The Squeaky Wheel (advocating for your child pt. 1) The school side

When your child, with special needs, goes to school it is hard to know what to expect, and how much support your child should get in the schools. There is a fine line between being a advocate for your child and making the school resent your attempts at helping.

First of all, I would like to say that, most, schools are, or can be, your friend. The schools often have their hands tied when it comes to providing support for children in general. when it comes to children in schools the district and government are playing math with your children. you see each child that may or may not need help gets classified by letter and then a grade inside that letter. I am basing these classes on a 2002 letter system so please excuse me if they made any minor changes. if your child does indeed have special needs they will fall into one of these categories:

• Level 1
  • Physically Dependent (A)
  • Deafblind (B)
• Level 2
  • Moderate to Profound Intellectual Disability (C)
  • Physical Disability or Chronic Health Impairment (D)
  • Visual Impairment (E)
  • Deaf or Hard of Hearing (F)
  • Autism Spectrum Disorder (G)

Again, please remember that these classifications are from the BC governments site, so there may be differences if you don’t live in Canada, or in BC.

inside these classes there are certain criteria your child needs to meet to require extra help. lets use children that have behavioral needs, or mental illness as an example of how little differences make or break the need for additional support. here are the critiria for getting extra support or not.

Students Requiring Moderate Behaviour Supports or
Students with Mental Illness

Assessment Criteria Related to Student

• Must have documentation of a behavioural, mental health
and/or psychological assessment which indicates needs
related to behaviour or mental illness
• Demonstrate aggression, hyperactivity, delinquency,
substance abuse, effects of child abuse or neglect, anxiety,
stress related disorders, depression, etc.
• Severity of the behaviour or condition has disruptive effect on
classroom learning, social relations, or personal adjustment
• Behaviour exists over extended time and in more than one
setting
• Regular in-class strategies not sufficient to support behaviour
needs of student; beyond common disciplinary interventions
• Rule out other conditions which may be contributing to the
behaviour (for example, side effects of medication, learning
disabilities)
• For Mental Illness, the diagnosis must be made by a qualified
mental health clinician

Criteria Related Planning and
Service

• Must develop IEP with goals that address student’s behaviour
or social/emotional needs and measures for student
achievement of the goals
• Must provide support services and adaptations/modifications
as indicated on the IEP
• No requirement for shared planning, implementation, or
funding with other service providers or agencies, but does not
preclude such arrangements

In other words, a child with these symptoms needs an independent education plan (IEP) that the teacher can use to modify their curriculum to meet the child’s individual needs. The teacher might need to give that child extra attention to keep him/her from distracting the class, but there is no other support that is needed (the “but does not preclude such arrangements” is, in my experience, in legal talk meaning the teacher can talk to an expert on their own time, if the expert is already in the school for someone else).

Now lets see what support looks like:

Students Requiring Intensive Behaviour Interventions or
Students with Serious Mental Illness
(Special Education Funding Supplement)

Assessment Criteria Related to Student

• Must have documentation of a behavioural, mental health and/or
psychological assessment which indicates the need for intensive
intervention beyond the normal capacity of the school to educate
• Demonstrate antisocial, extremely disruptive behaviour or
profound withdrawal or other internalizing conditions in school
• Behaviour or mental illness serious enough to be a risk to
themselves or others and/or significantly interfere with academic
progress of self and others
• Behaviour persistent over time in most other settings
• Behaviour or mental illness serious enough to warrant extensive
interventions beyond the school
• For Serious Mental Illness, the diagnosis must be made by a
qualified mental health clinician (psychologist with appropriate
training, psychiatrist or physician)

Criteria Related Planning and
Service

• Must develop IEP with goals that address student’s behaviour or
conditions of the mental illness and measures for student
achievement of the goals
• Must provide support services and adaptations/modifications
related to the behaviour or mental illness as indicated on the IEP
• Documentation to show that school district has already exhausted
resources normally used for moderate behaviour interventions
• Requirement that both plan and delivery of service is coordinated
with community service provider or agency (i.e. mental health
clinician, Ministry of Children and Family Development, Mental
Health, First Nations Social Worker). Not enough that another
agency or ministry is “involved”

these hoops take forever to jump through, and in the meantime, the teacher is the one that does most of the work. based on that one example I hope you see that there are a lot of kids that need help, that just don’t get it, or it takes a long time to work things out (I have seen it take half a year to two years to cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s)

