The Beginning.......

Orange, Blue and Yellow....three precious lives clinging to the precipice of life.  Orange was the strongest and was breathing on his own in a few days. Yellow was tiny and developed a drug resistant lung infection within 12 hours of being born. Blue was born too weak to survive.

All 3 were born with Hyaline Membrane Disease, now called infant respiratory distress syndrome. In layman's terms, this is the inability to absorb oxygen from the air we breathe. It is caused by the lack of the production of Surfactant and the immaturity of the lungs. Soon after birth the babies were injected with surfactant and put on ventilators and various other monitoring apparatus. Days and nights were spent at the hospital in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, being helped by the nurses to care for them. It was frightening to see tiny babies with drips in the veins of their heads, even stranger to see babies on their backs with breathing pipes down their throats. Yellow hated lying open on his back. He would kick and scream until the nurses rolled up blankets and piled them around him so he felt as though he was in a cocoon.

We soon noticed that Blue and Yellow had a special bond between them. Every time one cried, the other would start even though they cried noiselessly - as a result of the tubes down their throats.

Every day new tests were done - brain scans, eye tests and more to determine the extent of the damage done by the premature birth. As each test result came back with no defect, my sighs of relief grew louder and longer.

On Day 21 Orange came home, on day 30 Yellow came home and finally, on day 35, Blue was allowed to come home.

Having 3 premature babies at home at once is interesting, and challenging but not impossible. Time flew by. Days blended into nights and back into days as I fed, burped, bathed and changed 3 babies one after the other.  As time passed by, I noticed that Yellow did not respond to external stimuli as the other 2 did. He developed bad colic and would cry for hours as well as projectile vomiting his milk soon after drinking it. What to do? After multiple visits to the specialists, we put him on goat's milk. The colic improved and the projectile vomiting stopped.

While the other 2 babies would lie and gurgle and play and interact with their world around them, Yellow would lie still with a vacant look in his eyes. More tests followed including hearing tests - again the results returned negative. No one could find anything wrong, yet he continued to lie there without interacting with the world.

This is the beginning of a very interesting journey of discovery, of a child with very high functioning Autism, how he sees the world and how the world sees him.