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Something was going wrong with Ethan Brewer. A few months after his first birthday, the diagnoses started to mount, one after the other. He had hearing loss. He was not imitating his parents, Song and Michael Brewer. He had not started crawling. He would not hold eye contact or play properly with toys. He was nowhere near the typical size of a 17-month-old.

Each trip to the doctor seemed to bear more bad news.

"It felt like someone was taking my child away," his mother, Song Brewer, 24, recalled recently. "I felt like holding him tighter all the time because every time we went for a visit, they found something different."

Yet the couple still felt blind-sided when the developmental pediatrician came to their Gaithersburg condo and gave the life-changing diagnosis.

"Ethan was always playing games, he was smiling and happy and cheerful. He wasn't what we thought autism was like."

Impact on families

With no cause and no cure for autism, parents invariably start with denial, said Marguerite Kirst Colston, a vice president of the Autism Society of America, headquartered in Bethesda. For her, that complicated what was an already difficult process of finding help after her son, now 8, was diagnosed autistic five years ago.

"I was basically told to go home and prepare myself for my son never being independent," Colston said.

Doctors have become much better at referring to specialists and finding families support, she said, thanks in large part to advocate groups such as Autism Speaks! and The Arc.

And as autism continues its rise, advocates and government providers are trying to bring more attention and support to the emotional toll it takes on the family.

For the Brewers, denial soon mixed with helplessness and desperation, which soon gave way to a scattershot of emotions — fear that their future had shifted irrevocably, isolation from family and friends, the weight of Ethan's constant therapy, guilt that his 4-year-old sister Carmen was being slighted.

That anxiety began to melt away as they plugged into the county's and state's network for the developmentally disabled, Song Brewer said. The real turning point came when Ethan, now 2, started responding to the therapies.

Those treatments trace back to the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which guarantees special-needs education up to age 21. There are 2,000 children in the county's Infants and Toddlers program, which depends on IDEA-mandated funding to support special-needs children until age 5, when they enter the traditional school setting.

Every child is given an individual treatment plan, usually involving a host of therapists. But because it is the parents that sometimes feel the most vulnerable, said Ronnie Biemans, director of the Infants and Toddlers program, making the family feel like part of the community is a top priority. The county and state networks provide "parent coaches," family advisory boards and other supports that help parents deal with everything from stress and anger management to spousal tension and parenting doubts.

"Our job is to really support them so that they feel like they can do it," Biemans said.

The Brewers consider themselves lucky. It took less than two months to work out Ethan's therapy schedule with Infants and Toddlers, much of it through Community Services for Autistic Adults and Children, which the county contracts out for much of its early intervention.

That hurdle behind them, it was not long before the fear and denial gave way to the pressures of keeping up with Ethan's treatment.

A typical day will see Ethan have an hourlong morning session with CSAAC or a therapist. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, he goes to an intensive-needs group with Infants and Toddlers. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, he spends an hour with an occupational therapy, speech therapist or special educator. Then it's off to CSAAC's Brookeville campus for one-on-one therapy and back home by 1 p.m. Most afternoons, a CSAAC therapist comes to the house for more therapy until 5 p.m.

For Song Brewer, play dates have become largely a thing of the past. She struggles to relate to the worries of other mothers.

"It kind of felt like life before children, you're a ship on an open sea; you can go wherever you want to go. Then you have children and you're kind of like the buoy; you're tethered down to the bottom but you can still sway around," she said. "But then you get a diagnosis like autism, and you feel like the anchor. You're stuck on the bottom with the whole weight of the ocean on top of you."

‘Its own kind of happiness'

After a few months, Ethan settled in; he laughs as soon as he sees the buildings at CSAAC's Brookeville campus. His parents have settled, too.

The biggest turning point, Song Brewer said, came when she Ethan started responding to the therapies. Reaching those milestones together made them a family again, she said. A hug, a few moments of eye contact means so much more.

"Having a kid with autism, it has its own kind of happiness. When you reach those different milestones, that's a kind of happiness you don't get anywhere else; it's filled with so much humility and gratitude and appreciation, it's just more precious than other things, to see that development," Song Brewer said. "The kind of love you experience with an autistic child, it's a different kind of love."

AMC Entertainment and the Autism Society of America are hosting a pair of "sensory friendly films" this month for families with loved ones who have autism and other disabilities. The movie auditoriums will have their lights up and the sound turned down, families will be able to bring in snacks. Audience members are welcome to dance, walk, shout or sing. Tickets are $6 and can be purchased on the day of the event.

At 10 a.m. Saturday, catch "Monsters vs. Aliens" at AMC Rio Cinemas 18, 9811 Washingtonian Center, Gaithersburg. The same theater will screen "Hannah Montana: The Movie" at 10 a.m. April 18. Other AMC theaters are also showing the films. For details, visit www.autism-society.org/sensoryfilms.