This boy is the sweetest, most caring, loving, smart, compassionate, imaginative, handsome boy that I know. He is my first born son, my big 10lb sack of potatoes baby and I love him with all my heart. He is Gabriel Rudolph Justinich.
Gabriel was my 10lb, 10 day late baby boy. He was the cutest, sweetest baby the perfect 1st baby. He is a great 9 1/2 year old right now. He is so caring to his little brother who is Evan. Evan is 5 1/2 and has special needs. He has cerebral palsy, seizures and is verbally impaired. Because he has a brother with special needs I think this gives Gabriel an earlier learning of being compassionate, understanding and accepting of people's differences. Gabriel from what I can see is really friends with anyone. He makes friends very easily and seems to be friends with both girls and boys.
I am a little worried about Gabriel as he has developed what I think is a mild-moderate case of anxiety. It manifests itself in different ways. He has had a lot of constipation issues over the last 9 months which resulted with him being hospitalized for some medication to help him have a BM. He had to have an NG(nasogastric) tube placed down his nose into his stomach and the medication administered from a bag through the tube to his stomach, and then after about 9 hours of that he started going to the bathroom. The goal was to get him fully cleaned out and keep up a regimen of Miralax to keep him regular. This has worked well, with just one flare up of the constipation where I was using a product called magnesium citrate to clean him out at home. The experience in the hospital is not one I would like to repeat. Since school has been out Gabriel has been having pretty regular BM's and has not woken up with stomach aches or gone to bed with stomach aches and I can't really figure out if there was something going on at school or if he wanted to stay home from school so that he could spend time with me. I had talked to his teacher about Gabriel having any problems with other students and I had also talked with Gabriel and neither had anything to say about issues at school being the reason Gabriel did not want to go. I even had to go as far as telling the office not to let Gabriel call home unless he was running a fever or really sick. I felt bad but Gabriel was missing too much school.
I have been noticing an increase in Gabriel's anxiety over the last few months. Well, maybe I should backtrack to June 2006 when we were in a car accident and Gabriel was about 5 years old. He was really traumatized and would sit in the back of the car and say"please stop, please stop" when I would be coming to a stop light. He freaked out everytime we had to go on the freeway and was always asking how long we were going to be on the freeway. This went away after about 6 months and I did not really see too much of this after that. Now that I think back he probably started having constipation issues that were him having a stomach ache and then feeling better once he had a BM, but these were probably 1 or 2 times a year and then increased a little bit over a 3 year period, so maybe he had anxiety and it has been manifested as constipation.
Now in the last year it has increased and so much more in the past 3 months. From being really worried about going to the Dr. and asking me questions about what they are going to do, to really freaking out about getting blood work done and don't even let me tell you about how he was when he was admitted to the hospital. It was so heart breaking.
Now, he is showing more and more anxiety over his brother and him having seizures when he is staring off or doing something weird. He will look at me and say Mom are you sure Evan is OK. We recently got a pool and Evan is swimming with his head under the water and Gabriel will pull him up because he is afraid he is going to drown and Evan will be smiling and happy. I watched Evan in the pool and I could see that he could guage when he needed to get up from the water. Gabriel anxiety has been showing up more and more in regards to Evan.
So what I am going to do about this. Well, I think he needs to talk to a counselor and probably someone who deals with children and anxiety. I think it will be good for him to talk to someone and maybe help resolve some of his fears.
I also think it would be good for him to have other kids to talk to. He does have 2 friends who also have younger brothers with special needs but neither of those boys have seizures or the other issues that Evan has such as aspiration risk. So I want to look into sibling groups.
I really want to help Gabriel get over his issues because he is such an awesome kid and has such a bright future ahead of him and I don't want anxiety to inhibit him in anyway.
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