Monday, September 28, 2015

Mommy goes to generation rescue

It has been a year of conferences. I have just finished the weekend at the autism education summit in Dallas Texas which is presented by generation rescue.  This was my first time at generation rescue and it's a completely different feel from both autism one and taca. There were not as many familiar faces, but I met a lot of really cool new ones. I also met and got a picture with Jenny McCarthy which is really exciting because I got to tell her about how when Dominic was first diagnosed her book mother warriors was the one that got me through the worst of it.   That it was the book that gave me steel in my spine.  She was really very very sweet and so happy to hear my story when I said that I would love to get a selfie with her this is what happened - she invited us behind the table which made her security guard a little twitchy then Donnie Wahlberg and took my camera and this picture (my friend Tiffany is the other person in there)


Then when I attended the evening social activity which was an hors d'oeuvres and band and cocktails kind of thing I met up with Jacqueline Laurita (she is the actress in real housewives of New Jersey.).  She and her husband have a child with autism and they support generation rescue. So the thinking moms revolution team TMR girls who were here took this picture below with Jacqueline


We then proceeded to dance and be silly the remainder of the evening. 2 days later my knees are still speaking to me.

Overall the feel is more intimate than a1 where you feel lost and more comprehensive than TACA was.  Kind of like the "just right" amount of information and vendors.   I heard numbers wise that they had about 3/4 of the attendance that A1 had this year.  It felt more intimate tho, and that might have been because there were only 3 tracks going on at any one time and everything was in one spot where as at A1 there's 2 sides of the hotel involved.   While there were not presentations on more controversial cutting edge stuff like A1 has, those treatments were mentioned in passing in the Keynote and whispered about in the hallways.  I had a fascinating discussion with a MAPS doctor about how CD and other oxidative protocols actually switch on a gene (and i can't remember which one, I wish I had written it down - something to do with redox signalling), BUT if done for too long, it switches the gene back off.  Which actually makes our experience with CD make a lot of sense.

I spent the majority of my time working the IonCleanse by AMD Booth and getting to share our story with other parents.  We ran 6 machines simultaneously and were busy the ENTIRE weekend - even first thing Sunday morning after everyone went out Saturday night.  What was coolest about Sunday was that we had a ton of kiddos come thru the ioncleanse booth- which I hadn't seen before.  It was amazing and heartbreaking all at the same time to see the nuances that get called Autism.  Such beauty and tragedy simultaneously.  i also met and got the business card of a functional medicine pediatrician in the Dallas area who is working hard to stop the damage... they vaccinate one at a time and super slow and she's totally up on treaments.  If you are in the Dallas area and looking for a pediatrician that gets it, drop me an email and I'll share her information.