Operation Jack

Fighting autism, one mile at a time.

Rock Bottom … Again

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Every time our situation with our son Jack’s autism gets worse, I think we’ve hit rock bottom. It can’t possibly get any worse. And then sometime later it does. I think we’ve hit rock bottom. Again. It can’t possibly get any worse.

My wife Tiffany has been chasing Jack around non-stop since May. Real quick, in case you’ve never been here before, Jack is the Jack in Operation Jack, the only reason I bother with everything I’ve tried to do over the years. I love him to death. I sometimes just sit there and look at him and try to wonder what’s going on in his mind. He’s less than two weeks from turning 9 and really isn’t communicating and he’s still in diapers. He’s like a 1-year-old in a 9-year-old’s body. But he sure does break us down.

Long weekends, like this Labor Day Weekend we just had, are the kind of things young families love. I think. I mean, I wouldn’t know, but it sure seems that way when I see what my friends are up to on Facebook. We feel like we’re trapped in our own personal hell, though. We can’t go anywhere or do anything. He’s always a threat to have a meltdown and it’s gotten to the point that we don’t even bother trying to do anything. Tiff had to leave the grocery store on Monday. He’s good for 20 minutes at the local park. There’s a pretty good chance there’s going to be some kind of explosion on any car ride that lasts longer than 15 minutes.

I’m pretty high strung because of all of this. And I get to go to work every day. Tiff, on the other hand, has a miserable existence. She’s been Jack’s shadow for the past 3 1/2 months since school let out. We’re keeping him home until September 17 as he goes through some therapy. Our other kids, Ben and Ava, don’t know what a typical childhood is so I think they’ve accepted this as normal. [Read more…]

Three Things Thursday: Autism's Trickle-Down Effect

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Three Things Thursday. I won’t waste your time with some intro paragraph. That would be two minutes of my life wasted writing it and 15 seconds of your life wasted reading it. So, here we go, time to count to three.

1. My wife took my dog to get groomed yesterday and he got some kind of ridiculous shaving/hair cut. I think. Either that or she bathed him in paint thinner. Here he was last night:

Poor little guy. Not only was he born a Pomeranian, but he has this hair cut to deal with now. FWIW, he’s not a puppy. He’s 13 1/2.

2. I’m going to California tomorrow. For the weekend. 20-year high school reunion — I think it’s gonna be fun. There’s a group on Facebook and the activity has picked up lately. Sure does seem like it’s gonna be a good time. And if not, at least I’m going to In-N-Out tomorrow for lunch!

3. I’ll probably go into a little more detail next week, but we’ve been fighting really hard for Jack (if you don’t know who Jack is, click here and see why I even have this site) over the past few weeks. It’s heavy-duty, highly-emotional work to get your child with autism in the right school with the right program and the right plan. We’d fight to the death for him. We’re cautiously optimistic with how things are going right now, but we’re pretty happy with the direction things have gone over the past 10 days. Still, we’re exhausted. It’s consumed me and Tiff (Tiff 1,000x more than me, though). And while on the surface, this quick little paragraph seems like good news, autism is an ugly thing that ruins kids as well as those closest to them.

Me and Tiff are going out on a date tonight — I think bowling — and it’s going to be the first time we’ve smiled together in a while. Autism sucks. It has a trickle-down effect. And the worst thing is that it’s preventable.

I like this link. I’m kind of supposed to stay neutral on autism theories, but if I can one day save one kid through everything I ever do trying to help, then it’s worth it. So click it.

OK, that’s all … y’all have a great weekend!

Operation Jack Marathon: Special Offer!

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I said yesterday that there was going to be a one-day offer with Operation Jack Marathon registrations today, which is the case. But I have to give a quick little bit of history about the race first. Registration is only $45 for the half marathon and $55 for the marathon right now, plus I have somebody who wants to kick in donations on behalf of everybody registering today only. Details about that are at the bottom. If you’re interested, you should read this post first.

Back in 2010, when I ran 61 marathons to raise money and awareness for Train Autism in honor of my severely autistic son Jack, I had a serious problem late in the year. My last race, scheduled for December 26, fell through. There were some issues with the person who was going to put the race on for me and in early October of that year, I realized I had to put on a marathon myself.

