Cole's diagnosis

Tonight we met with Dr. Peredo, Cole's developmental doc at Madigan to discuss the results of his testing. She said that Cole was just baseline emotion meaning that he showed no emotion and was even a little depressed during testing, thus resulting none of the Asperger's type behaviors that he would normally display. Because of this, Cole has been diagnosed with PDD, pervasive developmental disorder as well as Asperger's syndrome. They are both Autism spectrom disorders. PDD is the "catch all" grouping for children showing some of the behaviors, but not all Autistic behaviors- mostly used for those who have social disfunctions (like Cole). These people usually range from Low functioning to High functioning and have varying degrees of inability.
The good thing is that we have a whole team of doctors working with us to help Cole function in life, the bad thing is that it's many, many more visits with all these doctors and much more time and heartache in the process.
Cole has had an IQ test done at the school and he is testing just a few point below "Gifted". We have always know that Cole is exceptionally smart, but seem to have to "prove it" when they didn't believe us. He loves words and numbers too. He is reading on a 13 year old level and is doing math at a 5th grade level with out using any scratch paper. We are so excited for his studious abilites and hope they continue to grow.