It's the news that no new parent wants to hear. Your child will be "different", "special", or "disabled". From the start, parenting a child with special needs is very different than parenting a so called "typical" child. There is the education that needs to happen about the diagnosis, then, educating your family and friends, learning to advocate for your child, and the loss of expectations that you may have had for your child. No parent wants to admit to having expectations put on a newborn, and most pregnant couples use the cliche "as long as it's healthy, that's all we care about".

But what if your child is healthy, just different? Not all special needs kids have obvious disabilities like blindness, or being wheelchairbound. I am going to share my experience of raising a special needs kid in the early stages of parenting and hope to shed some light on the side effects that and entire family would face when this situation happens.

Diagnosis

I was 25 weeks pregnant with my second child when the doctors found something wrong. The baby's brain was hydrocephalic (meaning water on the brain), and the doctors wanted to do more testing at the specialized hospital one and three quarter hours away. I would no longer be a patient of my regular OB/GYN. Throughout the remainder of my pregnancy I was in a state of Shock. The little boy that I had such high hopes and dreams for might not even survive birth (so said my doctors). His brain was hydrocephalic, his heart was malformed, and they could not get a clear view of his spine. The doctors told me to prepare for a profoundly retarded child who would never walk or talk, and would need open heart surgery immediately after birth. Well, thank the Lord, the doctors were only partly right. My son's heart was not malformed, and instead of hydrocephalus, my son's ventricles had enlarged to take the place of a missing corpus collosum. My son's official diagnosis at 2 days old....Agenesis of the Corpus Collosum: a rare brain anomoly where the corpus collosum, the brain's major nerve connection between right and left hemispheres, was not there, and had never formed.

Testing

After the diagnosis, comes the flurry of testing for syndromes, and doctor assignments. By the time my son was one month old, he had a pediatrician, neurologist, endocrinologist, pediatric opthamologist, and geneticist. In the coming months we also picked up an allergist, pulmonologist, orthopedic specialist, occupational therapist,

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