I am a bit of a control freak. Shhhhh. Don’t tell my family I have admitted to this teensy flaw. Just because I like things to go my way a good deal of the time doesn’t mean I’m controlling. I’m just usually right, right? (This makes sense in my head.) So when it comes to illness in our house, I take control. We DO NOT want sickness in our house. Sickness is bad in anyone’s home, but in a special needs home? It is the devil. Sickness can bring down the almighty routine faster than any other change. Sickness means medicine changes, food changes, sleep – what is this sleep of which you speak? Sickness can mean doctors or even worse, a midnight run to the hospital. So when I say I am a control freak, with illness, I take the bull by the horns.
So when I was the one who walked right in the front door with the whopper of all illnesses I had nothing left to control. I had taken all the precautions, Lysoled all the door knobs, coughed into all the inner elbows (a.k.a. Chelidon or cubital fossa), sent everyone the CDC flyers on why they should get flu shots (oh yes, I did), I might have even resorted to those new fangled essential oils. But what happens when I get sick, when I bring that devil right into my house? Bye-bye, control.
What do we do when illness comes knocking and we’ve done all we can do? What do we do when a diagnosis even worse than expected comes to call? Sometimes it seems our special needs kids get heaps upon heaps of one more thing. Just when we think they couldn’t possibly have another diagnosis, they do. To whom do we turn when we’ve done all we can do? When you lose all control in your special needs world, where do you turn?