So, how does this affect you? especially since most of my posts about education have focused on the Autism Spectrum. I want you to see just how much your child’s school needs to do to get the money for each kid in that school that may need help. Your child is no exception. There are a lot of schools that have teacher aids (each district calls them something else like: Educational assistant, special educational assistant, child ambassadors, and so on. basically they are the extra body in the class to give those kids that need consistent one on one time, for one reason or another, the attention the deserve, without eating up all the teachers time for the other children. That does not mean that these children are ignored by the teacher, they in fact get just as much attention as the rest of the class from the teacher. For 8 years, before my brain tumor, that was my job, and my passion), but there is not enough to serve every child that needs that extra attention.

As a parent, it is your job to find out what kind of funding your child has. Do they get Physiotherapy, and, or, occupational therapy? Do they get speech therapy? Do they have a youth and child care worker working with your child (usually used for children with extreme behaviors and mental illness)? How much extra aid and resource time do they get? Then, find out what all those peoples goals are. You might think that, that is the schools job, and you would be right, but it is your job to be educated on your child’s education and physical goals that the experts and school has. You also have to have goals you want. You might want your child to have the maximum amount of interaction time as possible, or keep up with all the others kid’s educational goals, but be realistic with those goals.’

On of the positions I had was with a boy, that had a sever case of cerebral palsy. He couldn’t move, but he could smile and frown even cry at points. we had myself, the teacher, a resource teacher, physiotherapist (PT), occupational therapist (OT), visual therapist, nurse and the parents working on his IEP (individual Education Plan). The visual therapist wanted me to take my student into a dark room and try and get him to tack an LED light with his eyes. the process would take 30 min out of the class and the class room, but it was important. The physio wanted me to take him to a room and do stretches, otherwise his muscles would seize up on him and he would be in extreme pain. That was to be done twice a day for at least 60 min. The OT wanted me to stretch out his fingers, get him to attempt to move his hand and feet to press a button (something I am proud to say he improved to be able to do it 2/5 times. small steps, led to big steps), and walk in his walker. That process would take about an 90 min out of the day. Then we had lunch break, recess and the point of integration, keeping the child interacting and learning from his/her peers. and then there was the hour or two that I would have to help do some 1/2 time with another child that needed extra time, that just wasn’t available. That again would take an 60 min out of the class. he also needed bathroom breaks, 20 min to get all the equipment (lift bed, wipes, diaper) and feed him(he was G-tube so we needed to be in a kitchen, just for him, and prep, clean and start feeding, then stop when it was done clean everything, dry and put it away, marking it all in a book for liability)taking 20 min each  . Lets add that up. 30+60+60+90+60+15+60+15+15+20+20= 7 hours out of class. Of course in the school we want all of our children in the class for as long as possible, but for my little man. Being that school is not 7 hours my job became impossible. I also could not transport him while he was eating, so he would have missed out on field trips with his class, if not for the fact that his mother knew when to be that squeaky wheel.

 

Now you know what the school’s have to put up with. my next post will be about what you can do to help your child be properly integrated into a their school.

my info came from:

https://www.bctf.ca/issues/resources.aspx?id=10812

Click to access special_ed_policy_manual.pdf

http://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/topic.page?id=539034EA83554537AEE3444F3A8279B0

if you don’t live in BC, look for your government website on special needs designations.

Educating Autism (Part 2: Therapies)

The key to helping children with Autism is early diagnosis, and implementing therapies that best fit your child. I have to admit there are a lot of good therapies out there and a few bad ones (my opinion only. All kids are different, and what therapies I think are bad could, in fact, help your child). So research is key to choosing what method your child needs. As for me, I don’t have a child with Autism. My experience is professional. I spent over 10 years working with children with children and have been exposed to a large diversity of therapies.

