Hospital Appointment

Also a good idea to take someone with you who can better take in the information. They do tend to explain things without appreciating that the patient is not best placed to understand what is being explained.

Also try not to do so much option exploration in your head - following through all the possible permutations, particularly the bad ones, in any situation.

If you are prone to this try to find a way of interrupting this - flick your ear or somewhere else that produces enough discomfort to interrupt the thinking process, then try to apply reality - most of the things you are anticipating may be least likely to happen. Try to give yourself positive options as well as negative ones.

Having said that, yes some health personnel don't seem to understand autism despite all the awareness training that supposedly is going on. And most hospitals seem amazingly oblivious to sources of noise, like those pay-as-you-go TV monitors above your bed that hum and whirr at night, or those personal fridges for keeping patient specific medications that run empty most of the time.

But having someone around regularly can provide an intermediary to communicate needs, and hopefully explaining that you have ASD will be enough to ensure sensitive care.

My lengthy hospital experiences are 2-5 years behind me now, so hopefully things have got better since. But on a premed in 2009 I wrote on the form mild asperger's syndrome. Before the op the anaesthetist kept asking what inhaler I used and seemed unconvinced by my protestation I didn't use one, until they produced my premed form to prove the point. Someone after I'd signed it had scored out asperger's syndrome and written above it "asthma".

Well obviously I was a silly patient who had clearly meant to write asthma. And after all everyone knows what aspergers is, and obviously if the patient could fill in the form, rather than a carer, well obviously its not aspergers. Indeed I kept finding that they assumed I had a carer who could be contacted.

Also a good idea to take someone with you who can better take in the information. They do tend to explain things without appreciating that the patient is not best placed to understand what is being explained.

Also try not to do so much option exploration in your head - following through all the possible permutations, particularly the bad ones, in any situation.

If you are prone to this try to find a way of interrupting this - flick your ear or somewhere else that produces enough discomfort to interrupt the thinking process, then try to apply reality - most of the things you are anticipating may be least likely to happen. Try to give yourself positive options as well as negative ones.

Having said that, yes some health personnel don't seem to understand autism despite all the awareness training that supposedly is going on. And most hospitals seem amazingly oblivious to sources of noise, like those pay-as-you-go TV monitors above your bed that hum and whirr at night, or those personal fridges for keeping patient specific medications that run empty most of the time.

But having someone around regularly can provide an intermediary to communicate needs, and hopefully explaining that you have ASD will be enough to ensure sensitive care.

My lengthy hospital experiences are 2-5 years behind me now, so hopefully things have got better since. But on a premed in 2009 I wrote on the form mild asperger's syndrome. Before the op the anaesthetist kept asking what inhaler I used and seemed unconvinced by my protestation I didn't use one, until they produced my premed form to prove the point. Someone after I'd signed it had scored out asperger's syndrome and written above it "asthma".

Well obviously I was a silly patient who had clearly meant to write asthma. And after all everyone knows what aspergers is, and obviously if the patient could fill in the form, rather than a carer, well obviously its not aspergers. Indeed I kept finding that they assumed I had a carer who could be contacted.