About Eli: Inside and Out :)

Welcome back :)

I would like to say thank you to each and everyone for their support of my first post. I am so blessed to have even one person read it, and it continues to grow in views. Thanks so much! 

This morning I decided that I wanted to write about Eli and his life as of right now. I know that he is only 3 years old and that (God willing) he has a full life ahead of him. He has so much potential to overcome his struggles. But I think it's important to give a background about him. I have tried to make it as brief and understandable as I could so please bare with me.

 

So this cutie above is Eli :) 

I absolutely love this picture of him because I feel like it captures his happiness. His smile is brightening and his laugh is contagious. Although autism doesn't allow Eli to communicate with us or share experiences with us, it doesn't keep him from being a (mostly) happy little boy. 

When Eli was diagnosed, the physician described autism in a way that really clicked with me. To paraphrase what she said, normal brain cells connect to each other to send messages without trouble. Each cell reports to the correct receiving cell to display the message being sent (i.e. making eye contact). For a person who has autism, their brain cells do not connect the same. Instead, the cells are either sent to other receiving cells or not connected at all to create abnormal messages (i.e. not making eye contact). Because the cells don't connect correctly, it causes the symptoms we are able to identify like difficulty with communication and social interactions, obsessive interests, and repetitive behaviors. For Eli, he displays difficulty in social interaction and communicating needs. He also has obsessive interests in wheels of his toy cars and displays repetitive vocal sounds (a.k.a. echolalia).  

Autism also affects a person's senses. Every person on the spectrum is affected differently and experience custom sensory difficulties. For Eli, he has hypersensitivity(fancy word for oversensitive) to light, taste, some touch, and some sound. As I previously stated, Eli's sensitivity to light is his hardest struggle. He remains indoors a lot because the sun is sometimes too much. A way to describe how uncomfortable it is to him is to imagine the sun was much much closer to the Earth. He receives that much more light from the sun than we do. Eli is also a picky eater. He is basically surviving off of chicken strips and fries because he has so much discomfort of squishy foods like mashed potatoes. He eats a lot of fruit because it's crunchy also. 

Eli also has hyposensitivity(undersensitive) to touch, sound, balance, and fear. Because he is not able to recieve stimulation from these senses the same, he requires much more to satisfy his needs. For a balance example, if you and I were on the merry-go-round at the park and we had rode it for only 5 minutes we would become very dizzy. We would have a hard time standing, and may even fall. If Eli was to ride the merry-go-round, it would take him probably 15 minutes before becoming dizzy like us. His senses don't recieve the same amount of stimulation that ours do. A fear example would be that while you and I can perceive a fearful situation like jumping off something at a great height, Eli would find it to be enjoyable. He is unable to understand situations that may cause harm because he doesn't recieve it the same as we do. 

To clarify, this is just a non-educated paraphrased description of my understanding. I am in no shape claiming that this is how autism is specifically or that it is completely correct. I am only sharing this to maybe help people better understand autism and how it is for people who have it. Using Eli as an example, it's a description of why some of the things autistic people do seemy strange or different. It's because their brains work much differently than ours.