Communication fail!! When your child has no voice.

Tonight my son cut his hand open. Not a serious cut, but it was cut and it was hurting. We dealt with it and moved on and I thought nothing more about it.

Skip forward 2 hours, I’m making Master 10 his dinner. The other children had already eaten and were running around and generally being silly, the usual. When I turn to find Master 10 crying and hyperventilating.

Now I have no idea what he had done, I didn’t see him fall or hurt himself, he had been standing right next to me when the meltdown began and this is my problem, unless I see exactly what has happened I am absolutely no help to him at all.

Master 10 can not speak when he is in the middle of an attack. His anxiety goes through the roof and his ability to communicate becomes zero. The more he tries to ask for help the worse it gets. His mouth moves but nothing comes out.

It is the most hopeless feeling in the world. If I knew what was wrong I could fix it or at least attend to the problem. But nothing works. His body betrays him. If he gets extremely upset it often leads to an asthma attack and has on occasion gotten so bad that he actual stops breathing.

Everyone in the house knows that something is wrong and the room goes quiet, all except the gasping for air of Master 10. All we can do is stand there and wait for it to pass. We have learnt over time that asking questions and trying to get him to speak just makes it worse.

As we wait and I try to calmly breath with him, I scan the room. What could possibly have happened in the 5 seconds that I wasn’t looking. By this stage Master 10 is in a full blown panic attack. He is shaking his hands and trying to wipe the tears from his face all the while I’m still trying to ascertain what on earth has happened.

Then, I see the lemon juice. Master 10 was having fish for dinner. I had just passed him the lemon juice when i turned to remove Miss 1 from the seat she was jumping on. It dawned on me, he had somehow gotten the lemon juice into the cut on his hand from earlier and it was burning.

I grabbed his hand and shoved it straight under the cold running water. Within a minute he was able to breath again. Slowly he started to calm down. It took a good 15 minutes before he was able to actually speak.

This unfortunately is not an isolated event. It scares the life out of me that something as simple as a little bit of lemon juice can lead to a full blown meltdown simply because my child is unable to communicate. A meltdown that for Master 10 can become life threatening.

Despite having a plan of action in place if things do ever take a serious turn. It worries me constantly. There is no cure. It is a part of who he is. Hopefully in time and with age he will be able to manage his emotions better and in doing so will hopefully be able to at least ask for help if not one day be able to help himself.

Until such time, we just do what we have to do. We try to minimise any drama in his life and keep things as structured as possible. When he has an emotional meltdown the signs are becoming more obvious, so I am learning in that area. But when it is because he is physically hurt, even something as small as a sting can lead to a major event, yet cutting his hand caused no reaction at all.

Hopefully with ongoing therapy we will get there.

Thanks for reading.

@mumofmany.