I have a confession to make. I am not a fan of ABA (applied behavior analysis), or at least not the ABA that I have been exposed to most of the time. I started off learning about a system of treatment started by Ivar Lovaas and Robert Koegel in 1970. They developed a method of ABA called Discrete trial training (DTT). DTT is a method that is focused mainly on a reward system. if a single task was rewarded than it was more likely to be repeated. It was a simple theory, but when practiced it felt more like training a dog to me. I mean no offence, to those that practice this type of ABA. The system is sound. Society today is based on the same model. Lets, for an example, take marketing. A company will have a benefits program where if you spend money you get something in return. The biggest rewards you can get is for buying multiple items, weather you need them or not. Lovaas and Koegel reported a 47% success rate, of getting children to equal intellect and social behaviors by the end of grade 1 with 40hrs a week of therapy, however those stellar results were not able to be reproduced with other therapists. a very simple example of DTT is to train a child to come when called. To get the child to listen you would send him to play, and you would watch for a while, then call his/her name. If the child did come they would get a reward, such as food, if they didn’t come they would be made to come, and shown what they would have got if they had come on their own. This would repeat until the child would come 100% of the time, then you would move on to the next task, or portion of a task and repeat these steps. Later Lovaas and Koegel criticized their initial method on the grounds that the method was to rigid, and didn’t help the child generalize their skills (a child would be able to come when called, but unable to do more than one task, or do the same task in a different environment.). Those are the reasons that originally turned me off ABA.

DTT is not something to be thrown out entirely from therapy however. As I said before, it works on adults without us knowing it, and it does work on kids as well. When a child is young (under 6) is is hard, if not impossible to us more abstract motivation to increase or decrease a behavior. DTT uses repetition and concrete rewards (often starting with food, and moving to other rewards as quickly as possible) It does work, but it isn’t good for generalizing abilities (feel like a broken record on that one).  There are potentially confusing terms when you read about DTT, or any other therapies for that matter, based on today’s perception of what the word means, not what it has been associated with. reward and punishment are often the biggest definition questions I have ever got from families that I have worked with. The term reward is a simple one for us to understand. a Reward is something positive given at the end of a desirable action. As I mentioned before if a child comes when called, a child correctly identifies others emotion, or any other correct response to a prompt they get something they desire (you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours). Rewards, or positive reinforcement start out concrete, food, a favorite toy, and then move on to something abstract, verbal praise, high fives, and finally, we hope, move to an intrinsic reward, they are proud of themselves for doing a good thing.

Punishment, today, is often associated with a spank, time outs, smacking hands, or other very negative things. Punishment doesn’t mean any of those things in educational terms. In the simplest terms Punishment is withholding a reward, verbal correction (not to be mistaken with verbal abuse, or anger). Another form of punishment is a negative reinforcement. Usually a negative reinforcement will happen before a desired reaction. Again, using a simple example, Think of yourself in the car. You turn on the car and hear beeping. You know exactly what the beeping is about…you haven’t put on your seat belt yet, so you do and the beeping stops. The beeping is the negative reinforcement. A negative reinforcement can be as simple as repeating a command, “look at my eyes…look at my eyes…” and then followed up with a Reward/positive reinforcement if needed to further motivate.

To fully explain all the different parts of ABA in full detail would take pages…and I might just do that one day, but not today. I wanted this to be more of an overall explanation than a detailed comparison, but I felt I would be remiss to leave out the history of ABA, since most people in learning about ABA, get the original DDT descriptions, first made famous by Lovaas, and “throw the baby out with the bath water”, so to speak.

The Therapy I spent most of my career drawn toward was a model called, “Floortime”, developed by Dr. Stanley Greenspan. Looking in on a session with a child and one of their therapists, it will probably just look like two people just playing on the floor, or where ever the child likes to play.  The joy of this method, is that’s what lies at the heart of the therapy. Every Child is different, they have different likes, dislikes, things that excite them, and things that turn them off.  Take me for example. If you put me in front of a computer and turn on a game, I could play for hours. I could talk to you about the poly count of the characters and what it is that the developer made the focus of your attention, and what they put in there to draw your eye away from the things that they cheated on, to save on memory, and performance. A good chunk of my friends don’t even know what half of that last few sentences mean. We are all different. Its what makes us human. Its whats makes us…..Us. So why wouldn’t we try to engage a child that just happens to have autism on a plane that they don’t even have any interest in. At the end of the day your, of someone you knows, child is just that, a child, and children learn to interact through play. My job was to find the educational , social, emotional, and tactile merit to what ever the child wanted to do.

Sorry there is less history here, but the floortime model was brought together in the 1980s. It all started with Dr Greenspan’s  Developmental, Individual Difference, Relationship-based (DIR®) system, developed for children of all special needs. From there, there has been multiple independent studies proving its value for children, specifically, with the autism spectrum disorder. See not much of a history to be had.

