And how did the person give you the diagnosis?
She was excellent. I mean if I could describe her, she is professional from the top of her head to the tips of her toes and we had obviously got to know her and we formed a relationship with her from the outset. She is just that sort of person. She has got such good interpersonal skills and she puts you at ease and I kept very detailed behaviour sheets for her and she saw Joseph a few times and she didn’t – I think it was the way she approached it - she knew she had got to break it to us gently but she didn’t hold back and I think that was the best way to do it. And she offered a couple of leaflets to start with. She said I don’t want to bombard you because you need to go away and take this in.
So I can only speak from personal experience that we were very fortunate in having [psychologist] sit down with us and say this is what I think and this is my diagnosis and she gave reasons why, which I can’t remember because we were taking it in then and all I could think at that time, was well he is autistic and I couldn’t think about anything else. So we did come away from… although she did it very well. We came away feeling devastated and lots of tears. And lots of why us? So it didn’t probably sink in. I don’t think it really sunk in until about two weeks later.
And did you go back to see her?
Yes. Yes. Yes. We went to see her, I think we went to see her about two or three weeks later. She gave us time to sort of go away, think about it, with the option of telephoning her if we needed to talk and we have always had that from her. So … but we didn’t. We waited until the next appointment and then we were able to sort of talk, you know where do we go from here, what do we do in terms of school and she did write to school and say, “This is my diagnosis.” And she did actually ring them as well, which I thought was excellent and then she attended a couple of meetings with school as well to say these are the implications, these are the things that you need to be thinking about.
