*gasp*
Thats right. When I started this blog and wrote my first two entries I was not "officially" aspergic. Some of you might think it was fairly preemptive of me to take the name Aspie Medic and also this blog title; but as I'm sure those readers who are themselves aspergic would understand, once I realised and accepted that I was on the spectrum, so many things in my life, both past and present, finally made sense and fitted the traits of this remarkably complex syndrome that diagnosis simply became a formality.
So anyway, yesterday, I had a 3 hour meeting with none other than Professor Simon Baron-Cohen who gave me a formal assessment and told me that I was "without a doubt" on the spectrum. After a very slight hesitation as to whether it qualified as Asperger's or High Funtioning Autism, he ultimately settled on HFA, on the basis that my pediatrician's notes described a language delay when I was a toddler. In that sense this blog was preemptive as it should technically be called "The HFA- or The Autistic medic" but I'm simply too relieved at the minute to be caught up in semantics!
I really should try and describe how it feels to be diagnosed and to have my long standing suspicions confirmed. In a word, LIBERATING. It might sound cliched but its like this huge weight as been lifted from my shoulders. No longer do I need to ask myself why I can't handle certain social situations and try and search for excuses in the way my parents brought me up, or in my own character flaws for which I am solely responsible. I'm not claiming a diagnosis of Asperger's is an excuse to be anti-social, but there were some times when I genuinely felt alien and distant and autism was a soul-relieving explanation.
Anywho, I'm gonna go to bed cos its been a long day but let me leave you guys with this song which popped into my head as I sat in my room after coming home from Baron-Cohen's clinic and I just had to listen to it on my iTunes. I guess this must better explain how I feel deep down even if I can not express it outwardly with words, neither verbally nor in this post. Enjoy...