I firmly believe that all children learn in similar ways. someone who has a disorder, in anyway, just learns in a different order than the rest of us. A Child starts to learn with play. Imitation, is usually the first thing a “normal child” (I always joke that normal is just a setting on some dishwashers, not a describer of people) uses to learn emotions, communication, exploration, and other complex tasks, so that is the first step with the DIR Floortime model. Get down on the ground, or where ever the child is, and work at injecting yourself into their play. Eventually the child will start letting you into their play on their own. Once your in, the sky is the limit….sorta. If you push to hard, the child will push right back and shut down. I like to teach communications by gently cheating, or in someway breaking the rules of play (called an anticident) and quickly help the child come up with the proper response (the behavior), then the child gets the reward of their hard work, the game gets back on Their track (consequence).

There is one more, enjoyable, step that this could be taken. At one of the schools I was allowed to start a student playgroup. I got all the kids together before the playgroup began I would round up the friends of the “target child” and teach them about Autism, and their friend. I talk about the challenges the other child has with play, or interacting  with them in a social setting (kids, when allowed, have far fewer hangups than we do as adults, and be quite understanding if given a chance). I talk to them about what rules, how often and when, I want broken, and how to help their friend deal with these complex social situations. At first I keep close in case something goes wrong, but the longer the playgroup lasts, the less I have to step in to help. Eventually, that playgroup spills out into the playground (not with my direction, it just happens. The kids connection with the “target child” and start seeing them as a person instead of a disturbance, or risk.). Those kids that we trained, now start helping others learn what the triggers, behaviors, and consequences of actions, and how to steer things toward a positive track before the behavior gets bad.

The best Therapy for your child is the one that works. I wish I could just say “do ….. and it will help all children with autism”, but since each child learns different, each child needs a different therapy/combination.  Just remember, you don’t have to, nor should you be, a one person army with your child. There needs to be a support group both for yourself, and for your child, you can’t take care of your child if you aren’t taking care of yourself too. Remember, if we didn’t have differences we wouldn’t have computers, the internet, music, plays, physics.

 

Here are my references so you can look into it yourself if I didn’t make enough sense.

http://www.autism.net.au/Autism_ABA.htm%5B/embed%5D

http://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/treatment/applied-behavior-analysis-aba

http://www.autismcanada.org/treatments/behav/analysisibi.html

http://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/treatment/floortime

http://www.stanleygreenspan.com/what-is-floortime

http://www.icdl.com/DIR

 

Educating About Autism

Autism is a hard issue to write about. There is so much information out there, and Autism, being a spectrum, has a wide variety of needs. The Autism Spectrum can go from high functioning, all the way down to an introvert that seems to live in their own world and has no interest in “joining the rest of us” in reality. I also find it hard to talk about Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) without talking about other people with special needs.

Autism comes from the Greek work autos which mean “self”. So it makes sense to use if for a disorder that is most commonly known for a group of people so withdrawn that they seem to be totally, emotionally, cut of from anyone else. Autism was first used to describe a symptom of schizophrenia, a link some researchers still hung on to until the 1960’s. It wasn’t until the 1940’s that Autism and Schizophrenia were separated from each other, by a doctor named Leo Kanner from Johns Hopkins University and was used to describe a condition in children that had social or emotional problems. At about the same time a researcher named Hans Asperger, in Germany, identified a similar condition he called Asperger’s syndrome. Sadly, from the 1960’s, through the 1970’s, Autism was primarily treated with “medications”, like LSD, electric shock and, finally, behavior change techniques that relied on pain and punishment.

The treatment of people, usually children, with autism was horrifying, but the parents didn’t get off any easier. Around the 1950’s parents with children with autism were labeled with the term, Refrigerator Mother, or Refrigerator Parents. When Leo Kanner first identified autism, he noticed a lack of warmth among the parents and the child. Dr. Kanner often blamed the mothers for their children’s atypical behavior, such as needing a rigid routine, speech difficulties, and self isolation. I can only imagine the pain and guilt that must have caused for these poor parents, being told that everything they were struggling with was entirely their fault.

