This has been quite a week in the world of autism and the press. Once again Dr. Andrew Wakefield has been hauled up on the stand to defend his work, character, and a paper he wrote. This is not about that, you can read buckets of kind and unkind remarks all over the web if you are into that. I personally, am not. Like a few other Mom's out there, I had the chance to talk to him personally and discuss my own son's test results oh so many years ago. I know his feelings on John....and I sure know mine.

No, this is about understanding that word cure vs. the word recovery, and breaking it down in a form I hope people can understand.

When my older son was in the 8th grade he went to a small private school and had a couple of friends. One, also went to church with us, and we knew him rather well. One day my son came home in tears, David had been out of school ill for a week, and the news about his illness was not good. David had a form of cancer. His summer would not be spent at fishing holes and ballgames, but at St. Jude Cancer Center.

David missed his freshman year of high school. His Mom home schooled him to try to keep him up with his class. Nearly a year after learning he had cancer, his family learned he bad beat it, he was cancer free.

Was David cured? No, he was in remission. Could you look at him and tell he had lost a year of his life to cancer? No, not by simply looking at him.

David changed. Oh his cancer never came back, and some did consider him cured, but the truth is, once you have a life changing event, you can recover, but you are never cured. You are never the same person again.

David missed one complete year of social skills of going from middle school to high school freshman. He lost playing baseball that last middle school summer and he missed basketball as a freshman. He missed moving into the youth group at Church. He missed getting his drivers license with his peers. He missed camp fire cook outs and other social skill building times that are critical during the transition from middle school to high school.

You see, anyone who is walking down a normal path of development and gets derailed for whatever reason, will loose a percentage of time of development that the others in the same peer group don't. It changes who you are. For David, he had to spend a year on the bench before he was up to playing basketball again. He was in his senior year before he was back to playing basketball with his school's team. Had he not had cancer, he would have played all four years. Did it effect him? Yes it did. It kept him from getting a shot at a college ball scholarship. He did not have four stripes on his letter mans sweater. Little differences, but still real.

The point with a recovered child in the autism world is...no you can't cure it...but you can recover that person back to where they had been or close. David recovered from cancer, but he was forever changed not from the cancer as much as from how it impacted his social and emotional development during a year off to be sick.

When you have a normal child that looses normalcy, and becomes autistic, for every year they are on the spectrum, they are loosing a year of normal development. Recover that child and you very well may not be able to spot him in the 3rd grade classroom as different, but little things are still there. Not autism, but a loss of normal development time. It takes a while for these kids to blend back...and yes there may always be little flickers...but it is still a recovery and a wonderful thing. There are hundreds of them running around today and it's heartwarming to meet one and sit and talk. They have great insight to life, but as they age, they usually blend in more and forget the past.

A child born autistic that recovers will too, be different. We just don't know how becuase you don't have that normal child background to compare them too. Is it a cure, no, it's overcoming a developmental issues that kept them from developing normally the first however many years of life they were spectrum. I met a child once that started therapy at one year as the Mom caught his autism really fast and hit it hard with 40 hours a week therapy and a touch of biomed that she felt fit things he had been exposed to while she was expecting. He was in the 5th grade and blew me away watching him in class. It was not until he and I sat down and talked that I saw little flickers of a difference..did it matter? No, he had a very successful life ahead of him.

The point to all this is, whatever word you want to call it, cure or recovery, as in the case of David and his cancer, missing time makes that individual a different person and always will. It's not a bad thing, it's just a reality.

John is always changing. He has been disabled 15 years now...he lost all his social peer time from preschool to high school senior. Do I stop believing in a recovery? No, I just know if it happens, he will never be that person he was at two. And maybe that is not so bad, the person he is is not a slacker, but a fighter. I have a sneaky suspicious the old John was going to be a slacker and get by on his charm and looks.

As for David if you are still with me and wondering...he died three years ago. Not from cancer, but from a stunt bike trick that went wrong. Go figure.