I informed absolutely no one that I would have a phone call this afternoon with the National Institutes of Health regarding what’s been going on with E-Niner. I didn’t know if anything would come of it or not. It was a memorable call and probably one of the most efficiently attained helpful bits of information I’ve received about E-Niner.

In a nutshell, the social worker at NIH said that psychosis and PDD-NOS sometimes occur simultaneously. What’s unique about psychosis in conjunction with PDD-NOS is that the psychosis is focused on a child’s interest — as E-Niner does with WALL-E or Lightening McQueen or any number of other Disney characters up his sleeve.

So that was comforting to hear. Why didn’t I know that before? Why didn’t anybody ever tell me that? Maybe not that many people know.

After going through E-Niner’s history, her prognosis was that E-Niner will either grow into the PDD-NOS diagnosis, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. She said that schizophrenia can occur with or without PDD-NOS and with or without bipolar disorder, so one doesn’t rule out the other.

I asked her at what age she thought these things would come together and we would have a better idea of what was going on. She gave me that therapeutic caveat of “we really can’t predict the future or make any guarantees,” but she guessed around age seven. That’s two more years.

She was most interested in his genetic abnormality and requested that I forward his neurological work-up and the results of the genetic testing we’ve done. She thought the NIH geneticists would be interested in that.

So that’s where we are. I’ve got to say that it feels so good to finally have somebody have the balls to give me prediction on where they think things are headed. I can’t emphasize how comforting it feels to have some sort of road map — directional – on the trajectory of things.

Almost every other therapist we’ve seen has told me that we have to live in the moment and deal with where E-Niner is right now, and that’s all well and good. But to live solely in the moment and not have any idea of the future is not always easy. At least not for me.

The prediction doesn’t make the road any easier or gives us any answers, but it opens up a path thick with brush that I had been previously working on by hand with a machete.