Blog post from a parent of a child with FASD who discusses the current situation at home.
“It’s been two months now since our teenage son with FASD has been out and about. No school. No weekend visits to the charity shops. No seeing friends and family. Just the occasional dog walk. He’s had, if we’re honest, probably too little exercise.
The days now are gentle, rolling one into the other. We are not attempting home schooling. We are, here inside our bubble, just gliding now through this time of quarantine and lockdown.
He’s adjusted to the lack of daily treats from the shop that used to be waiting for him as he returned home from school in the taxi. He’s adjusted to the need to avoid certain rooms if parental work zoom calls are happening. He has absorbed the unabsorbable – that ‘out there’ is a virus that we are trying to avoid. He knows we wash hands. He accepts that when a package arrives one of us takes it outside and removes the packaging and that we must wash hands again.
We believe we had an early introduction to COVID-19 in our home – but we will never really know. My last post was fairly grim on that point. Apologies. It was a strange, strange time. We learned later that a family in our local FASD support group (whom we had seen days before our eldest became symptomatic) came down much harder with it than we did in our house. Worries were running high. (Thankfully, they made it through, though it was scary.)
Our son with FASD was shielded from those worries. We didn’t tell him that’s what we thought his older brother and I had…that maybe that was what explained his back pain or his dad’s unusual symptoms. He is still shielded as much as possible from the extent and horror of this thing. We turn off the news when he comes into the room. We don’t discuss this novel coronavirus when he’s around. He’s too prone to anxiety, so we do not fuel it. We just keep chugging on.”