Kenner may have started the theory,  but it was believed that a Professor in Chicago that gained the phrase widespread popularity within the public and medical community. So there it was. Autism was the fault of the parents, mostly the mothers that, obviously, gave their children no chance at life. The only chance the children would have was a “parentectomy” (I had to look that one up, and found out that, according to medterms.com, it meant the removal of a parent, or both, from the child). The frigid mother theory went unchallenged until the mid 60’s when a psychologist, who had a son with autism, wrote a book about autism attacking the refrigerator theory directly (1964), but the refrigerator parent theory had effects that lingered until today. It is sad, but in my time working with children of all special needs, I have had to try to convince parents all the time that it wasn’t their fault.

It is obvious that those theory’s and treatments were emotionally traumatic on all involved. We aren’t that much smarter nowadays. Millions of people were convinced, by a doctor named Andrew Wakefield, that the cause of autism was vaccines. His research was a breakthrough in autism treatment, but in 2004 questioned were raised by The General Medical Council. It took years for the results of the investigation to come to a close. The Medical Council found that Wakefields research wasn’t ethically done, and information was either added or changed to prove his hypothesis. If that wasn’t bad enough the study was funded by lawyers of parents wanting to sue vaccine makers. Since Wakefield first published his work diseases that were preventable with vaccines have made a large comeback. Things like Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Polio, Whooping Cough and others have made a comeback across the world.

Enough about that depressing stuff. Now that we have a history on Autism lets talk about what Autism actually is. you may notice that I use the term “people with autism” instead of “autistic people”. The reason for that is simple. people with autism are people first and foremost, they just happen to have a disability. I wouldn’t call someone with cancer, a “cancer person”, or a person with liver damage “liver damage person”, so I won’t call someone with autism an “autistic person”. we should try to remember that everyone is a person, no matter what they lack.

General symptoms of autism are, communication, social skills, and self stimulation. A child with autism can also have difficulty with touch and other sensory information. There are people that will have a total melt down if you try to hug them, put scratchy material on, pat them on the back. Yet others need quiet, loud noises seem to amplify inside their head. In some people the opposite is true. there are some children that think clearer when they have pressure, such as laying under two mattresses.  The majority of the time, people with autism have a hard time understanding abstract things, like social cues, facial expressions, and sarcasm. People with autism, also, tend to focus on one thing at the detriment of everything else. there is also self stimulation, that can be as innocent as flapping their hand, all the way to biting themselves or smacking their heads into things.

Researchers, recently, found that there are variations in a particular gene, that has a key role in Aspergers Syndrome. They found that certain sequence variation  nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in a gene known as GABRB3 is more common in people with Aspergers. They also discovered that the more genetic variations in the same gene were linked to scores on an empathy measure.In simpler terms (I had to un-scramble my brain from all the technical data to get to this conclusion) people with Aspergers Syndrome tend to have more empathy than most of us, they just have a hard time understanding the social cues to know what another person feels. Once they do understand they tend to empathize in a way we couldn’t. these same gene variations also showed a relationship to tactile sensitivity, so its no wonder some people who have AS have a hard time with touch. This study specifically looked at people with AS but there are many other studies, to determine empathy levels, for people across the Autism Spectrum Disorder.  Just like the study I just talked about, they found that these people tended to empathize more than others, and in a completely different way. People with autism tend to feel everything they understand others feel. a good example is if a child gets yelled at in class, the child with autism will get really upset as if the teacher had just yelled at them. We used to think that was because the child was so internalized that they failed to realize there was anyone else in the room, so the teacher must be yelling at them.  What new study suggests, is that the child feels such empathy they feel what they think the other person feels. its a “funny” thought. We, educators, work hard at helping children understand body language and what feelings each facial expression, and body language means. Once they know all of that, they start getting overwhelmed by all the emotions in any given room. its like they are experiencing what they think we all are feeling.

In order to not make this a 5000 word post, I figure I will end here and talk about the teaching tools we have now. (guess what. we don’t use LSD anymore. lol) oh and my information came from:

http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/study-confirms-a-gene-linked-to-asperger-syndrome-and-empathy

http://autism.about.com/od/SymptomsofAutism/f/Do-People-With-Autism-Lack-Empathy.htm

http://www.autism-society.org/about-autism/facts-and-statistics/

http://www.asha.org/public/speech/disorders/autism/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator_mother_theory

http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/history-of-autism

The man that saved us all, and that I have never heard of

Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov. Who has heard of him? I know I never did, but I am not always current with all the news out there.  The answer to who is Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, is simple. He is the man that, many experts would consider, saved the human race from a nuclear holocaust.