Never mind the fact that I was working full time, taking care of my family and still traveling to run a marathon (or even two marathons) every weekend. I now had to put on a marathon, otherwise this whole “at least one marathon a week” thing would go by the wayside. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to run 60 in 51 weeks and none of my donors would have wanted their money back, but I just had to put a race on. When you spend a year running yourself into the ground the way I did, nothing fazes you, and the only thing you’re interested in doing is taking the hard way out. Operation Jack Marathon, bring it on.

I made a mental list of things that needed to be done. Medals. Shirts. Food. Oh, volunteers. Those would help. And it would be good to have some runners. And probably a registration website. Oh, and I know — bibs! Safety pins! Oh but wait, I have a race coming up on Saturday and I need to book airline travel for three weeks out and also find a place to sleep on Friday night. And I have a blog to write. And 20 emails to reply to. And I have to pick up my son from soccer practice after work. That marathon planning thing wasn’t going to be easy. But like everything else with that crazy year, I took a leap of faith and went after it.

Oh yeah, and there was one other issue that was definitely going to be a challenge roughly 10 weeks out. I needed to find a location and get a permit and insurance and all that kind of fun stuff. I knew it would have to be on an open course, because getting roads blocked off was just not going to happen on my budget and with my timeframe. I looked at various spots near the beach in Orange County, but they crossed into too many different municipalities and there was no way I’d be able to overcome all the red tape and secure permits in time.

I looked into a spot in a city called Cerritos, where a friend of mine had run a 100K on a course that was 5K in each direction (she ran 10 laps of that!). That spot actually dealt with the county, and I was close to securing a permit. All I needed to make the race count was to advertise it for a month, have five starters and have three finishers. I was pretty sure I could get five people out there. Heck, I filled 20 percent of the quota myself! It would have been an incredibly boring, one-time thing, but technically, it would have counted.

Just before I was about to lock down that site, though, a friend of mine, Jake Rome, begged me to consider a spot near his home in Manhattan Beach. Run it along the beach and then along some creek that was nearby, he told me. He said it would be a great event, he’d work with the local community and bring runners. Jake had been a pretty strong Operation Jack supporter all year, and really, at that point, I didn’t care. I had so many other things to worry about. So, I said sure, we’d switch.

What. A. Blessing.

Jake and I before the start of the 2011 Operation Jack Marathon.

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I Hate Autism, Part 257

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2:57 is a time I liked a lot when I ran the Boston Marathon in 2011. It was a new personal best for me, the first time I was able to cover 26.2 miles in less than three hours. 2:57 is a time I really hated yesterday, though. It’s the time I woke up yesterday morning to hear my son Jack having a meltdown, hitting his head into the wall in his bedroom.

If you’ve never been here before, click here to see why I even have this site. It’s because even though I don’t have autism, like Jack, I will fight autism for the rest of my life. I will fight it because Jack has it. Severely. He’s about five weeks from turning 9 and he doesn’t really talk and he’s still in diapers. Some people like to throw out the cliché he might have autism but autism doesn’t have him. That’s not true, though. Autism has him. It controls him and owns him and defines his every day. But I’ll get back to that in a minute.

He woke up at 2:57 a.m. Maybe actually earlier than that, but that’s when I first heard him. I was going to be getting up to run at 4:30 a.m., so when he wakes up in the middle of the night like that, my wife Tiffany goes and takes care of him. Usually, that just means laying down with him until he calms down and goes back to sleep. It takes an average of 30-60 minutes. For most parents, that kind of stuff stops somewhere around 6-12 weeks after your baby is born. Jack turned 464 weeks on Tuesday and we’re still getting up several times a week.

This child was not born with autism.

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Wordless Wednesday: A Face Of Autism

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Technically, this isn’t going to be wordless, but the pictures will do a million times more talking than the sentences I’m going to write. I’m posting two pictures of my son Jack, who is my inspiration for Operation Jack. He is severely autistic, nearly 9 years old with limited speech and still in diapers. Since he can’t really talk, he gets upset over his frequent stomach pain and when he gets frustrated about not being able to communicate that to us, he hits himself in the head. We put him in a padded helmet for his own protection, but sometimes he finds ways around it to still punch himself in the head.

He’s a really cute kid. And a really sweet kid. Everybody tries to be nice and positive with us, to find a bright side to what he goes through. In response to his inability to communicate and his abnormal behaviors, a lot of times we hear, “Well, as long as he’s happy … ”

As I was telling my wife Tiffany yesterday, I won’t accept that he’s happy until he tells us he’s happy.

My precious Jack.
My precious Jack.