I can't prove any of these claims...

There are a bunch of things that happen in the life of an autistic person that don't make any sense.

Now there's an understatement.

These are events, habits, tendencies that parents report to each other, but learned very quickly NOT to mention them to doctors or therapists. Unless you enjoy people looking at you like you've grown a second head.

Billy and I have both been sick for over a week. Nasty cold, maybe a flu (though I have this stupid thing that says people who say they have the flu just have a cold and are being overly dramatic). Whatever it is, it's hideous. Jumping with random abandon from noses to threats to chests to heads. Sounds attractive, doesn't it?

In the throes of the odd illness/recovery/illness again experience, though, the 'spooky sickness improvement thing' has happened again. Maybe it's because he's been home, free of social pressures. Maybe it's because he's had time to revel in the stuff he loves. But whatever the reason, through a rivulet of green boogies, has come huge strides forward in language and general resilience.

He's having longer and longer conversations. They make more sense. He's spinning concepts around in his head. He's understanding more subtext and inference.

What is that about?

I'm not the only parents who notices this. Sometimes it comes after a fever. Sometimes after an illness without fever. But it happens often. It's confusing because many of us have learned to be frightened of illness, after nasty regressions in toddlerhood.

Related to this phenomenon is the fact that many of us have noticed that our kids run temperatures that are significantly higher or significantly lower than the normal range. Billy's on the low side, and can be fighting a bug that is so tough he's hospitalised without ever running a fever. Again, what's going on with that?

On a similar vein, parents say their ASD kid is the healthiest of all their siblings and peers. They never get sick, ever. When all the other kids are falling, their autistic one is a trouper. I've read somewhere that this is a sign of a hyper-functioning immune system, as potentially concerning as an under-functioning one. Clearly, Billy is not one of those kids...

Seriously, what do these things mean? I know it's all anecdotal, but... the fact that people could be bothered reporting them to each other must mean something. There's absolutely no reason for us to randomly make this stuff up.

I've said before I hope that we are on the thin end of the autism learning wedge right now. I'm in the camp that says some autism (at the very least) is an auto-immune condition. There just seems to be compelling evidence in our lives that neurological inflammation, gut inflammation, immune irregularity and the stuff we call autism are tied very tightly together.

But... who am I to try to make sense of all of this?

I'm not a medical professional, not a therapist, just an involved observer. Although... the amount I think about this stuff might just qualify me to grow that second head after all.