son might be autistic.
Even when both of Seamus’s little sisters developed non-febrile gran mal seizures it still did not occur to me that autism could be the issue. I didn’t know that about a quarter of people with autism are diagnosed with epilepsy. I hardly noticed the fact that both girls also had sensory issues. Having become accustomed to things like entire days ruined by requiring Seamus to use the scented soap available in a public bathroom, I had learned to navigate the world differently and had different expectations of kids. My girls’ sensory troubles were fewer and less intense than Seamus’s, anyhow. Maybe because of regular chiropractic care and super strict diet, maybe for some other reason. They also both had gut trouble and food sensitivities – not shocking since I did, too, though with all of my vigilance and how much I had learned about diet, I certainly had hoped my younger children would have happier bellies.
Somewhere in the midst of the drama of sorting out my second daughter’s belly/food issues–Maeve was well past 12 months before she could tolerate anything except breastmilk–I decided to try heavy metal testing. I wish I knew who to credit with the excellent idea of doing a heavy metal hair test but I was so exhausted from taking care of three sleepless children (sleep issues are also common in autistic populations!) that I don’t remember much from that year, but I digress. . . After a decade of eating a mostly organic diet, using non-toxic body care and housekeeping products and growing a lot of our own food, my 14-month old was in the 99th percentile for overall toxicity. The test showed her hair was especially high in arsenic, aluminum, and antimony. I got my own hair test with similar results, additionally showing lots of mercury. No wonder my kids had so many health problems and no wonder my many physical and mental health issues had improved even as I was well into my thirties . . . I had been their source of heavy metals and I had been unintentionally and steadily detoxing into my children.
After reading the test results, I remember nursing my little Maeve with tears pouring down my face. She couldn’t tolerate food. The only thing I could feed her was my own, heavy-metal tainted milk. But God is faithful. Maeve was his daughter much more surely than she was mine. Little by little I wrapped my mind and my heart around the issue. Little by little, Maeve began to tolerate first a few and then some more foods. Getting rid of our Smart Meter and Wi-Fi sped up her belly healing quite a bit, allowing her to eat more and more solid foods. I scoured the internet for months, not finding any particularly promising solutions until I ran across the “Andy Cutler Protocol.” It was developed by a chemist who got mercury poisoning from dental work and then developed a protocol to treat himself. The more I read about it the more it made sense to me. I even bought one of his books and looked up the specific metals that showed up on our hair tests; it seemed as though someone had been watching our family and writing down all of our idiosyncracies and troubles. A characteristic pimply rash that cut short our enjoyment of supple baby skin with each of my kids; my obsession with hot drinks; anxiety; seizures; miscarraiges; autoimmune issues; yeast; sleep issues; adrenal fatigue; painfully good hearing. . . it was us! It was at once, both terrifying and validating. But countless parents had used this protocol it to cure their autistic children. I had long since been convinced that autism was at least largely a result of the heavy metals. . . How could my kids have heavy metal poisoning or autism or whatever you want to call it if they had decent eye contact and good verbal skills?
Now it seems so obvious. They had been on the GAPS diet for much of their lives. They all had been receiving omega-3s (as fermented cod liver oil, salmon, and sardines) pretty consistently since conception along with lots of other good fats. We had a pretty strict screen-free policy and we home schooled, two things that can go a long way to empower “high functioning” autistic kids to socialize well. I also actively worked on eye contact with my two kids who struggled with it, attributing it to COVID policies (sigh!) and myself being often distracted taking care of a sick baby. Yes, they had “decent” eye contact and good verbal skills. I know a lot of homeschool kids who eat real food and have minimal screen time – it is, as you might expect, a recipe for optimal eye contact and verbal skills. My kid’s should have been doing great, not “decently.” How much worse off my children have been if they ate junk, used screens, or simply were put into a school system that they weren’t well suited to I can only imagine. Oh yes, and there was the chiropractic care that helped their behavior symptoms so much.
Well, the proof would be trying the protocol and seeing what happened. Dr Cutler said that results were apparent pretty quickly if, indeed, heavy metals were the issue. We decided to try it for Seamus first and see what happened. I kept notes and within six weeks of starting I find the note, “Seamus is completing more schoolwork in less time than ever before. Meltdowns are fewer and farther between and require less intervention. He can “self soothe. . .” As a nine-year-old, he hadn’t been able to calm himself down previously. Within a few more weeks the nine month gut flare, caused by contact with our wheat-containing chicken feed, melted away. All of the broth and fermented foods and anti-inflammatory herbs I had used for months had barely helped the flare at all; suddenly it totally resolved, leaving Seamus able to touch wheat with no reaction. Someday I may be brave enough to let him try eating it.
