Trust Your Instincts
“Never discredit your gut instinct.”
Like many parents, my first rodeo was an exciting but wild one. I remember coming home from the hospital, staring at my daughter sleeping in her car seat and wondering who in their right mind had let me take this baby home unsupervised. In the first 6 months of her life, I made many trips to the doctor. If she as much as sneezed, I’d bundle her into her cute little black and gold pram I was obsessed with, and head off to the GP to demand answers. After being told, “She’ll be fine,” for the hundredth time, I finally realised there were more enjoyable ways I could be spending my maternity leave.
By the time my son was born three years later, I was armed with experience and ready to welcome him into the world. He was an early walker like his sister and met most of his developmental milestones ahead of schedule. He was such an active little boy and was constantly climbing furniture and landing himself in precarious situations. We couldn’t take our eyes off him for a second!
I will never forget his first word. He had climbed onto the TV stand and was trying to pull down the TV. It was something he had done many times before and like every other time, I jumped off the sofa screaming. “No!”. He looked back at me, smiled, and screamed repeatedly, “No!”. This was just before his 1st birthday. Trying to decipher the reason behind a toddler’s tears and tantrums is an Olympic sport, so we were excited for his language to develop and eager to get to the stage where he could tell us what he wanted or what was bothering him. 12 months later, we were still waiting.
He was a chatty little boy; constantly babbling and attempting to sing the entire Little Baby Bum discography, but we just couldn’t get any other words out of him. If he had been our 1st child, we wouldn’t have thought too much of it, but because he has an older sister who had been capable of having full blown arguments with us aged 2, we couldn’t help but wonder what was going on. At his 2-year health check, we raised our concerns about his language development but given he was meeting all his other milestones, the health visitor wasn’t concerned. She advised us that boys tend to develop slower than girls but after some persistence on our part, agreed to refer him for speech and language therapy. She advised us that there was a long waiting list but, in her words, “By the time they are ready to see him, he will most likely be talking already.” The same sentiments were echoed by our friends and family.
In the coming months, we visited the GP three times to express our concern but each time, were told not to worry because boys tend to develop slower than girls. We had now been on the waiting list for SLT for 9 months, and 3 months before his 3rd birthday, I was done waiting. Our son was barely talking, and my gut told me time, wasn’t the answer to his challenge. We were fortunate to be able to afford a private SLT and after ringing a few, found one who was able to offer us a weekly slot. At the time, he was in full-time nursery and after an assessment and a few 1-2-1 sessions, it was his SLT who started to subtly hint that there might be more to his language delay.
We had noticed some behaviours which though quirky, didn’t ring any alarm bells. To us, they were just cute personality traits that we often joked about as a family. It wasn’t until his SLT suggested seeing an ENT (to check for Adenoids) and a Paediatrician, that we started to suspect there could be more going on with our son.
We booked the ENT appointment first and within 10 mins, the Paediatric Otolaryngologist very gently told us we needed to see a Neurodevelopmental Paediatrician. It was his tone; soft and comforting, that confirmed it. It was clear to us he knew something we didn’t and while he was trying not to alarm us, I could see the worry in his eyes.
So many people told us stories of children who didn’t start talking till they were older than the norm and tried to reassure us it was a boy thing. I would nod in agreement at each tale but deep down inside, I knew something wasn’t right.
Trust your instincts. If you're wrong, there's no harm done, but if you're right…