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REAL LIVES
How a canine companion is making life calmer for an autistic boy
When you hold your baby in your arms, it’s as if you look deep into the future. No matter what, no matter how they turn out, you know this child is going to grow up, move out, get a job and be an adult. Now, with this autism diagnosis, all that certainty just vanished. I had no idea what Toby’s future held for him. Would he be able to live on his own? Have a career? I was so sad for him but there was another emotion, too – guilt. I couldn’t help but think of all the times we had battled with him to eat his meals, when I’d sent him on ‘time outs’ for unacceptable behaviour, how I’d told him he had to try harder. I had thought he was simply a challenging child and that I needed to be the one to win our battles, because if I hadn’t he would have been in charge and you can’t let children rule the world.
But there had been other worrying signs. When he was just four years old and I was driving with all four children in the car, he said thoughtfully, ‘Mummy…’ I made eye contact with him in the rear-view mirror. ‘Yes, Tobes?’
‘Mummy, if I wasn’t alive, you’d be so much happier. Perhaps if I jumped off a cliff…’ The other kids went quiet. ‘Toby,’ I said slowly, deliberately, trying to use words he would understand. ‘If you died, I’d be heartbroken for the rest of my life.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ was all he said. My little boy was four years old and talking about killing himself.
One day, during Toby’s first term in reception, I got a call from the school to come in and help him. He’d had another meltdown, one so big that the teacher had to clear all of the children out of the classroom because it wasn’t safe to leave a single one in the same room as my son. He had kicked and screamed and thrown things. When I got there, Toby was sitting in the corner, hunched with his face turned away from me. He was almost growling. It took some time to calm him down.
The meltdowns just kept on coming and there seemed to be no way of stopping them. Toby
hit and bit other children. He was always being told off. And then, one day just before Christmas, I was surprised to see a big bite mark on his arm when he rolled up his sleeve. It was swollen and red. My hackles rose immediately in his defence, thinking someone had hurt him. ‘What happened there?’
Toby glanced down at his arm, where a circle of teeth marks rose clearly from the surface of his skin. ‘I was really cross with myself,’ he said. ‘I felt I needed punishing.’
From then on, I was always on the lookout for injuries. And there they were, again and again. No matter what Neil or I said to Toby, he would still hurt himself when he felt he’d done something wrong. He might come home with a bump on his head where he’d walloped himself with something hard, or a scratch, a bite or a bruise.
There were complaints from other parents about our son. It was understandable, really; if I was worried about a child’s behaviour in my other children Ollie, Joe or Lauren’s class, I probably would have said something, too. But what was hard was that no one ever said it to my face. These were parents I was once friendly with. If they had talked to me, I would have been able to explain about autism and Asperger’s. Often the problems in the classroom were caused by Toby, but the teachers also said that he would get the blame for things even when he wasn’t in school. It had got to the point where he was the naughty boy – and nothing we could do would change that.
On 12 December 2011, when Toby was seven, the school called and asked me to come in to see the headteacher. It was oddly formal. ‘Mrs Turner, I’m afraid he’s gone too far this time,’ he said. Toby’s latest meltdown had culminated with him scratching a computer screen with a pencil. Then he uttered the words I’d been dreading ever since Toby had started school: ‘We’re going to have to exclude your son.’
* * * * * * One day, I was watching TV in a rare moment of quiet and a feature came on about hearing dogs for the deaf. The newscaster went on to say that assistance dogs can help a multitude of people – including children with autism. I got up from the sofa with more energy than I’d had in months, searched on the computer and found Dogs for the Disabled (now Dogs for Good). ‘An autism assistance dog gives the parent and child real independence and provides a safer environment for the child so they feel more secure…’ That was the problem with Toby. He didn’t feel safe. I couldn’t stop thinking about how settled he’d become sitting next to a lizard on a visit to Longleat Safari Park. Could an animal companion be the secret key?
‘The dog wears a special harness which connects it to both parent and child and acts on instructions from the parent, while the child is encouraged to walk alongside the dog. This offers greater independence to both child and parent, ensuring the child is safe and unable to bolt if they become stressed or anxious.’ As I read on, I felt an unfamiliar sensation spreading inside me. I realised it was hope. I put my name on the waiting list.
The thought of an assistance dog was like a helium balloon – it bounced along beside me day by day, lifting my spirits, enabling me to tackle Toby’s issues with a renewed vigour. Working with a fabulous woman called Lorna, a special-needs teacher, we slowly reintroduced Toby to school on a part-time basis. He would go in the morning and I would teach him work supplied by the school in the afternoons.
But even with Lorna’s expert help, it was an uphill battle. Toby had meltdowns several times a day. A report from that period describes him hitting walls, throwing things, kicking off his shoes, destroying property, refusing to work, disrupting classes, hitting out at people, running from classrooms and the school building, and even trying to climb out of the school by scaling the fence. All of us could see that his emotional outbursts were escalating and we had to give formal consent to the school that they could restrain Toby if his behaviour was unsafe.
Sometimes Toby spent mornings with me and afternoons at school. The gate normally opens dead on 3pm, but time and again it didn’t open. The other parents and I would be lined up waiting, thinking ‘It’s Toby…’ and it always was. I’d head to the reception class and several staff would be guarding the doors. Inside, Toby would be pacing and ranting. I was devastated that he was causing such disruption, but, equally, witnessing his distress was heartbreaking. I just wanted to nurture this feral animal and make him feel better. But nothing ever did.
