Dan and Autism

Oh, You Can Actually Do Stuff?

On Monday, nothing particularly interesting happened.

I did the overnight on Tuesday night. I slept in the staff bedroom that's next to the bedroom of our resident with the bone disorder. That night, however, I learned that he's much more mobile than he would lead one to believe. At around 3:30 AM, I heard him doing his "Someone pay attention to me even though it's the middle of the night" scream, so I found him sitting in the middle of the room that used to be the office (we need a better name for the room than that). Interestingly, he wasn't wearing any pants. I found that peculiar. I found his pajama pants and diaper on the floor of the bathroom. I guessed that he went in his diaper and wanted to get a clean one, so that's why he was shouting in the middle of the night. So, I got him a new diaper and new pants. What was interesting was that when I went to the bathroom to discard his dirty diaper, I found that he had actually pooped in the toilet. Normally, when this guy wants to go the bathroom, he gets me to walk him there, and half the time, he just goes in his pants before he gets there. There's actually a particular spot we'll get to on the walk there where he'll just stop and urinate or defecate there. But inside the toilet is proof that his guy, who acts totally helpless, can actually go to the bathroom by himself when he wants to. He was able to walk from his bed, open his door, walk to the bathroom, open that door, pull down his pants, and go to the bathroom without any help. This was quite the discovery for our household, because now we know not to baby him so much, becuase he's physically capable of alot more than we thought.

Unfortunately, since he was up, he spent the rest of the night screaming to himself or rolling off the bed over and over.

Wednesday, when the guys came home from work, I told my bedroom neighbor that since he kept me up all night for no good reason, I'm not letting him fall asleep during the day. We try to prevent the guys from falling asleep during the day anyway, because if we don't, they'll end up waking up in the middle of the night and keeping the staff up. So anytime this resident would try to fall asleep in his chair, I'd shout his name or shake the chair or throw the pillow across the room. And now I know he's actually able to get up and get the pillow himself if he really wants it.

One of the other interns and I decided to start running the teaching programs with our guys much more often than they have been. These are the programs that teach guys how to do simple things to benefit the household and themselves, such as vacuuming or brushing teeth. So, we ran a program with about every resident and plan to do so more often in the future.

After dinner, I lifeguarded as a few guys went swimming. Our one resident who's usually water-shy actually went in the pool all the way. I believe I've described how some of them act in the pool, and his actions were just as interesting. He jumped around making a siren noise and kept splashing water everywhere. Including on me. It looked like he got so lost in splashing the water that he didn't even realize what a mess he was making. These guys love swimming.

posted by Daniel @ 1:51 PM