I alluded to the visit to the Autism Center at Seattle Children’s Hospital yesterday and how we now have teams of people who want to help Daniel learn and grow.

Basically, the need for services is so high that the waiting list to get an appointment is over 12 MONTHS — not just to be seen but to just get the initial appointment. It’s in the U District of Seattle at the north edge of the University of Washington (Go Dawgs!) and, as we discovered, across the street from the University Village, which is an upscale shopping center. We got to the appointment an hour early (traffic is horrible so we left super early in case we got stuck on I-5 for 30 minutes because of an accident) so we went across the street to the first $tarbux my parents ever visited (this is the second store ever opened — my parents visited it when my dad was a grad student almost 50 years ago) and got coffee to kill some time.

When we got back, we visited with a psychiatric nurse practitioner for an hour, talking about every aspect of Daniel’s case from birth to present. We left with referrals for ABA, peds gastroenterology at Seattle Children’s Hospital, the UW Center for Pediatric Dentistry, outside speech therapy (in addition to what he gets in school), a DDA application, and some other information. When we get the clinic note next week, we’ll be hooked up with people who can help us get all these services established. Given that I’ve been kind of having to figure all of this out myself for the most part (people can tell me about stuff but getting services established is a whole other ball game), I am so unbelievably happy that I’ll have people helping me whose job is to help me.

The best thing: dealing with people who can use the actual correct biological terminology to describe WHY my kid is on the spectrum, has ADHD, and has developmental delays (other than his prematurity). Given my dealings with anti-vaxxers who believe in the conspiracy theories spouted by the quack and fraud Dr. Andrew Wakefield and disgraced pediatrician Dr. Bob Sears (who will, God willing, be losing his license shortly for gross negligence), it’s so wonderful to deal with intelligent people.

We finally got a consult at the Autism Center at Seattle Children’s Hospital today. It’s near the UW so Mom and Dad tagged along in case we were going to make a stop at the bookstore. (Unfortunately, we didn’t.) Thankfully, Mom drove because the streets likely would have confounded me. I can drive around the towns in my area just fine but Seattle is psycho. It also feels positively claustrophobic because of the tall buildings.

The appointment was good and I now have some more people who are focused on making sure Daniel has what he needs to succeed and grow, but traffic on the way home was crazy and I definitely now understand why I don’t make the effort to take Daniel down there to do stuff on a weekend!