His anxiety got worse and worse. More and more frequently he would shout in a pained voice, ‘I want to kill myself.’ He hit himself over and over with a wooden saucepan he had found somewhere. It wasn’t the school’s fault, but you could see that school was destroying him.
Toby’s bad behaviour spilled over into our weekends, too. We never made plans to do anything as it was so difficult taking him anywhere, so we were usually all cooped up inside. We had incidents of Toby hitting his sister, or him accidentally hurting his brother and then feeling so guilty that he threatened to kill himself, and he once tried to jump out of his bedroom window. He was out of control.
The stress and tension was starting to make
him very unwell. He was waking every night and sleepwalking. He said almost every day that he felt poorly, and would often be physically sick. Perhaps as a consequence, he refused food and the weight started to drop off him. He looked pale and sickly with dark circles under his lovely green eyes.
With every disaster that unfolded, I had more reason than ever to keep emailing the dog charity. Month after month I sent a message reminding them that we were still interested, only to receive a reply saying that their list was still closed. I was so tired. And then one day the phone rang: ‘It’s Kelly from Dogs for the Disabled. Would it be OK if I came for a home visit to discuss your application for a dog?’ I couldn’t say ‘yes’ fast enough.
* * * * * * ‘So this dog,’ said Kelly, ‘is about one and a half years old, he went to puppy socialisers for the first year of his life and he’s recently started kennel training. He’s very assertive and confident, which makes him perfect for autism training, but he’s very big. Are you happy for me to bring him?’ ‘How big can a dog be?’ I thought. Sox was enormous, a labrador retriever cross, but there must have been some Irish wolf hound in there. You could tell he was young as he came bouncing into the lounge, his nose sniffing away as he took in all the new scents of this unfamiliar home.
I had rarely, if ever, seen Toby so excited. He started talking very quickly about how lovely the dog was, running his hands all over his inky fur, talking 19 to the dozen. The dog stood there very calmly, not at all perturbed by the exhilaration he had created in the entire family.
‘Why don’t you give him a treat?’ said Kelly. She gave all the children some treats and told them they could ask the dog to sit, stay and lie down. ‘Sit. Good boy!’ Toby gave him a cuddle and a treat. ‘Lie down,’ he said next. The dog stretched out his long front legs and plonked his whole body weight on the floor. ‘Good boy’; another treat was dished out. It was so lovely to see him interact with another being in this way.
Sox was looking at Toby. It was as if there was this bubble around the pair of them, a different feeling now that they were together. A relaxed calmness came over them both. But then I realised it wasn’t a bubble; it wasn’t a wall that came up and shielded them, cutting Toby off from the world like the audiobooks and headphones he needed to calm him whenever we went out. Toby and Sox were both in this room with me, sharing this special moment. Toby was smiling and chattering. He was calm and relaxed. It is going to work, I thought. I felt like crying, but it was too happy a moment for tears. It really is going to work…
On his first day with us, Sox had a little shadow. Toby followed him all the time. Normally Toby spent hours in his bedroom on his own, but now he spent more time downstairs, which meant he felt part of the family. The moment Sox arrived, Toby no longer needed his hood, his headphones or his audiobooks when we went out. The focus was now on the dog and what we were doing; we weren’t focusing on Toby and how he was going to deal with things. His whole mood lifted. The biggest change, though, was in his talking – he never, ever shut up.
Previously when I’d dropped Ollie off at school Toby would come with us and he wouldn’t talk to anybody. In fact, he’d be so wrapped up in his own world that I would steer him to Ollie’s classroom door and then back to the car. Even though it was only a 15-minute walk, we always drove because Toby couldn’t cope with the chaos of ‘outside’. Now, with Sox as our escort, we decided that we would walk.
I remember clearly the first morning we walked to school. Toby got Sox’s harness sorted and stood solidly by his side. He chatted to Sox, his brother and me all the way there. Not only that, as we turned for home, we heard a voice behind us. It was Katie, another mother at the school. Even through Toby’s terrible times, Katie had always said hello to us in spite of the fact that Toby always blanked her. ‘How are we doing, Toby Turner?’ she asked.
He looked up at her and said, ‘I’m doing very well, thank you, now that I have my dog. Do you know my dog? This is Sox. He is 70cm tall and over one metre long. He weighs 37.9 kilos…’ This was the boy who’d never had conversations with people, ever. He had never acknowledged Katie’s existence. Now she was pupil, audience and rapt listener.
Toby isn’t cured. He still has tricky days. But whenever he’s having a difficult time or a meltdown at school, he knows exactly what he needs to make him feel better. On those days I see him lying next to Sox with his thumb in his mouth, just stroking his ear, and I see that it’s the best therapy for him. It’s no longer the end of the world when a day goes wrong. Tomorrow is a new day.
This is an edited extract from Toby and Sox by Vikky and Neil Turner, which will be published by Ebury Press on 25 August, price £6.99. To pre- order a copy for £5.59 until 28 August, visit you-bookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640; p&p is free on orders over £15
On his first day with us, Sox had a little shadow. Toby followed him all the time