From 1947-1991 is considered to be the time of “The Cold War”. Since this is important to the story but not the focus I will use Wikipidia and some other sites to fill in some of the stuff that doesn’t need full details:

“The Cold War was a sustained state of political and military tension between powers in the Western Bloc (the United States with NATO and others) and powers in the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union and its allies in Warsaw Pact). Historians have not fully agreed on the dates, but 1947–1991 is common. It was “cold” because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides, although there were major regional wars in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan.” (Wikipidia)

“It was over the issue of the postwar status of Poland, however, that the animosity and mistrust between the United States and the Soviet Union that would characterize the Cold War were most readily apparent. Soviet troops were already in control of Poland, a procommunist provisional government had already been established, and Stalin was adamant that Russia’s interests in that nation be recognized. The United States and Great Britain believed that the London-based noncommunist Polish government-in-exile was most representative of the Polish people. The final agreement merely declared that a “more broadly based” government should be established in Poland. Free elections to determine Poland’s future were called for sometime in the future. Many U.S. officials were disgusted with the agreement, which they believed condemned Poland to a communist future. Roosevelt, however, felt that he could do no more at the moment, since the Soviet army was occupying Poland.” (history.com)

Politics aside, the thing portrayed in most pop culture, and history classes, was the fear of the ever present threat of nuclear war. The fear of nuclear war was never higher than during the Cuban missile Crisis. History.com describes the Cuban Crisis like this”

“During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John Kennedy (1917-63) notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary to neutralize this perceived threat to national security. Following this news, many people feared the world was on the brink of nuclear war. However, disaster was avoided when the U.S. agreed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s (1894-1971) offer to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for the U.S. promising not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.”

It was here that the name Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov comes up in history, as the man who single handed stopped a nuclear war. Vasili was second in command aboard a nuclear armed Soviet submarine near Cuba. The Officers of the Sub had been given permission to fire their nukes without direct orders from Moscow if they believed they were under threat, and the Captain and Political Officer agreed to such a drastic course of action.

On October 27^th 1962, a group of eleven US Navy  Destroyers discovered the, diesel, B-59 submarine and started dropping practice depth charges to try and get the sub to surface for identification. Naturally the sub had no way of knowing that the depth charges were not meant to sink them, so they dove down, out of the line of fire. Problem is, down at that depth, they had no way of talking to anyone. They were left alone with a limited supply of air.

 

Fearing the worst, not knowing if the war was over, or had just started in Ernest, both the Captain and Political Officer, both, voted that they launch their nukes at the USS Randolf, a giant aircraft carrier leading the task force. Thankfully there was one more man on the bridge of the B-59 that day. Arkhipov, being commander of the entire fleet (four subs sent to a Cuba, each with a warhead of its own) he had the power to veto the firing of the missile. He, alone, was against the use of their ‘special weapon’, as the soviets called it, in that situation. He, alone, convinced the officers of that B-59 to not press that launch button.

There was always the threat of someone, at some time pushing that button, but nowhere in recorded history had that button been any closer to being pushed. For a man, almost, no one has ever heard about, he sure did a lot for us all.

 

References:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/featured/the-man-who-saved-the-world-about-this-episode/871/

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/27/vasili-arkhipov-stopped-nuclear-war

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov

Things you learn while watching TV

I found out the funniest, strangest, and just strait disturbing information last night. I was watching some PVR tv. At one point in the night, my wife had to go out of the room to deal with Kody waking up at midnight. So I stop the show, and went to live tv so I wasn’t stuck watching a frozen screen, and that is when I discovered the history of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and learned a little bit about graham crackers, along the way, as well. I have to admit, I was skeptical at first, as I always am, so I looked into it a little bit, and this is what I found.

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was born in 1852. when he grew up he became a medical doctor in Battle Creek, Michigan, and ran a sanitarium. He was a vegetarian and focused his treatment on nutrition, enemas, and exercise. Kellogg also led the establishment of the American Medical Missionary College, founded in 1895-1910 (it then merged with the Illinois State University). All said and done, Kellogg was highly respected medical practitioner.

