The father of a child who was diagnosed as severely autistic at the age of two describes the intensive therapies that were pursued before young Carly had a breakthrough at the age of 10, when she began using her computer to communicate and reached out to thousands of people on a blog, Facebook and Twitter. 75,000 first printing.

8220;Witty, sarcastic, and heartfelt, Carly’s words shine with personality and intellect, her strength and determination adding sparkle and hope.”

Auteur

Arthur Fleischmann lives with his wife, Tammy Starr, and their three children, Matthew, Taryn, and Carly, in Toronto, Canada, where he is partner and president of john st. advertising. Carly Fleischmann lives in Toronto, Canada, and attends a mainstream high school where she is enrolled in gifted classes. She corresponds with her thousands of friends and followers via Twitter and Facebook. Visit her at CarlysVoice.com.

Texte du rabat

The father of a child who was diagnosed as autistic at the age of two describes the intensive therapies that were pursued before Carly had a breakthrough at the age of ten, when she began using her computer to communicate.

Résumé
In this international bestseller, father and advocate for Autism awareness Arthur Fleischmann blends his daughter Carly’s own words with his story of getting to know his remarkable daughter—after years of believing that she was unable to understand or communicate with him.

At the age of two, Carly Fleischmann was diagnosed with severe autism and an oral motor condition that prevented her from speaking. Doctors predicted that she would never intellectually develop beyond the abilities of a small child. Carly remained largely unreachable through the years. Then, at the age of ten, she had a breakthrough.

While working with her devoted therapists, Carly reached over to their laptop and typed “HELP TEETH HURT,” much to everyone’s astonishment. Although Carly still struggles with all the symptoms of autism, she now has regular, witty, and profound conversations on the computer with her family and her many thousands of supporters online.

One of the first books to explore firsthand the challenges of living with autism, Carly’s Voice* brings readers inside a once-secret world in the company of an inspiring young woman who has found her voice and her mission

Échantillon de lecture
Carly’s Voice

1

In the Eye of the Storm

A news reporter once asked me to describe our a-ha moment with Carly. He wanted to understand that blinding flash of insight we had had about our daughter. I thought for a moment before replying, “There never has been a moment like that. Carly has always just been Carly.”

From the moment our daughters were born on a gray morning in January 1995, both my wife and I knew which twin—Twin A or Twin B—was going to grow up to live the life of Carly, and which would become Taryn. Call it intuition or cosmic intervention, but one baby just was a Carly.

After the unsettled time around the birth of our son four and a half years earlier, we were elated to close the book on trauma and start a new life with our enlarged family. Matthew had been born during the grieving period for Tammy’s mother, who had died suddenly just months before his birth.

Having the twins had not come easily. Creating life was not an issue for Tammy; sustaining it had been. After three miscarriages in the years after Matthew was born, we were about to break the curse. We looked forward to a fresh start. Quid pro quo; we were owed that much.

“How many bedrooms do you have?” Tammy’s obstetrician-gynecologist had asked her cryptically five months earlier, during the summer of 1994.

“Three,” Tammy replied.

“You might want to consider four,” Dr. Amonkwa said.

It seemed that the Clomid, progesterone, and aspirin that he had prescribed had broken the cycle of lost babies and parental despair. Rather than one child, Tammy was pregnant with twins. Other doctors had told us that perhaps more children were not meant to be. But we, and in particular Tammy, seldom took “perhaps not” at face value.

After careful monitoring for the rest of the nine months, Tammy gave birth to our daughters. We considered naming them after the drugs that made their successful birth possible, but Clomid and Progesterone Fleischmann would have been cruel.

Our older twin and middle child arrived at 7:38 a.m., and her little sister, Taryn, fourteen minutes later. Carly had been the feisty one in utero, clamoring to get here. But once she arrived, she seemed to take a look around and say, “Oh, wrong place.” This world would never be in step with our little girl. Within weeks of her birth, Carly took on a startled and cranky look, one that matched her demeanor.

Taryn was peaceful and elegant with a cap of dark hair and a quizzical expression. But Carly arrived blotchy and patchy and looking surprised. From the prenatal medical records, there was little to suggest that the fraternal twins would have such different fates. Tammy’s medical chart indicated that the delivery of the girls was “spontaneous, vaginal, and uncomplicated,” much like the act of their creation had been. After a week in the hospital, we bundled our tiny new-potato-like parcels into furry winter baby buntings and brought them home to our modest Toronto house.

The next six months were a bleary, sleep-deprived period of normalcy. As normal as a household can be with three children under five, two of whom eat every three hours, twenty-four hours a day. Tammy and I would plod up the steep, narrow staircase to our bedroom around 9:00 p.m., lugging two babies and six mini-bottles of formula. Frighteningly, all six portions would be consumed before 5:00 a.m. the next morning, each feeding followed by the requisite diaper change.

Tired as I felt, I couldn’t fail to smile at the two little swaddled lumps. Carly and Taryn slept in a large woven basket that we placed atop a low dresser that Tammy had been lugging through life since college. It was stained a puzzling shade of green and had more sentimental than aesthetic value. Now tucked into an alcove in our bedroom, it served as a pedestal on which our daughters started their lives.

The two girls had spent nine months pressed together in Tammy’s womb and felt completely natural being tucked in tightly, snuggled closely. We made a conscious effort from the start to give them unique identities, refraining from dressing them the same or referring to them as “the twins,” but rather as Carly and Taryn. Yet, they were two halves of the same whole and would lie together, reaching out and touching each other, practically hugging. How were we to know that one day they would grow to be like the front and back cover of a book—matching opposites—with so much separating them?

Since dinner parties were out of the question (not that they happened often before the girls’ arrival), we covered our dining room table with a large pad and plastic tablecloth for changing the babies when downstairs. Tammy’s friend Sue would come over on Sunday afternoons and help us with laundry. While Tammy simultaneously fed the two babies, Sue and I would cook as much food as we could squeeze into our freezer for the week ahead. The first months were a blur of laundry, poo, spit-up, quiche, and lasagna. But Tammy was happy to have a family after the false starts and dying hopes. I have scores of photographs of the early days, each of us taking turns holding both babies. We both seem to have a tired but amazed expression, as if to say, “How’d this happen?”

Life took on a chaotic …