Every Cloud ......

After a fairly restful night, Boy Wonder was charged up ready for the school sports day. This was Cat Girl's first one and she was excited! Superman kindly told the children that I would do the parents race as I didn't do it last year. Thanks for that!

We got ready, PE kits on, sun cream applied and plenty of drinks. It was already really warm and it looked set to last. The morning activities consisted of  group games which ranged from table tennis to basket ball. After dinner were the competitive races. Boy Wonder came second in the hurdles and second in javelin as his foam javelin bounced back. He wasn't happy about this but didn't overly react. Cat Girl enjoyed her relay race and also came second so they both did really well.

It then came to the parents race. It was Egg and Spoon this year and then a sprint. I won the egg and spoon much to the children's delight. It was now nearing the end of the day and I could see Boy Wonder getting more and more excitable. They went back to their classrooms and on collection the teacher came out and asked me to come inside to get him as he was very excitable. We went to the car and this escalated to throwing himself about and trying to run. When we got home he went up to his room. I followed him up a few minutes later with a drink and found him swinging in his hammock,  covered in blood.  He had, had a nose bleed and wiped it all over his face, arms and legs. It was also all over his desk and laptop. He sat there, not at all concerned playing Minecraft. I asked him why he didn't shout me for help? He said that he didn't need help as he was fine. Really?! I got him into the shower which he found very inconvenient. The nose bleed had now stopped so I explained that he needed cleaning up and so did his bedroom.

One thing that we could mostly rely on was that if he didn't recognise pain due to his altered pain threshold, he would generally over react to blood. Without this little safeguard he is becoming more and more vulnerable.

After an evening of Oliver rehearsals, he came home and watched football before settling down. He was late falling to sleep so had only a few hours. However, in the morning they had to be up a little earlier and go to breakfast club , but nether the less he complied.

At approximately 1.45pm I received a phone call from school to say that there had been an incident and Boy Wonder was very distressed and self harming. She went on to say that she was keeping him back from swimming and would stay with him on a 1:1. I explained that I was about an hour away but would set off now if needed. She agreed that, that would be a good idea.

I arrived at school and Boy Wonder who initially looked calm, jumped out of his seat in an excitable way. We spoke about the incident which started off as a minor falling out with a friend on the playground. Boy Wonder had then run off to hide in the willow where the TA found him. They went inside and talked about the falling out individually and together and apologised to each other. That appeared to be the end.  However when the teacher started the lesson, Boy Wonder got his book out of his tray and started to hit himself hard in the face with it. As they intervened, he took himself to the floor and started to roll around. They commented that he looked very distressed and tried to help him by putting his weighted jacket on. He took it off and threw it and took himself back to the floor. The decision was made to keep him back from swimming for his own safety. He reacted to this by getting very upset and crying whilst curled into a ball on the floor.

We talked about how he can recognise if he feels like this again and what he can do but it was clear that he couldn't relate the emotion to the physical so therefore would struggle. I further identified that he goes from controlled to uncontrolled very quickly do therefore there is a very small window of opportunity to intervene. The TA said that this had been evident today. I explained that this type of reaction happens quite a lot at home, Boy Wonder intercepted by saying ' No it isn't rare!' which made us smile. He then tried to communicate moreso by typing on the computer key board. I explained that we couldn't see what he was typing as the computer was off so he moved to one that was on and wrote 'yes' when asked if he was feeling better.

We went on to drama and ju Jitsu where he remained okay for the rest of the evening. It was clear that he had relieved his anxiety earlier and so it didn't spill over into after school. A little result I think!