...is there a Research Psychologist in the house?
Ok, it's an old bigotry that got surfaced and, to a degree. broken. I think I was maybe seven or eight before I figured out that "touchyfeelydamnedidiots" is not one word. The way my father pronounced the phrase in relation to posturings and intrusions on your personal space the sensualist folks call appropriate made it an easy error for a child. Nope, not one word. A phrase. Ok. (*lol* and Pandora in it's infinite sarcasm serves up Robert Plant's "Ship of Fools". Nope. Random play is not random, it's fate's jester).
But truth told it has been more of a power player for the last couple of years than it should have been in relation to the boy Beam (third roommate and youngest buddy) who I've been mentoring for five years or so. What popped the ancient bias was a thought that crosses a lot of territory, from current events to current technology to deep psychology. Let me report a bit of current events to put a frame around this thought.
In essence for the last three months I've been committed 24/7 to crewing a loonie bin in my living room for one patient with one other hand on staff (his mom). It's been a rough period, I'm pulling from the combat reserves as often as not.
Hard times for the grown-ups, and hell for the boy. The walls of an autism-ish existence have all but totally crumbled, they can no longer protect him from feeling, and reacting, to what very likely got him called autistic in the first place. Some of this is probably neurological, the physical side of autism. But equally as time has played forward it has become obvious a lot of what was diagnosed as severe autism is actually heavy psychological injury resulting from an extremely premature birth (only 25, 26 weeks in utero). There is no doubt he is suffering from a form of PTSD, medical PTSD if you will, he acquired from a nine month stay in a neo-natal ICU as the doctors fought to keep him alive.
According to the shrink set folks can't remember that far back, it's hard to get most of them to take you seriously. Some few do, they're working on it, but their work is pretty well hush-hush, for obvious litigateable reasons. And to a degree they're correct, what Beam experiences was never set into a sequential memory stream, he was to young. What he experiences is worse: raw and totally unprocessed sub-concious memory surfacing as his brain works to finish developing, to catch up what was lost to loosing that last trimester in Momma. Right, yes, that is what I said, and Beam has proven it by giving adult verified details there's no way he should have remembered about events before he'd left the NICU. The boy is, most literally, rewiring his brain on the fly.
Given the task he's attempting to full win his freedom it is possible to forgive him the consequences of the parasomatic events that happen when the nightmares break sleep paralysis and he gets up, still asleep, to attack anything in range... me, his mom, the walls, the appliances, anything that comes in reach with a berserk strength of someone three times his size. Like I said, crewing a loonie bin in the living room because there isn't a bed in the state for him in an inpatient facility configured for such a case.
And here I pause to send a HUGE SALUTE AND THANK-YOU to the response officers of the Chickasha Police Department who have been called to the house way, way more than once to assist... some of the finest examples of humanity I've ever encountered. Skilled and compassionate... thanks guys. The last time, the one that FINALLY got a full psychiatrist in the game (to their covert influence behind the scenes I'm quite sure), it took three or four of them plus me to hold him down long enough for a paramedic to safely stick him with a sedative... and he was moving all of us across the floor using enough power to break his own bones. A totally dangerous situation.
Long and short of the affair was that Beam spent the first four days of a one week stay in the local ER under EOD (emergency ordered detainment) pretty well sound asleep. The Docs released his mom from the room next door after a couple of hours (she'd ridden a separate ambulance with a broken nose and a concussion... missed a block trying not to hurt her son) and she went in the room with him and didn't leave for a week while the hospital tried to no avail to find him a psych bed. I was tankering in everything, the crew opened the door to see me coming. To give how tired I was? It took me three days to connect up the joke... he's here EOD... right... and they're still appropriate initials on my side of the world. Explosive ordinance disposal... the freakin' bomb squad. Yea.
Anyhow, to shorten the tale a bit the senior ER doc did what I've seen so many of his peers do: step up and do the specialists job for them, taking a weeks observation and turning it into a set of scripts for psychiatric meds the full psychiatrist didn't change, just adjusted the timing a bit. Beam is doing a lot better, the meds are hitting full saturation and doing what they can for him. But they can't fix the problem of course, all they can do is give him (and us) a chance for the time for things to heal.
His mom and I are keeping him under watch 24/7 and logging his life as data for the shrinks. We weren't told how to do it, just do it, so I took a graph paper composition book and kind of bastardized the swindle sheet line logs the truckers use, built a symbol set overlay and cross bred that into the sort of line entry log I kept when I was a working supervisor in the chem plant. System is evolving nicely, a month in and I can pretty well read the week at a glance chart and tell you what was going on in Beam's life at any given point. Hell, I may copyright the critter and sell it for a buck to other folks who might need a book of kid... but I digress.
Needless to say, we're writing down pretty much anything that crosses our though concerning his behavior and responses, which brings this cathartic ramble back to where it began... what in the name of Noah's Pet Whales is this business of going all touchy-feely on himself all about? Been seen once, or twice, in the past but the event count is going up, and it's going up in parallel with the times he's zoned out and staring at the wall but looking into the depths of his soul. This behavior was beginning to really bother me until I remembered something seen in passing many, many years ago and pieces to more puzzles than just Beam started falling into place.
One thing that has always struck me about Beam is how good he is with an Android interface... smart phones and tablets... kind of a tell on how much intelligence is his when nothing is impeding it. Way good. Leave your phone untended for thirty seconds and he'll have three hundred dollars worth of a new order up for Amazon hanging only on the credit card numbers. That kind of good. It almost looks like he is hard wired to use that interface. How is it he can communicate with the machine at such proficiency but struggles so much to express a full thought the rest of the time?
What I remembered seeing that may well be the beginnings of an answer was a little short film clip made decades ago from a continous ultrasound feed of an infant in utero at about eight months. The little one was doing exactly the same kind of touchy-feely in the womb that Beam does when he spaces out! Something in the back of me bodark brain went click, and I realized hell, he's not being touchy-feely perverse, trying to hide in the sensations, hell no! He's swiping... and so was the unknown unborn infant in the movie! Just how much of human memory is architected using the parallel-priority processing scheme (yes, it has to be, acupuncture works) of how the nerves report sensation to the brain as a base format template???
IF that is how we all began building what would evolve into our minds is this why the smart phone interfaces have caught on so fast? And from the conspiracy theorist in me soul is this part of how the dark powers access so many people's psyche's to work their wickedness? Knowing how those motions connect into the mind-body interface just below the level of cognition?
Hmmm... like I asked in the beginning... is there a Research Psychologist in the house who might be able to put some light on this one for me? Someone who might know, and be willing to dare the dragons and spill what is known? Or is this virgin turf? I have no clue, but I'm going to be watching for anything in this venue that comes past my sight.
Anyway, enough of this ramble. If you've read this far thanks for being a surrogate ear for me early AM ramblings and ponderings sitting up in the night to watch the kid (almost) relax in his sleep. For the time being this is a 24/7 job... we never really close. Would sure be nice to have a couple of more folks on crew so we can stand down from these heal and toe twelve hour watches. They get really old in a hurry.
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