Dan and Autism

My Residents Celebrated Independence Day By Acting Like Lunatics

I'll get to the lunacy later. The day started off nicely at 9 PM, when I arrived at the house and told only three of our residents were with us because the other three were with family. The three we had also wanted to sleep in, and I was fine with letting them. Eventually they got up and two of them went swimming for a bit. The first half of the day consisted primarily of sitting outside or swimming.
Our guy with the bone disorder was dropped off by his mom in the afternoon, and I witnessed something new with him. A few days ago, we were told that we might have to call 9-1-1 for him sometime soon, because his life expentancy isn't anticipated to go much longer. Ever since that, I've been on the edge whenever he starts making strange noises (well, stranger than usual). While we were sitting the living room, he started making pained sounds and I thought I heard a few sobs, so I rushed to get another staff member. She informed me that he just does that sometimes, and assured me that it wasn't unusual.
More strangeness occured when our most well-behaved guy started acting up. I've never seen him misbehave in any major way, and he's usually very calm and quite. But towards the end of the night, he was obsessing over something in the kitchen. In addition to this, I think he became more frustrated since he couldn't communicate to us what he wanted. We tried to tell him to calm down, but he started doing this thing where he rubbed his forearms on his face. His adversive (a sort of punishment) for noncomplience (not listening to us) is for us to take his watch for three minutes. I'm beginning to question the usefullness of this, because while it did get him to stop obsessing over whatever his problem with the kitchen was, he became obsessed with getting his watch back. He'd tap us on the shoulder after ten seconds, or go looking through the house trying to find where we hid it. We had to sit him down by himself in another room, because if he saw any staff or made eye contact with them, he'd run up and start asking for his watch back. This didn't even work, however, because he started just getting out of his seat and looking for us or the watch. And everytime he did this, we'd have to start the timer over. Eventually, we found a loophole by making him go take a shower, which takes longer than three minutes, so we could give him his watch back.
At night, I learned another new trick one of my guys can do. I was sleeping in the staff bedroom (no more sleeping on the couch for me!), when I heard a sound that I can only describe as a cross between a fire engine siren and dying cats. I didn't know what in the world it was, so I left my bedroom to follow the sound. It led me to the bedroom of two of our residents, and when I opened the door, I found one of them sitting up and smiling at me. I asked him if that was him making the terrible noise, and he smiled and nodded. I asked him if he was serious, and he smiled and nodded. I asked him why in the world he would want to make that sound at five in the morning, and he smiled and nodded. I told him to stop and to go to bed, and then he went back to bed. What was the point of all of that?

posted by Daniel @ 11:34 AM