Sympathetic Response

I have been having a very strange problem lately. I have been having trouble with filtering and processing sound. I've always had trouble with TVs and being tired- if I'm tired, and you want to talk to me, turn the TV off, or I can't even hear you. But now its like I can't do it at all. If I'm in a room and there are other conversations going, I can't even hear the person speaking to me, and often find I have looked away- even when I know I am being spoken to. It happened today. Miss Carrie, one of our speech therapists, was giving me the latest results from an evaluation she had just completed. I know she was talking to me. I can even tell you some of the words that emerged from her mouth. But all I could hear were the boys, and suddenly I realized I missed the conversation, perhaps she had asked me a question? She was now asking me if I was nervous. About what? Whether Joey was apraxic? About the possibility that even this diagnosis wouldn't get the medical insurance to kick in something? I don;t think it was connected to what I hadn't heard, though. I think she had just noticed I wasn't there anymore. I feel terrible about it, too, because I'm sure it seems rude for me not to focus on her when she's telling me important stuff, and has lengthened her day by an hour to test him for us, and all. I need to do something really nice to thank this person, she really is bending over backwards to help us, and not many people are doing that these days.

But in the meantime, I am definitely seeing an increase in this kind of occurance. One part of me wonders if this is what happens to Joey when he can't focus on a task- because I can't even really tell you where my mind was, I just snapped back and realized it wasn't focusing on what it should have been focusing on. Another part worries if there is something changing, or if this is just a sympathetic sort of response- I am either noticing these things more because I know more about the problems Joey may be facing and autism generally, or they are occuring more as a psychosomatic response to Joey being autistic, and the stress of fighting with the very people who are supposed to be helping us, the "school folk." Or am I just getting old, and this is part of that? Or am I suffering some form of exhaustion, and need to see somebody? Because it really needs to stop. And if this is what its like to be Joey, then I definitely need to help. I worry about it happening when I'm driving. Will I tune out of teh road in favor of the boys, or the radio, or the trees passing by? That would be Not Good.