I Tried Oils And Herbs And Nothing Worked

We juggle a new school year for our high support needs severely autistic son while we question staffing, trust, and classes without enough help. We also share what happened when natural remedies and cannabis products worked unpredictably, plus a bigger idea about respite communities that could use technology to fill real care gaps. 
• Shifting into a new school era and tightening our focus on staff 
• Needing one-on-one support and sometimes more at school 
• Frustration with mainstreaming vs functioning level 
• Trying herbalism, homeopathic tablets, and essential oils as coping tools 
• Seeing “opposite” reactions and losing faith in what what we believe in 
• A funny morning script plus pizza day attitude after a bigger dose 
• Exploring safer lifestyles and respite communities with AI support 
• Asking for ideas to market the concept to the right people 
Don’t forget to send your comments, questions, and stories to me at contact.parentingsevereautism@gmail.com. 

Transcript

Welcome And Support Shout Outs

SHANNON CHAMBERLIN 0:17

Hello and welcome to the Parenting Severe Autism Podcast. I am your host, Shannon Chamberlin. I'm so happy that you're here with me today. I'm still not accepting guests on my podcast, but you can email me with questions, comments, and stories at contact.parentingsevereautism at gmail.com. And of course, you can still support the show with the Buy Me a Coffee app. I think you can just click the little support button on your podcast player, and you should be able to continue from there. Huge shout out to Becca C for my largest one-time contribution thus far. Thank you so much. You really made my day. You bought me 25 coffees. You're so amazing. Thank you for letting me know that you're out there and for reminding me that I'm a superhero. Thank you. It seems like every time I'm having a hard day, I get some kind of message or donation from a supporter, and I'm just so grateful. The universe just smiles upon me and reminds me that there are other people out there going through things like we are. Thank you, Becca. So it seems like every time I want to transition my storytelling to a new era in this podcast, I feel the need to tidy up loose ends and give weird details and stories before I move on. So here we go. When I left off in the last episode, I had just shared with you the bus ride and where I thought they were returning my son without even taking him to school. So yes, school had started. We still had not had any luck with the doctors. So now my focus had shifted because the child is now going to a new school. We have to shift our focus and start really paying attention to the staff at the school. Because unfortunately, we don't feel that we can just freely trust everyone that's there to respect our son's needs and give him the attention that he needs. Because apparently, a lot of schools are really short on paras anyway. So our son requires a one-on-one, sometimes a two or three-on-one at school. And there's this weird trend. I don't know if they're still doing it now because he's been out of school for quite some time. But when he was in school, there was this weird trend that they just wanted to blend him into mainstream classrooms. I don't know. If you were to meet my son, you would not think that. I don't know what makes these people think that that's a great idea for the majority of the class time that they're there every day. I just, it doesn't make sense. Um, I don't have a way to explain it. I don't see the logic in it. The only thing I can understand is that perhaps they're doing it because they simply don't have enough special ed teachers and aides, and they just want to throw our children into the mainstream sea of people. I don't know. It just doesn't make sense. When he got there, we were informed that he was a senior in high school, which makes sense by his age, but it doesn't make sense by his level of functioning. So everything was super confusing for us, and we were very hands-on as soon as school started. As much as I would really love to be hands-off and let someone else just take him for a while. No, it's a full-time job, just keeping up with what's going on in school, having to pop in there when they don't expect it, and having to pop in there when we don't expect it, but they need us there. So there was just a lot of confusion and a lot of energy went into this project. So we hadn't had any luck with doctors yet. I don't know if I told you, but I was in school for medical herbalism at the time. So I was really hell-bent on using natural methods for our son. I know I've talked about this in my earlier episodes. I tried everything. I made little smell sticks for everyone else in the household, all the adults that were affected negatively by our son, because he was stressing us the fuck out. His grandfather was always on edge, his dad was always on edge, I was trying not to crumble. We all had different ones for different conditions. While I was making these for the adults to use as coping tools, I was also trying to use essential oils and herbal medicine on our son. So I used homeopathic things for under the tongue to address anxiety. I found these calming day and night. They're called well-mind calming homeopathic tablets. They have chamomile and valerian root and some other stuff. It also has magnesium in it. It says that it's for the temporary relief of simple nervous tension and anxiousness to promote better natural sleep. You dose it under the tongue and just let it dissolve, and it could be chewed and swallowed. So that works perfectly for our son. And you're supposed to use it at the first sign of symptoms. So I thought that was cool because with a lot of other herbal medicine, well, especially essential oil, if you try to use the essential oils at the first sign of distress, you're actually tying that scent of that oil to that feeling of distress. Using these well-mined calming homeopathic tablets seemed to be a better route because I layer herbal remedies together. So I was trying to give him a couple of these calming tablets as soon as I could see that he was distressed. That should take about 20 minutes to work. I was hoping that those would start to calm him down so that when he achieved a sense of calm or calmer, then I could turn on the essential oil diffuser or apply an essential oil blend on his skin or to uh cotton and let him smell it. But you can't give him the calming essential oil smells if he's not already calm to some degree. So anyway, I was trying to layer all of that in there. For him, these didn't work. I started taking them for myself, and I don't think that they worked for me either. And that became a theme with all of the herbal medicine. Nothing really worked for him. I had a beautiful diffuser in his room, and I would try to diffuse uplifting scents, and I was buying all kinds of things, essential oil blends that were