I'm not even going to address the blackmail comment. Geez.
Looking back, it was obvious even at birth. But we started to know something was really up when he was about 18 months old. He had about 3 words, but then he stopped talking all together and started saying 2 syllables over and over. Literally. Nonstop. All day long. It was the first thing I heard when I woke up in the morning, and the last thing I heard before I fell asleep. It's called delayed echolalia, and ds has always had it pretty bad. When I took him in for his 18 month appointment I told his Pediatrician (although I should probably mention here that my dh is a Pediatrician as well, so we noticed things that other parents may not), I told her about the loss of words, and we were referred to speech, audiology, and developmental. First he went for his hearing test and failed it spectacularly. The auidiologist said that her gut feeling was that he could hear, and she was puzzled why he failed (he did end up "passing" later). We scheduled another appointment. Speech told me that if I just stopped feeding him, he would start talking. We fired her right away. I mean, he has an older sister, and at the very least he'd be shouting "NO!! Mine!!!" at her when she stole a toy. It has nothing to do with being attentive to his needs. Please. Then we saw developmental, who said that he didn't think he had autism, but that he had some concerning signs, such as splinter skills. Those are developmental skills well above his age level, when he has other delays. at 20 months he had the speech development of a 9 month old, but the fine motor skills of a 3-4 year old. Not good.
We were to go back for another eval in a few moths. In that time, he started getting really "weird." Stacking, lining things up, banging his head for literallyhours on end, refusing to eat any foods that aren't round, and despite getting him in to speech and using baby signs, there was absolutely no progress on his speech. He was 3 before he even said mama. He would perseverate, that is spend an inordinate amount of time, on various objects. He would walk around the house adjusting things to the way the photo in his head saw them, and would spend literally an hour trying to get the soap dispenser exactly the way the thought it should be. He would eat soap and dog poop, but refused to eat normal food, uness it was round. It just went on and on. He was diagnosed with PDD-NOS at first because of his age. He met 5 of the 6 criteria, but the 6th was untestable before that age of 3. At 3, he was diagnosed with autism. He's now 5 and ahalf and still struggles. He has learned to talk, but is having an enormous amount of difficulty in school. Hes not a "bad" kid, which is really puzzling to the school. He's actually very sweet. But they still can't handle his behaviors. Unfortunately he will struggle his whole life. Having a social delay is really hard, and some of the things he does are socially inappropriate. Like, you wouldn't as a kid who is blind to read a book, but they do ask him to look at him when they talk to him, and he can't do that just like someone who is blind couldn't read a regular book. but since it is behavioral, they assume that he could do it if he chose to.
And obviously, people are pretty ignorant about what autism really is, and what it really means. They think it's bad parents, or bad kids, or vaccines, or physician ignorance and conspiracies. But when you spend time with my son, is is very obvious that there is something really different about him and the way he thinks. He's doing really well, so we decided to put him in his new school without telling anyone, thinking that he could just blend right in, but they knew within the first week that he had some major problems. Unfortunately we have had to allow the school to start services with him, because he will fail Kindergarten, and they can't get him to go through even one day without having to have several aids come in and calm him down during class. And like I said earlier, it is clear he was like this from birth, he was even born in a position typical of people who have neurological disorders. Nothing caused it, it is just a quirk of genetics.