Here is where it gets strange. John Harvey Kellogg was a Seventh Day Adventist, with very radical ideas when it came to that of sexual habits of people. You see, he believed that all illnesses came from the stomach and bowels, so he treated his patients with whole grains, fruits, nuts, legumes, and other healthy foods, but not meat. He was also a fan of daily yogurt enemas to produce sparkling clean intestines. Any other illnesses that were not cured by diet alone, he maintained, were caused by sexual intercourse. It has been reported that he remained celibate for his entire life, including after marrying Ella Eaton (he was married to her for more than forty years).

oh but it gets stranger indeed. Kellogg believed that masturbation was the most foul of acts that a person could do, and needed intervention right away, or before the problem even started. his methods were enough to make girls and boys alike wince when they hear his methods. but instead of me trying to describe what he thought let me give you an excerpt from one of his books on the subject:

“A remedy [for masturbation] which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision…The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind…In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement. ” — Dr. John Harvey Kellogg

Now if that didn’t work, he recommended sowing the fore skin that over the penis with silver wire. along with these practices, he was convinced that meat fueled sexual excitement and therefor people should abstain from eating flesh.

because he believed so wholeheartedly that food was the answer to all of life’s ailments, he eventually made cornflakes in order to help stop sex by cutting out the food that caused such thoughts. he went into business with his brother, Will Keith Kellogg, in 1897 to distribute this healthy food. Eventually the Kellogg’s had a falling out when Will wanted to add sugar to the cereal, something that Dr. Kellogg believed that would ruin the work the cereal was supposed to do for people…stop sex. Will Kellogg would then split from his brother in order to make, what is now known as The Kellogg Company.

John Kellogg wasn’t the only one that believed that vegetarian was the only way to go, in order to stop the evils of sex. here is what Sylvester Graham, the inventor of the graham cracker, had to say on the subject:

“All kinds of stimulating and heating substances; high-seasoned food; rich dishes; the free use of flesh; and even the excess of aliment; all, more or less — and some to a very great degree — increase the concupiscent excitability and sensibility of the genital organs…” — Sylvester Graham

of course Graham Crackers, originally, had none of the sugars of today’s crackers.

sick and twisted origin of breakfast cereal isn’t it. as an extra bit of fun, James Caleb Jackson created the first dry cereal, called Granula. eventually a patient of John Kellogg’s, C.W. post, would make a cereal company called post cereals. John Kellogg would later claim that Charles Post stole the formula for corn flakes from his safe in the Sanitarium office.

here is where I got my info, in case anyone wants to double check what I said:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harvey_Kellogg#Breakfast_cereals

http://psychcentral.com/lib/do-kelloggs-corn-flakes-help-control-masturbation/0001043

http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/10/graham.htm

http://www.historyofcircumcision.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=48&Itemid=0

http://www.nndb.com/people/018/000133616/

11 things that I have learned working with special needs people:

1) life is tough, but you need to find ways to get over it

2)if the way you found to get over the tough patches in life is harmful to you, or others you need to man/woman up, and get help to find a way that isn’t harmful.

3) Love is forever. When you let yourself love someone it doesn’t matter what they do, or who they become you should still love them.

4) love can be a choice. you can chose to love people and you can choose to shut them out, but life without love is pointless and hard. So let yourself love, even if that means hurting occasionally.

5) love is not a romantic thing, contrary to popular opinion. however in today’s culture there is Love, and then there is love (wink, wink, nod, nod). put your effort into the non-romantic kind, then within your romantic relationships, then maintaining your romantic love will come easier and more meaningful.

6)what is easy for you, might be crazy hard for someone else, and what is hard for them may be easy for you.

7) you aren’t better, nor are you worse than anyone else. you are different and that is what makes this world work.

8) everyone is important, and worth being alive, even if you don’t look closely enough to see why.

9)if something is easy, it doesn’t make it right. if something is right to do, it is almost always hard.

10) people express their feelings different. Figure out how people express their feelings, and how they know what others feel. (for example:On facebook some people know they are cared about by passing on those “share if you love someone then tag them” type pictures or posts, and others, like me, would rather comments on posts and don’t like “spamming” my feed with public displays of who I like, and am friends with. within romantic couples, your partner might show they care about you, and know you care about them, by being physical. but you might show, and know people care by getting/giving gifts. if you don’t figure out how to share your love with each other, you are in for a world of hurt, and misunderstandings)

11) I am glad I live in a world that includes kids, and adults, that used to be pushed aside, in a world that would rather they were forgotten. Our children get to learn how to respect everyone (I hope).

there is a good chance that I did not express my thoughts properly, but I hope people see past that.