called a joyful blend and things like that. All it did was make him mad. If he was fairly decent and I was like, okay, this is a great time to keep this going and make it even better, I'll go turn on the diffuser in his room and I'll turn on the one in the living room. So he just can't get away from it and it's gonna get in him and get into all of us and make us happy. I mean, he went totally the opposite way every single time. I started thinking that maybe I should start looking for smells and herbs that are known for pissing people off, and maybe I could just use those and they would make him happy because he really seems like an opposite reactor at this point. I was doing this whole herbalism essential oil thing to no avail. All my life I've believed in homeopathic medicine and herbal medicine and things like that. I was fairly new to essential oils, and I'm not a huge, huge fan, not as much as the other alternatives, but I was throwing the everything I had at him, and my belief and faith in herbal medicines started to wane because nothing, nothing had a good effect on him. They did help the other people in the household, but I don't know if if it's a decision that he makes that he will not be affected, because I swear to God it works like that with him. Or if it was simply that he's got some kind of blockers in his chemistry, in his makeup. I know I've mentioned this before with the CBD oil that we first started on many, many years ago when it was still illegal. It only worked once or twice, but there was a precaution that said that certain people with autism possess a certain protein chain in their bodies that prevents them from benefiting from CBD. And actually, with our son, I believe he has it. We haven't had him tested, but he he's the proof he never had a really good reaction to it. And in fact, it seems like when I give him cannabis medicine that contains any amount of CBD with the THC, he gets really pissed off. It has the complete opposite effect on him. The same thing happens with the strain. If I give him indica, he has a terrible reaction. But if I give him sativa, he calms down and he is cordial, at least, most of the time. Unless he decides that he doesn't want to and then it doesn't work. No matter how much you give him, it won't work. I don't know if he's going through a thing one day chemically inside his body or if it's a choice. I really don't know. But there are times when the same exact thing that works all the time doesn't work, no matter how much you give him. It's ridiculous. I experienced some major delays with tech and family issues. So the episode is late and it's cut off and there's information missing. I'm really sorry. Everything will get better in the next one. I have a whole page of stories that I have to share with you. I don't know, they're very entertaining, and a lot of them have been happening like back to back. So I want to share these things with you because they're funny. In the beginning of April, there was one day when he woke up with like a jump stomp from his bed. I swear to God, he just stands up on his bed and jumps down onto the floor. He went to the bathroom, and then after that, he started sobbing and wailing in his room, which of course is right above ours. You just can't miss it when he does it. So his dad decided to jump out of bed and take his medicine to him instead of us meeting him when he gets up, like we usually do. And he washed it down with 20 milligrams of cannabis medicine. Usually he only gets 10, and he takes his medicine with water. His dad didn't even give him water, he just gave him all the drugs at once. And about 90 minutes later, I was up at the refrigerator upstairs, and our son was standing in the dining room. He pops out from behind the wall where he likes to hide, and he very quietly says, Good morning, Shannon. I said, Hi there. He says, Did you sleep good last night? This is something he runs through every day. This is just a script that he runs. So he says, Did you sleep good last night? Did you? I said, Not really, did you? And he says, No. Not. Really. I thought that was so cute because he slowed down enough to be understood. I think he was trying to form his words on purpose, but it was just funny, his delivery there. He seemed really disappointed that he didn't sleep well. So that was a Saturday. That's his pizza day, and of course he wakes up being a jerk on pizza day. He does that all the time. I don't know if he plans it or if it's just something innate. But after he says no, not really, he says digga digga digga digga digga blah blah blah. Pizza. And as he says pizza, he puts his hand on his waist, bends at the waist, and points his finger at me and gives me stink face. I was like, what is going on with this kid? I said, Yes, you're gonna be a good boy today and eat pizza tonight. And then he starts pulling on the ties of his robe. He says, He says, I'm a good boy. And it was almost like a burlesque movement. It was so funny. I don't know what got into him, but it must have been that 20 milligrams of cannabis. The other thing I want to say is there is a lot going on in the world with this autism committee that RFK Jr. has put together and a lot going on with Melania as well and these damn robots. Have you seen that? I I don't follow the news, but I did see like a a clip. Um I didn't even play it. I just saw the thumbnail on YouTube. And I really think that um my blueprint for Safer Lifestyles, respite communities, would be greatly enhanced if it existed and had some AI robots or whatever the hell they're called. I don't know. Don't shoot me for saying it. I just think that that would be really awesome because there are not enough humans that are trained enough to take care of our children. And I think that they would be a great asset in a community like that to help the regular humans take care of our irregular children. And hopefully you don't get offended when I say it that way. I want to reach them. And if you have any suggestions, I mean I'm gonna do the normal stuff, but if you have any input on that, on how to get my idea taken seriously, let me know. I'm pretty good at figuring stuff out, but I'm really stretched thin, and I think I always will be, just like you. So I just wanted to, you know, throw that out there. If you're in support of that idea, I would love to hear from you if you had any ideas on actually marketing it to the right people and the right avenues. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your support. Don't forget to send your comments, questions, and stories to me at contact.parenting severe autism at gmail.com. And remember to check out my storefront for some swag stuff that I put together. I don't know if you any of you have seen it yet. I think it's pretty cute with what they have available: tote bags, t-shirts, and pillows, cups and glasses, and you know, just all kinds of stuff. So hang in there. You're a superhero.