The People We’ve Become

By Kent Heckenlively, Esq.

When you’re a man and you get married you lose your female friends.  I know it goes the other way as well.  And maybe it’s for the best. 

But now that I’m closing in on my fifteenth year of marriage, maybe it’s not such a bad thing that a few old female friends have started popping back into my life.

The first woman I’ll call Sue.  I first met her when I was seventeen years old, and last saw her when I was twenty-nine.  When I first met her she had a boyfriend she didn’t like, and I was, well, her confidant, and yes, I fell in love with her.  We talked for years about what might happen if we were together, but she never gave me the chance.  The last time I saw her she was twenty-nine, married to a guy she didn’t love, and I found myself wondering, “What the heck am I doing giving the same advice I gave when I was seventeen?”

But aside from the fact we were never together as a couple, from the age of seventeen to twenty-nine, there was nobody I saw on a more regular basis, or looked forward to seeing more than Sue.  The torch I carried burned for a good twelve years, but it went out when I met my wife. 

I can still recall the last time we parted at the Montgomery Street BART station.  She’d been crying as she told me how unhappy she was with her weird husband and I had fallen back into my usual comforting mode.  But I just didn’t feel it any more.  When she got into the train and it pulled away I remember thinking to myself, “I’m never going to call you again.  Good luck, my friend.”

And so it was that sixteen years passed before I heard her voice again on the phone.  She’d recently run into a mutual friend, asked about me, and realized we lived only a few miles apart.

She was in the midst of getting a divorce from husband number two and had two children.  Her son appeared to be on the autistic spectrum and she wanted my advice.  She had gone onto Age of Autism and read all my articles.  It seemed I was back in the advice business.

I wasn’t really sure I wanted to meet with her and talked to one of my teacher friends about what I should do.  When she heard the story she said, “This is one of those God/karma type of things.  You have to meet her.”

With the full approval of my lovely wife I met Sue at our local book store, which was conveniently located next to a health food store.  I had my list of things for her to read, to buy, and to research, and figured I’d just leave it at that.  The memories of how she’d never taken my advice before were still fresh in my mind.  I figured the most God could
ask of me was to give her the information.  What she chose to do with it was up to her.
When we got together I heard more about her son, who seems to have high-level Asperger’s syndrome, her soon-to-be ex-second husband who’d had a mental breakdown lasting four years, her younger sister who has lupus, her new boyfriend who suffers from MS, and her brother who is on a gluten-free diet.

During our meeting she told me a story she’d never shared with me about her first year in college.  “I always thought I was going to become a doctor,” she said, “But then I failed my first physiology class in college and figured I’d better stick with banking.”

Maybe it’s because we’ll do more for our kids than we’ll ever do for ourselves, but in front of me she bought every book and supplement I suggested.  “I don’t see you for all these years, and you’re immediately acting like papa bear to my kids,” she said as we were walking to our cars.  “I really appreciate it.”

I had to admit I was impressed that she’d become the de-facto doctor to her children and her family.  People have a way of surprising you.  Karma.  It feels good.

Another recent incident concerned my law school study partner, a woman I’ll call Cathy.  Cathy did better in law school than I did, but never seemed to like it very much.  A few years after law school she moved to Arizona and we lost touch.

She was in town recently and gave me a call to catch up.  I filled her in on what had happened in my life, then she told me about her own life.

In Arizona she’d founded a school of acupuncture and Chinese medicine.  It’s actually the largest school of acupuncture in Arizona and gives a four-year-degree, as well as studying western medicine.  The school tries to take the best of eastern and western science.

Cathy was also married and had a two-year-old son.  I always hate when the subject of young children comes up because of the inevitable questions I have to ask.  To my relief, she hadn’t vaccinated her son because of her concerns over the vaccines, but was starting to question her decision.  I told her about safe vaccination schedules that she could find on Generation Rescue, but also how in light of how little information has been released about the real effects of the vaccines, I urged her to wait.

It didn’t take much to convince her.  She was well aware of a good deal of the information I shared with her.  Unfortunately, it’s getting easier to convince people that the public health authorities don’t have their best interests at heart.

The Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, believed that history moves in great waves that people can’t really control.  The great wave of history pushed Napoleon to invade Russia, but didn’t allow him to hold it.  Individual people can make their own destiny, but the tides of history are beyond their control.

I can’t help but feel we’re all riding a great wave of history with our sick children.  The
public health authorities and their pharmaceutical sponsors may seem as invincible as Napoleon, but they're also subject to the tides of history.  But the tides of history also change us as individuals.  After Napoleon there was a hundred years of peace in Europe.  We become different people.

As I reflect on how my two friends have become health warriors I can only feel a sense of pride in the time we had together.

Kent Heckenlively is Legal Editor for Age of Autism.

Comments

[Jack]

A timely piece for me. My wife and I just joined facebook, and although I'm apparently too old to use most of the features, we've still connected with dozens of old friends, most with young kids or soon to be. People that liked and respected us, and now they've all learned one very important thing from us. There are just so many ways information is traveling these days.....

[ElizaCassandra]

From "across the pond":- For some years now I've been telling anyone who'll listen for long enough that, if proper research was carried out**, it would be found that many children with autism spectrum disorders have strong medical histories of autoimmune disorders, allergies and gastrointestinal disorders. In my daughter's medical history appear diabetes on my side, rheumatoid arthritis on my husband's side and my thyroid problems; various family members had or have asthma, hayfever, dermatitis and allergies including penicillin; her two grandmothers share acid stomachs (no citrus), stomach and duodenal ulcers, diverticulosis/itis and irritable bowel syndrome. I have intermittent IBS while my poor HFA daughter won't eat wholemeal or oats "because they make my stomach ache".

