The Beginning

To fully understand our journey, I will start from the beginning of discovering Asperger Syndrome. Hopefully my husband J will be able to fill you in on what life was like previous to this as it is 35 years of mental anguish I was not part of.

Through the weeks and months of living with J, I was trying to figure out how the doctors thought he had ADD, OCD, social anxiety and depression. I will agree that he had social anxiety, but I didn't believe he had ADD at all. His first mistake was to go to an ADD clinic to get diagnosed. Of course he was going to come out with a diagnosis of ADD! Over the years, they just added a little of this and a little of that to his diagnosis and prescribed him medications accordingly. By the time he met me, he was on 4 medications and 1 of those was to combat the insomnia that was a side effect of another medication. Yet, the medications did nothing for him out in public. He was visibly uncomfortable, even on anxiety meds. I was beginning to get fed up with the lack of help the medications (and doctors) offered.

One night we were driving and I was discussing these things with him. I told him that it seemed to me that his symptoms were more like a "mild autism" than anything else. I had never heard of the autism apectrum at that point though so when we got home, we googled it. There we found Asperger Syndrome.