*This post was originally meant to publish on Friday morning*.
This morning was a fucking nightmare. We're trying to work with Emmett to figure out why he's not feeling well, and at the same time, keep him in school as often as possible. His grades aren't an issue but new, very strict truancy laws are.
Emmett woke up this morning and wasn't feeling well. His stomach was upset again and he was unable to eat. We've known about these stomach aches for a long time and we've been treating them as though are related to stress because we've ruled other medical issues out. It turns out that Emmett is getting nauseated everytime he eats. Sometimes this also results in abdominal pain but it's not indicative of anything specific.
Autism, sensory, speech, language and anxiety challenges make this a much more complicated.
It's very difficult to know what's what. We know for sure that Emmett is having stomach issues. It appears as though this might be related to a return of food sensitivity. He had food sensitivities when he was younger that caused him lots of problems. He was nonverbal at the time, and figuring out what was going on was very difficult. As far as we knew, the food sensitivities were outgrown. We are currently awaiting the results of tests that were done yesterday and those results will hopefully give a direction to go in.
Anyway, Emmett badly wanted to go to school this morning but he felt so sick, he was afraid to go. We were concerned because he would likely be unable to eat and that's not a good thing either.
After about an hour long meltdown, we finally came up with a solution for this morning. I had a long conversation with the school and explained everything. They're incredibly supportive and willing to work with us in any way they can.
We decided that I would walk Emmett into the school, talk to the office and arrange for him to be checked on about an hour later.
When we got there, we were an hour late and he wasn't comfortable enough with me leaving or the school checking on him because if he needed me, they would have to call me at home and I'd have to drive back to the school to pick him up. To help him feel more comfortable with this idea, I told him that I would sit in the parking lot and check on him myself, in one hour.
So I sat in the car and listened to a podcast before returning to the office. They called Emmett down and he was doing okay. He wasn't feeling well but he wanted to stay because they were doing a special event for the kids in the afternoon. I offered to stay and go hour by hour but he sent me home.
When I picked the boys up from school, Emmett was still not feeling well but he was glad he stayed.
I'm not sure what we're going to do. This isn't going to work everytime and he's only going to become more frustrsted with everything.
We're still waiting for his test results to come back and tell us if anything is going on that we need to address. Unfortunately, it will probably be a few more days before they come in and even when they do, they might not tell us anything super helpful.
The plan right now is to compare the current results with his previous results and see if any sensitivities have returned. It will still be awhile before we get the results back on his celiac testing.
All we can do is try our best to find things that he can eat without it upsetting his stomach too much. Right now, brown rice is the go to and that's all we've found that he will eat. His menu is very limited to begin with due to sensory issues, and right now, most of the things on that limited menu are making him sick.
This is making things incredibly difficult for Emmett and it's not easy for us either.