My daughter passed all her childhood development checks with flying colours until her "inexplicable" descent into regressive autism within a month of her receiving one of the original MMR's at fourteen/fifteen months (not the MMR II currently in use). Her eighteen-month developmental check was "very borderline". Her so-called "booster" MMR has never been administered and her few vaccinations are carefully chosen.

Her twin brother remains unaffected directly by autism although our lifestyle is hampered by our daughter's foibles. As they reach towards adulthood the comparison between them becomes too cruel for mere words - her twin brother will probably go to university next year while she cannot tolerate academic pressure in any form. Robert Frost wrote about "the road less travelled" and that is the road my dear daughter is taking but with few signposts to help her or us.

** Several(?) years ago an application to study and compare the clinical health of 500 'normal' and 500 ASD children was made to the Medical Research Council in the UK - it was turned down. To the best of my knowledge, the MRC hasn't seen fit to allocate funding for the clinical examination of ASD children (please post here to correct me if I'm wrong).

[sdtech]

Kent:

I too have a story about an attractive member of the opposite gender. But in my case it is my doctor’s nurse. I took a chance and brought David Kirby’s book Evidence of Harm to my appointment. When I asked how her one year old was doing we had a very nice conversation. She said a family member has a son with Autism. She and her husband are very concerned about their child but she said her pediatrician told her that there was “no known connection between autism and vaccines.” Never the less she still believed that parents must be the advocate for their children’s health. So I offered David Kirby’s book and she was very grateful. I am hopeful these young parents will arm themselves with information before seeing their pediatrician next time.

And I have another story about the same gender. While napping in our van in the Holiday Inn Express parking lot during a wedding dance (my wife was visiting and dancing inside with our daughters) I awoke to the words “roll down your window sir.” So I asked for this person’s ID and then rolled down the window. The young man was an off-duty cop on security detail so I asked him questions while he asked me questions. I found out his son has special needs with possible autism. So I asked for his address and later mailed him Bryan Jepsons’s book “Changing the Course of Autism.”

I believe that Mother Teresa’s quote is apt … “We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.”

[How times have changed]

"As I reflect on how my two friends have become health warriors I can only feel a sense of pride in the time we had together."

I was talking to my aunt today and she was reflecting on the fact that she was soon going to be 70 and she has lupus. She was telling me that my parents too, both in their 70s, now have nagging health problems and why shouldn't they, after all they were old. I was struck by the fact that we, only in our 30s and 40s are now plagued by chronic disease like never seen before - allergies, ADD/ADHD, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. Finally take our kids - autism, SIDS, asthma, juvenile diabetes, bipolar disorder, ADD/ ADHD - and all under 10 years of age.

Do you think our kids will even be around 30 years from now to meet up with old friends and talk about old times? Assuming they do what do you think they will talk about - remember the time they used to put mercury in vaccines and shoot 40 vaccines into kids before 18 months of age? Remember all the kids who died? Remember they kept saying multiple vaccines at one time were safe even though nobody really had done any studies to prove they were safe? Remember how they crucified our parents on the internet for protesting about this? Unbelievable isn't it? Who would have thought corporate greed could make everybody deaf, blind and dumb?

[Gatogorra]

Lol, it's true we all have those opposite-gender-friends we sort of part from when getting married (and staying married).

But I also reached out to a old pal, the brother of a girlfriend from college, when I learned his wife was pregnant. We'd once been very close but I'd been better friends with his sister and we lost touch in the past ten years but felt it was urgent that I send him some info on vaccines after my own twins were injured. The reason for this was that I'd noticed this "wave of history" seems to have clots in it which represented genetically unrelated groups of friends whose children often mysteriously end up with autism together at rates higher than other social sets.

I had my own assumptions about this correlation before reading David Kirby's article mentioning a link between fragile mitochondria and IQ which was offered by some unnamed member of a CDC advisory committee. I had this suspicion prior when noticing that mainstream medical authorities (Simon B.-C., etc.) were insisting that higher autism rates in the offspring of mathematicians and those in analytical careers meant genes were at play. I thought they might be right about the autism rates and parental careers or intellectual bents but wrong about why this was and DK's article brought that suspicion home. I don't believe this is the only "susceptibility", just one of several.

Anyway, this old friend was one of the most brilliant people I'd met before college and in my gut I knew that my old friend's children could have a higher than average chance of developing autism from shots. I began lobbying him through his sister to check out the nearby Homefirst clinic and to read EOH and other materials on safer vaccination schedules. His sister warned me that he'd gotten a bit stuffy and might not appreciate the information.

NT as this old friend was (really the definition of NT-- great verbal aptitude, subtle mind, scary sense of humor and perceptiveness about people), he was too smart and apparently he'd married an equal, which harked on an article I'd read mentioning that rates of autism among couples where both had the same pay grade in an analytical career (the rates were noticed in Silicon Valley, gathering place of computer geeks) tended to be higher than average.

In other words, had he married an idiot, I might not have been as worried, but she was a PhD like him (just wait for some crusty Harvard researcher to blame autism on feminism or something).

I got the great news last year that, before their daughter's birth, my old friend and his wife decided not to vaccinate. Last I heard, the little girl is extremely advanced in all areas of development.

We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne

[dan olmsted]

what a great piece, kent. we all find ourselves in situations where we're surprised how informed and concerned people are about this, and how much they are willing to listen to what we have to say. i'm not so sure that the tides of history are totally unaffected by seemingly small efforts like the ones you made here. -- best, dan