Dispatches from the sunburned wastelands

Since the moment he stopped crawling, Martin was always running. It was as if he could not stop the urge to run. Whenever we would go somewhere - a park, or the mall, or anyplace new to him, he would immediately start running. The problem with this was, he never came back on his own. You could call and shout, but the little running man just kept on going. Oh, and he also did not want to be put in his stroller anymore - trying that resulted in some serious melt-downs. So we adapted. When we went to the mall, he got put into a shopping trolley. When going to a park we had to be prepared to run after him, and try "herding" techniques. And we stopped our attempts at leisurely family picnics, going to the markets, or going for a hike in the bush. At daycare, they started calling him "runaway martin", and put notices on the doors for unsuspecting people to be ware that small running boy might escape when a door is being kept open too long. I thought that it was funny, at first. Round about when he was eighteen months old, we started wondering about his hearing - because surely that must be the reason why he never responded to his name being called, and explained his delayed speech development. And the running? Well, that was just the way he expressed himself. After the hearing tests came back negative , we had to face the fact that there might be something else going on with him. We went to our family GP, and told him about our worries. He referred us to a developmental paediatrician. It took us ages to get in to see him (a common problem due to a lack of medical specialist in Canberra). When we finally went to see him, we were slightly embarrassed. Won't he just laugh at our worries, and tell us that our little boy is just being a normal toddler? Martin did his normal running routine when we went into the paediatrician's office, and after listening to our worries, he agreed that there might be something wrong and referred us to a developmental psychologist for an assessment. That evening, we felt shell-shocked. One the one hand, we were glad that it wasn't just our imaginations that something might be wrong with Martin, but on the other hand, who wants to be told that their little wonderful Boy might have a disability? To be continued.

Posted by HannesB at 10:49 AM Comments