Autism doesn’t take a holiday

Disney 2023

Talk about a shock. Those of us that live alongside autism can get delusional when envisioning their holiday. 

I did just that, I thought about how wonderful Disney 2019 was after the complete disaster of 2018, forgetting about the meltdowns, heat exhaustion, crowds and anxiety. So when I thought about this Disney holiday, I had a perfect vision in my head of wonderful, meaningful, family time and Disney joy. I blocked from my memory that the children would be far from their comfort zone of home, away from their routines and being exposed to so much sensory input that even a neurotypical adult would struggle. Oh what a wake up call that was when the meltdowns started. 

We started at the airport where Virgin had stuffed up and not logged any of the details for our wheelchairs, regardless of the 5 emails I had sent (and been responded to). So check in took around 40 minutes when it should have been 10 minutes max. I have to say the staff were very good and rushed us through security seeing how much the children were struggling. Unfortunately this was the end of it for Riley, having already had to deal with breakfast in a restaurant, then travelling to the airport, parking up the car (which was a nightmare in itself) and navigating the airport, it was already over for him. Riley had at this point already shut down and all this before we had even left the country.

Overall the children did amazingly. We were helped by the fact we had the DAS (Disney’s disability access pass), that Riley had his wheelchair to hide away in when necessary and we were willing to jump ship and leave parks even if we had only been in there for an hour if really the children were struggling and no longer coping.

Magic kingdom became stroppy kingdom. The park was always too busy filled with people ‘on my ‘olidays’ and became the park we were guaranteed to have a meltdown in. Riley, who we know cannot regulate his own temperature, overheated. We forgot that temperature regulation works both ways as coming from the UK we are used to bundling him up from the cold. Well a few days in and he suffered heat stroke. Luckily a muslin square to cover his wheelchair, a fan blowing in the back and some cool drinks and he recovered quickly, reminding us that those physical needs are needed to be preempted even more so when at the most magical place on earth. 

We made some old school mistakes with Samantha. We allowed her blood sugar to drop and couldn’t understand why she was grumpy. We, having fed her, couldn’t work out why Samantha was still grumpy forgetting that she responds this way when she gets too hot. Once we had realised this we quickly administered a slushy drink and all was good again.

It was hard and eye opening but we still made some amazing core memories.

We made a lot of rookie mistakes. We are hoping that for the next one we have readjusted our expectations. We preempt that the children will struggle and we realise earlier that we need to leave and find something/somewhere more calming. Although this year’s holiday comes with more trials than previous years, we hope that overall it will be a good one as it may be our last for a while.