So we started the girls on the Andy Cutler Protocol, too. A year and a half later, we have seen only one small seizure in each of my girls. Seamus’s writing skills, always a point of difficulty, are soaring. I rarely need to remind anyone to look me in the eye and when I do, they comply easily. My four-year-old’s cheeks suddenly became lovely and kissable not pimply as before – they all still have rashes in some places, but the patches are shrinking and I am sure cherishing those cheeks! They can eat most wholesome foods without reactions. Our lives don’t revolve around the bathroom. My kids sleep. No joke; typically, they fall asleep when they are tired and then stay asleep, often until well past daybreak. They wake up rested. They can cope with changes in the plan without major meltdowns. A note I recently took says, “Seamus – able to see the point of view of others.” Until the change happened, I hadn’t realized that he lacked that ability. I thought it was some obstinance or selfishness. No, it was simply that his own sensory issues and anxiety (or maybe something else I can’t identify) made it too difficult to comprehend anything other than his own perspective. Virtue that we had been working toward for years suddenly blossomed in him. Not “virtue” that was a memorizing of how to handle a million different situations, but an organic, thoroughly natural, human virtue rooted in wholeness and health. Thomas Aquinas is often misquoted as having said, “Grace builds on nature and nature builds on grace.*” Quote or misquote, it is what is happening in our house!
My child–the one who, as an infant would typically wake every 45 minutes at night, the one who would scream bloody murder in the car, floor, bed or anywhere except my arms, and who demanded to be outside, to be bounced, and to be nursed constantly–that child is peaceful. Active and intense, yes, but peaceful. He is well rounded. He is cheerful. No, really, he is actually habitually cheerful. Even when something goes wrong, even when there is–horror of horrors–a bad smell, he can be calm. This child who had gut reactions to countless foods and tantrums after eating countless others: tomatoes, dairy, grains, peppers. . . This child now eats my home-made pizza. . . in whatever quantity he wants. . . and washes it down with a glass of milk. And then he goes to bed, sleeps well, and rises excited to be alive. Five years ago, I literally did not even dream that it was possible. Five years ago I was still wondering if requiring him to submit to hair washing would slowly but surely ruin our relationship.
To be sure, we are not all the way “there” yet. There are still many smells that really bother him. He still is often overwhelmed by things that shouldn’t be overwhelming and still struggles with transitions and with focus. He just walked out of his bedroom at 9:50PM because he heard a noise no one else can hear. There is still sometimes a “disconnect” between him and other children or between him and the social situation, but most often, there isn’t. He is so normal, so well liked by family and friends. He is happy. I never expected to call Seamus “happy” without qualifying it carefully. Now I say it unqualified. My son is happy. It is amazing what having a brain free of neurotoxic poisons can do for a person. We still have at least a few more months of this protocol, and I can’t wait to see how my kids continue to progress as we go.
Not only do I know what was plaguing my children, I am able to heal them. That is a huge gift. Deo gratias. How my heart breaks for the families still searching for their answers. Heavy metals can hardly be the underlying cause of every health problem or even every child on the autism spectrum or with ADHD or sensory issues, but I can’t help but wonder if it is a much bigger problem than we realize. I also have a lot more patience for people than I used to: maybe all of those cranky, rude, or clueless people have mercury or arsenic in their brains. The Andy Cutler Protocol has given my family health, joy, even wings. There have been so many helpful tools along the way: diet, chiropractic care, tuned-in parenting. . . But this protocol is actually making them well. The poisonous elements that made them miserable for so long are coming out safely and permanently. Dr. Cutler passed a few years ago–may he be richly rewarded in heaven for every person healed by his protocol!
In my next article (coming in November), I will talk more about the Andy Cutler Protocol and about other options for testing for and addressing heavy metals in the body. If you think heavy metals might be at the bottom of your health problems, I would encourage you to read The Mercury Detox Manual by Dr. Cutler available at andycutlerbooks.net or Fight Autism and Win: Biomedical Therapies That Actually Work! by Jan Martin and Tressie Taylor available at gendetox.com, which also has other resources. Cutler’s book explains for the principles behind the protocol and how to treat adults. Martin and Taylor’s book gives directions for treating children and is very easy to read, even for the a very sleep deprived parent.
*The actual quote from Aquinas is from the Summa (Part I, Question 1, Article 8) “. . . grace does not destroy nature but perfects it,” and is part of a discussion about sacred doctrine.