Neuropathic pain and Marijuana

I find it funny, how fundamentally opposed to marijuana I used to be when I was younger. i grew up the son of a forensic police officer. The part of marijuana that I grew up knowing was the heavy gang influence. the shootings, the break and enters, the grow-ops that would burn down houses. I knew the criminal element of marijuana fairly well. I also saw the “stoners”, the Cheech and Chong’s of this world.. I never believed in the gateway drug propoganda, but I did know that smoking pot was bad for your health. I read the stats that x amount of brain cells per puff, or that one joint was the equivalent of smoking 3 cigarettes (although I the chain pot smokers I knew where the minority, compared to the, 3 packs a day smokers, that I knew.) So when I heard that they were allowing marijuana to be used to treat Glaucoma patients I scoffed at the idea. All you needed now was a dirty Dr. to get your hands on some Legal pot, or a licence to grow it.

Now I am a different place in my life. I am in constant pain, and have seizures as a result ( I have real seizures, that I never would have known were seizures if it wasn’t for my pain induced sudo-siezures). I never would have considered talking about medical marijuana if it weren’t for knowing someone in a similar boat to me. but looking further into it I found out some more things about marijuana that I just didn’t know before, I actually don’t think anyone in the medical community knew about when I was growing up.

I found out that there was more than one active ingredient in marijuana. Most people familiar with the drug know about THC (tetrahydrocannabinol). THC is the active ingredient that makes you high. Recreational smokers, usually, want this part of the plant to be higher. but there is also CBD (Cannabidiol) which unlike its partner, THC, is a non-psychotic ingredient that will actually counter the effects of THC . Up until now only high THC stains of marijuana were available, but since the discovery of CBD, more stains are coming out that have different percentages of each ingredient, allowing it to treat multiple different pain, and other, problems. CBD, has in recent research, been thought to have anti seizure properties. A mixture of 1% THC to 24% CBD, has been found to have reduced seizure activity in people with epilepsy.

THC isn’t all bad, however. We all, I assume, know about marijuana causing the munchies, and how that trait alone can be a life saver for Cancer patients who have a hard time eating, let alone keeping the food they do manage to eat down for very long. THC is also responsible for the drowsy feeling someone would get while smoking, or eating, marijuana. In someone that can’t sleep for many debilitating medical problems, THC again would come to the rescue.

The issue of weather marijuana should be legal as a recreational drug will be up for debate for years to come I am sure, and protests like the 4/20 won’t do a whole lot to help that fight. To be honest I care a lot less about that aspect of pot right now. sure, it would be nice to get some taxes from the drug, much like we do with alcohol and cigarettes, to help pay for the medical bills of those heavy users out there when they have lung issues (although pot has not been linked to cancer, it has been linked to respiratory issues with users that smoke over the course of their life, due to the tar that is produced when smoking, and the fact that to smoke pot you hold it in your lungs for longer than cigarettes). I would love, if they do legalize it, to make similar rules for smoking pot as they do for smoking cigarettes (no smoking with in a certain distance from public doors, and other such rules to make sure those that choose not to smoke aren’t exposed to as much second hand smoke) . But that is again, not what I am talking about.

I never thought I would be on the marijuana band wagon, so to speak, but here I am, realizing that this could be the only thing that could help people, much like myself. It frusterates me now, seeing people like the Harper government trying to put medical marijuana out of business by holding up seeds from licensed growers, and drowning dispensaries in red tape. If they were brought up like me, and never had to experience pain and discomfort like I, and many others have, I would understand their position. It is hard, to impossible, to describe what I am feeling. This is a sensation unlike any I have ever had before. I probably would still be against marijuana if it wasn’t for the way my life is now. So, I get it. I also get this side of the fence much better, and realize what these new strands of Cannabis means for people like us.

I can’t tell you if marijuana works for me yet. I still have a few hoops to jump through before my doctor, and I, are fully committed to this course of action (my Dr’s comment was…”if it was for anyone else, I would say no right away. but if nothing else works and you push for it, I would prescribe it for you.”). All I can tell you is that I now see how useful it can be. every drug will be abused. Just look at T3’s, morphine, alcohol, but this can be one of those drugs that has the potential to do more good than bad, just like the pain killers most of us have been on multiple times in our life