Three Years Ago During a Horrific Night I Lost my Daughter for a Year

It is a night that will live in my memory until the day that I die. I was woken at 2 am and found my daughter uncontrollably shaking; she couldn't get control of her body, worse was to come. When we took her temperature, she was at 40. Anything over 37.5C is considered a temperature. Then she had a seizure.

When the ambulance arrived, we were told the shaking was rigours, a symptom of a very high temperature. She was put into the ambulance and rushed to the hospital, luckily only ten minutes away. In the ambulance, she had another seizure, and a code red was called in.

Record Breaking

Once at the hospital, her temperature was now 42, the highest anyone had ever seen in the accident and emergency. Not just on a child, but on anyone. The head of paediatrics was there, and they started to treat her temperature. She had one final seizure in the hospital, and I consented to have her sedated until it began to drop. Luckily it wasn't necessary, but we got close.

Over the next week, she stayed in the children ward. A good day was when her temperature stayed at 39, and that was with medication; it never went as high as 42 again, but it was close. For that week, we lived in constant fear. The cause was a viral infection. They couldn't find anything else to explain it. Then all of a sudden, the temperature disappeared, and so had my little girl. Not physically but emotionally and socially, she was gone. She had left our world for her own.

Losing my little girl.

Before the illness, she was trying new foods, starting to speak and interacting with us. Afterwards, she was withdrawn, only ate three types of food and stopped talking. Whether from the illness or the trauma she had been through, her autism had been dialled up to one hundred per cent. My happy little girl had vanished.

It took us a while to realise she had withdrawn. Initially, we were all in shock from the trauma we had been through. We were also so pleased to have her with us. Slowly we realised that things were more complicated, and she was struggling.

Her sister was born, and she never really noticed; as long as she had her television and iPad, she was happy it was like she was in the room, but not with us.

Coming back to us

By chance, a friend recommended a book to me called the Autism Language Launcher to help autistic children learn to talk. The central premise was to join them in their world. Stims are common repetitive behaviours that autistic people adopt to calm themselves; my little girl's is throwing herself back against the sofa over and over again. The book suggested we copied her stim, so we went for it. There are many other techniques to use which we adopted. Slowly they worked, and she started interacting with us for a couple of minutes a day.

This then increased to an hour a day, and now she is always with us. She started to reenter our world, and it is the greatest joy of our life.

Life now

Fast forward to today, she is starting to speak and initiate interaction. Today, we asked her out of her and her sister, who was the crazy one, and she pointed to her little sister and laughed. Something two years ago, she wouldn't have even heard, let alone understood and known how to respond.

We went to a theme park yesterday, and she was with us the whole day laughing, smiling, pointing to rides and interacting as any four-year-old would. This year she had a party with her friends, something that would have been a dream two years ago.

We never looked into whether the temperature did cause some minor brain damage that caused her withdrawal. Now it seems irrelevant as she has made her way back to us. Many children with autism withdraw after sensory overload and trauma. It was fair to say that night in May three years ago was traumatic, and the sensory overload must have been beyond comprehension. It is entirely possible this one week took three years to recover from.

The reason does not seem important now we have made such giant steps forward. Three years ago, I lost my daughter for a year, but now she has reentered our world with a bang, and I can't wait to see where the next three years take us. She is my superhero.

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