Donna Williams: 

Hello, my name is Donna Williams. Hello, my name is Donna Williams. Hello, this is Donna Williams. I am Donna Williams.

I was an autism consultant since 1996. I have worked with a thousand of people with autism and they are so different, so many different fruit salads, so many different personalities, so many different families and influences. 

I have met people with really severe health issues and genetic issues. I have seen people with Co Morbids and people with brain injuries. I am in the immune disorder group. I have immune disorder since I was at least five month old. I grew up very face blind. When I was in my childhood, I was about ninety percent meaning deaf, so I was very Coeliac. By age 9 to 11, I came to understand receptive language and string sentences together and eventually quite fluent, quite reasonable functional speech. I had significant visual, perceptual issues, so I could not see my world as a whole. I couldn't see a face as a whole, people as a whole. Everything is in bit, so I could only process bit, bit, and bit. So I can see the part, but lose the whole. It makes me difficult to recognize people and therefore how do you build any friendship if you can't recognize people? 

This made me an artist. It really trained me into music and nature and colors, contract, textures. I am a really hands person. These are my hands. These are my ears. They help me in being a sculptor, in being a visual artist, in being a musician. 

My biologic mother is an alcoholic. She was also a person who was on Valium and significantly abusive. I understand that I was being given Valium in my bottles as a baby and Valium has been found to cause sudden infant deaf syndrome. It causes a depressed respiratory drive and hypoxic damage, which is essentially the same as asphyxiation. When I was about two years old, I took tools sleeping under the bed and the reason for this was that my abuser. In the middle of the night, was putting a pillow of my face, then I was being suffocated. There were a number of times when I was also being choked and suffocated with this pillow. I remember being really tensing my mouth to try to get a small amount of air when I was just being suffocated. Those are very strong memories. When you have oxygen deprivation, it does not just cause autonomic nerve system damage. You are also gonna have agnosia, inability to process what you see in its meaning, inability to process what you are hearing, difficulty with word retrieval. I could echo stuff but even once I got functional speech. It was very hard for me to pull words up, unless I put gesture to them. Yes, there was information overload issues and processing the part even losing the rest, which is common in people with autism. That was still there was probably accountable for a whole lot of other stuff that I come to the world with, but there was other stuff that I think looks like acquire brain injury and obviously I have done really well for a person who has come from that level of challenge.  

We sort a lot of effort and a heck lot of help and support and inclining from professionals who have helped me along the way. I found it significantly overwhelming to have people directly interacting with me. Also things like emotional overstimulation, and not being able to control self-protection responses, when I felt emotionally overstimulated by the intensity, by the directly confrontational nature, by the per se social invasiveness over other people's interaction. So with exposure anxiety, you learn very early that the way to manage it is avoidance. If people keep pushing, diversions. If people keep pushing, retaliation responses. One of the problems is that you develop this mentality and this identity, that you are a person protecting yourself for the external world. 

So you begin to identify as a person who has to protect his own world at any cost. That the intrusion of other people are the problem. So you get this mask, mentality. Once you get older and you start to think why you want to pursue interaction. You start to think why you want to pursue communication. But the problem is that by then you spend several years with avoidance, diversion, retaliation responses, so that they now become a trigger. You want escape from that world, at the same time you defend it with everything you have. It is that battle to join the world and a simultaneous battle to keep that world out. So some of the wise around this is, first of all, you really need to address the sensor perceptual problem, so that you realized that there isn't much to self-protect about. If you go to someone who is disoriented, who isn't getting the level of nutrition to their brain, who is dealing with high toxicity, deal with the gut immune metabolic issues, so that they are able to handle sensory perceptual input. So there is less to automatically defend through avoidance, diversion, and retaliation responses. 

I developed rickets when I was five months old Rickets is about vitamin D deficiency, so I had banana arms and banana legs. By six months I have jaundiced and began having recurrenting infections, eye infections, and bladder infections. I got dermatitis stuff at the moment in my ears and around here. ?? changed me as a person and it made me very happy when I was healthy. 

When I was older, about 17, and that was the first time that I was actually told about my immune deficiencies. I was constantly itchy and, you know, thrush tongue and it is just horrible. Then I got diagnosed with IGG II deficiency and I have to have antibiotics daily. I thought ‘OK great. I am dealing with this antibiotic drama. It’s gonna be OK.’ A couple of months later, I had cancer. Going through chemo with immune deficiencies is just the most shocking thing to have to do. You already cannot trust your body. You know how it does. 

Hi, I am Donna Williams and I want to do a clip to just let people know that I did now get all my results back. The biopsy from my lymph node was all clear, so they know that my breast cancer didn’t get into my lymph node. It’s all gone and my breast is gone too, but I am glad that my cancer is gone. 

So I sound like a ship break, but I hope I am very positive. ‘Joie de vivre’ ship break and that's all you can really wish for. Most people don't feel like 85 when they are 48. They don't have to face those things, but some people do. 

I wanna say that I am normal. This is my normality and I want to face it very positively, because I am not the only person with this. There are kids a lot younger who are going through what I went through, some of whom are going through much worse, some of whom don't make it to 48. So, really, in an immune deficiency term, I am an old age. So I can live with that. 

Anyway, I am Donna Williams. Thanks for listening