My daughter who is now 2 and a half started showing signs of being a bit different and an early age. At 8 months I decided to start looking into things myself. Doing research and acting doctors to do start doing blood work. At first nothing was found besides lead poisoning but that was explaining everything Athena was doing. Athena wasn’t crawling, able to sit without help, no sounds, she hated being held, sounds would cause meltdowns, the are flapping and kick was non stop, and there was just so much she wasn’t doing that her two month younger cousin was doing that I finally said something isn’t right. So we took the trip to Rileys Children’s Hospital. Athena was now 1 and half and the first thing everyone thought was Autism which is what I was beginning to think but they wanted to do more testing to see if it was genetic. They were beginning to think it was genetic along with Autism when they heard about my family history. All the girls in my family including myself was on the “SLOW” side. I was diagnosed with ADHD,Bipolar, and some type of learning disability. When you hear about girls with Fragile X it sounded like me. I had all charities and so did my aunts and my mother.
On September 2 2010, I got the five minute phone call, it is genetic, it is bad, its Fragile X, and you need to see a genetic counselor. My world feel apart that day and it took a bit longer to put it back together. So the genetic counselor let us know that she was fully mutated and that it was smeared. She couldn’t tell me what Athena would be able to do because she was a girl but if she was a boy we wouldn’t get to much. They all seemed surprised that we got her to finally walk at 22 months. They asked if I wanted to know if I was the carrier and I said yes. In December 2010 we found out that yes I was the carrier. We work hard every day in therapies and what not to show the doctors that Athena can and will prove she can do what ever she wants to do.