December 15 Discovery

December 15, 2011 Prompt:

Discovery

What discovery did you make in 2011? What kind of impact did it have on how you view the world today?




This is something that I wrote for one of my writing assignment, I learned about Fetal Alcohol.

Struggling Through Life

Struggling, unaware through his life, the young boy tries to make his way. He wears a plane expression on his face. Neither interested, curious, distracted or angry, just plane. His dark brown eyes dance in their sockets not fully and smoothly tracking. But he is handsome, clean cut and has a sprinkle of acne to honestly confirm his age of 14 years.

His eyes do not really say anything. But if you ask his chiropractic Neurologist they say everything. The doctor can see the missing connections of his weak and confounded brain. Using a special pair of ridged square goggles that resemble enclosed jewelers magnifying glasses, with special video cameras focused inward towards his eyes, we can all see the crazy dance of his eyes.

The doctor spins him in an office chair, not fast and wild as a child might do but, quicker than a slow turn you might do if someone walked up behind you when you are seated at your desk. He stops the spinning boy who has his feet tucked up under him. He asks, “are you still spinning?” The boy answers, “yes.”  He is not. His eyes dance in an erratic fashion on the computer monitor. The left eye looks like it is following the line of a rapid heartbeat on a heart monitor. The right eye bounces from up and to the left to center repeatedly. This is showing us unhealthy saccades. Saccades are the movements of the eyes that allow it to take in a situation and develop it in the brain so that give understanding of their placement and of the situation. Healthy functioning brain activity would allow the eyes or the saccades to be even and level and smooth.

When a woman consumes alcohol during fetal development it is called prenatal alcohol exposure. This is possibly and arguably one of the worst exposures to a developing fetus. Exposure to drugs such as cocaine, heroin, marijuana will pass into the fetal blood supply leaving the child with the temporary high or dependency. We have all heard about the difficulty and trauma of babies being born as heroin or cocaine addicts, because of the pro-longed use by the mother. These infants have a tough start in life, they are born addicts, who will go through the physical withdrawals of these dependency drugs and have all the physical pain and internal trauma but they maybe free of the affects.

Fetuses exposed to alcohol have had the mitochondrial sheath damaged by the alcohol. Upon cell division a damaged cell will divide, repeatedly.  If something is ill formed and divides several times the wrong design is imbedded in the cells. The results are cell imperfection and then organ or system imperfection.

The brain is one of the first organs to be developing in the human construction and when there are imperfect cells compiling it due to a woman’s consumption of alcohol, damage is going to occur. The effects are called Fetal Alcohol Affected Disorder (FAAD) or Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). There is not a lot of differences in the two diagnosis other than FAAD is accompanied with facial abnormalities.

The facial abnormalities are wide set eyes, flat bridge of the nose between the eyes and a flat smooth upper lip. The facial anomalies occur during a fetus development on days 18 thru 21. They are tell tale signs of alcohol use by the mother. However, if the alcohol was consumed at any time before or after those days the effects would be less outwardly obvious and only detected in behavior and learning abilities and the admission of the mother’s prenatal use of alcohol. It is a social stigma to admit to alcohol use during pregnancy. Often times a child’s difficulties are not correctly labeled because of the mother’s unwillingness to confess to use. This results in ineffective ways of trying to help their children and the children being labeled with a variety of behavior issues.

The consumption of alcohol does not have to be great, it is a lot like Russian roulette, you put one bullet in a chamber and see if it blows your brains out when you put the gun to your head and pull the trigger. A woman has no idea which drinks if any will forever damage her fetus’s brain by leaving lesions or rather holes in the brain. But it could be a forever issue for her, the child and the family.

The lesions in the boy’s brain are in his left cerebellum and right frontal lobe. The cerebellum, controls body movement, emotion, it helps people pay attention and has to do with language. And this part of the brain is not talking to the frontal lobe, which is the executive function or the boss of the brain. It makes the decisions, it uses logic and it is our compass and allows us to understand space and time.

Imagine for a minute never knowing the proper boundary you should be to your friend vs your lover. Never knowing your proper position or placement in your surroundings. Imagine not being able to decide what is pleasurable to you, chocolate milk vs coffee and never being able to decide. Or maybe sitting in a room full of toys and not being able to decide what to play with so you do nothing. Imagine when you are asked a question, not being able to find the right combination of words to say to answer the questions. You cannot judge how long it’s going to take yourself or your friend to do something, when given an instruction you only hear every third word and then you cannot help yourself, you do the opposite of the instruction, because everything is jumbled in your mind and you have no way to logically sort it out. Imagine walking through life with a misfiring frontal lobe, a life without logic. The only thing you can do to make it through life is to learn the proper sequence or pattern of expected behaviors and when it is altered you are confused and confounded. You need an external brain to help you navigate your life.

This boy is our boy. He is a love; he can barely put a sentence together. We so want to know him, we so want him to know us. He pantomimes or mirrors normal, everything I have ever told him is parroted back to me, sometimes appropriately, like when we meet in the kitchen after we get ready for our days, “it is good morning, and did you sleep well?” I respond and regardless of the response his next inquiry is “did you have any dreams?” We had practiced those questions for 2 years before he could automatically provide them without coaching, but change the surroundings and I get nothing.

He is our prize from Russia. He is the answer to my calling. My calling came 16 years earlier while in Alaska. I fell in love with Russia and I was called by God to love the children and to one day adopt one. I had no idea it would take that long to prepare us/me for him. So a blind faith and calling did not lead me to research the ills of the Russian orphan’s plight. The ills of a country so lost in sorrow, and in the inability for most to care for themselves. In their sorrow, they resort to the abundant use of alcohol. It is a cultural standard to consume alcohol particularly Vodka, in social, family and business situations. It has been my experience if you do not participate it offends those around you. Our son was affected by his mother’s use of alcohol.

As we sit in the room with the 5^th specialist we have looked to as we seek answers and methods to help our little boy, to be more like us, neurotypical, or normal brained. The doctor promises us that his methods have helped many Russian adoptees, because it is very typical for Russian adoptees to be affected by the alcohol consumption of their mothers. His methods seem like quackery, spin your son in a chair clock wise three times, three times a day.

We will try anything. The next visit, The doctor grabs those zit speckled cheeks and quickly twists his face from one shoulder to the other, watching his eyes. He sees a small improvement. I sit skeptically watching. The next exercise is looking at a diagonal line drawn on the paper with dots on it. He is to look from the bottom to the top then, let his eyes jump down from dot to dot. He must exercise his left arm because that side of his body is abnormally weak and unbalanced.

The ultimate treatment is the interactive metronome guaranteed to turn your misfiring brain into a sharp and well functioning organ. By keeping rhythm with the cow bell chiming in his headphone covered ears and clapping his censor clad hands in rhythm with the bells. This exercise is to create new neuro path ways in place of those that ran into holes previously. My fear was that it would just allow him to make bad decisions faster. The doctor promises that it will enable him to make decisions because his cerebellum will correctly fire to his frontal lobe.

It’s a lot of hope to hang on two cow bells clanging in his ears. But hope is all we have. We never dreamed we would be faced with forever being another human beings external brain. 10/2011