Coping with Autism

Well, I've seen the CT scan. The doctor has received the radiologist's report by now but he has not seen the scans (he picks them up tomorrow when he comes to Fredericksburg). Peter has absolutely no sagittal suture. His skull looks like a shiny, smooth, round cue ball. He has the coronal suture and the lambdoid (the one on the lower back of the skull) but that's it. I can find little evidence of the temporal sutures as well. On one side, you can kind of see where it was but the other side looks as if the suture was never there. Peter also, very, very clearly, has trigonenephaly. You can't quite tell looking at him but his forehead is small and triangular shaped and his skull is strangely out of proportion with his face. Looking at him with his skin covering the skull, you can't tell this but the scans tell a completely different story. The question for us now is whether the neurosurgeon will want an ICP test done and, if so, when. We expect that we will be meeting ...

Peter saw the neurosurgeon at the Medical College of Virginia on Tuesday (December 4). He confirmed that Peter has synostosis (or stenosis, depending on what source you consult). Synostosis is a medical term that means 'fused.' Some of the bone plates in Peter's skull have fused early. This can cause problems with his brain growing. The sutures or gaps between the plates are connected with fibrous tissue that is supposed to fill in over time but in children it's supposed to remain flexible so that the skull can grow as the brain grows. Peter has had synostosis of the metopic suture (the one that runs down the middle of the forehead) for quite some time. The doctor said this suture normally closes around 1 year of age or so and the fact the Peter has trigonencephaly (pyramid shaped forehead and probably forebrain) indicates that this sealed much earlier (this may have been why I had a devil of a time delivering him if his skull was partly fused). The bigger concern at th...