SEQUIM — Autistic Sequim High School senior Patrick McCready brought many in the room to tears last week, reading his college entrance essay that recounted a life of challenges that come with his complex disorder.
Underneath it all, 18-year-old Patrick, who is keen on computer graphics and loves to write, embraces the future with a passion.
“I’m a student. I’m still walking. I’m still breathing, and no one is going to take that away from me,” he told about 75 people from Port Townsend to Port Ludlow to Port Angeles attending the Sequim Guild’s regional outreach luncheon for Seattle Children’s Hospital and North Olympic Peninsula guild members at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Sequim on Friday.
“Autism is hard, but the human spirit is harder, and it has to be to endure what I had to,” he told the audience.
At 23 months old, Patrick was diagnosed with autism after he showed trouble with eating and sleeping. He banged his head and bit his hands.
“I used to put him in the van with food and his baby carriage, and I’d drive to Lake Crescent and I’d cry,” said his mother, Kathryn, who with her husband, Bob, struggled alongside her son after they adopted him as an infant.
“What could I do?” she said.
Autism is a developmental disorder that appears in the first three years of life. It affects the brain’s normal development of social and communication skills.
It is a physical condition linked to abnormal biology and chemistry in the brain.
Today, Kathryn’s son plans to graduate from high school next year and move on to Peninsula College, eventually earning an associate degree there and transfer to a four-year university.
“When I get through high school, then I bet that I can get through college,” he said.
“So my personal statement is this: If we as a people can get through our toughest moments in our lives, no matter what they may be, then we can handle and adapt to any changing situation that may occur.
“It doesn’t matter who or what you are. We are all humans, and we all must adapt and conquer if we want to succeed.”
Road not easy
While he sees high school as the best years of his life so far, getting there wasn’t easy.
He attended Helen Haller and Greywolf elementary schools and left Sequim Middle School for Queen of Angels Catholic School in Port Angeles after he was severely bullied at the middle school.
“I was beaten up and left with a bad taste in my mouth from my time spent at the middle school,” he recalled. “I remember coming home not wanting to go to school because the torment was too much to bear.”
Kathryn said her son’s biological mother smoked and drank during her pregnancy, which might have contributed to Patrick’s condition, although it was never confirmed.
Patrick is an example of the children with autism helped by Seattle Children’s Hospital.
There, he has received occupational, behavioral and other special therapies to help him cope with autism.
Kathryn said she has attended 25 autism conferences and workshops all over the nation and today believes that autism is related to toxins in the environment.
“It’s a condition of the modern era,” she said. “It’s not going to go away.”
It was only eight years ago, she said, that a Port Angeles pediatrician recommended they take Patrick to Seattle Children’s Hospital.
Changed diet
She learned when Patrick was 3½ that gluten, dairy and soy products were “like meth” to her son, causing him to spin in circles and repeatedly open and close doors and drawers, along with other out-of-control behavior.
The gluten-, dairy-, and soy-free diet is for life, she said.
“I made my son take ownership of this,” she said, and now he carefully reads food labels to avoid accidentally consuming anything that will affect his autism.
Also on hand Friday to detail autism’s effects was Jason Russo, a registered nurse at Seattle Children’s Hospital’s Autism Center, who said the condition affects a person’s social interaction, ability to communicate and general behavior.
Typical traits associated with autism are narrow interests, repetitive use of language, fixation on certain mechanical objects, trouble making eye contact and physical gestures and a lack of understanding for others’ feelings, Russo said.
Autistic people are often blunt, seeing things in black-and-white terms and lack a connection with others.
“The prevalence of autism has increased,” Russo said, from four out of every 1,000 in the mid-1990s to one in 100 today. It is a condition affecting boys more than girls by a ratio of 4-to-1.
Still, he said, “We don’t know the specific cause of autism.”
But autism looks different in any child or adult who has it, he said.
While some contend that childhood vaccinations against certain diseases are the cause, Russo said there is no scientific support for that belief.
Autism is believed to be a genetic disorder.
Russo said the hospital’s Autism Center is held up as the “leading model” nationwide.
Jane Humphries, a Seattle Children’s Hospital board trustee, told the Peninsula guild members that Washington guilds together raised $10.8 million last year.
“It’s an incredible situation, given the economic situation we’re in right now,” she said.
The 271 guild members in Clallam and Jefferson counties, she said, raised $191,173 in project revenues in 2010, serving 945 patients that received $797,555 in uncompensated care from providers with Seattle Children’s Hospital.
The hospital is now building a 330,000-square-foot addition that will include additional critical-care space for children with cancer.
Kathryn and Bob McCready moved to the Sequim-area 21 years ago, and since then, she said, “We’ve come a long way.”
Kathryn accepts autistic children as individuals whose lives have just been “derailed.”
“Their brain is always going to be different,” she said, adding the autistic should be accepted as “a new population.”
She lauds the children’s hospital, the Sequim school system and the community at large for caring so much.
“We need to start speaking their language, even if it is literal or whatever,” she said.
And Patrick, who now has his driver’s license and is the chief audio engineer at Sequim High, sees a long road of adventures ahead.
He said high school is what made him the person he is today.
“My life has been a fight but I have gone my nine rounds and I’m on top,” he said. “Nothing can take me down.
“And this is what I will remember for the rest of my life.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
