reSee.it Video Transcript AI Summary
We have triplets, two boys and a girl, Richie, Robbie, and Claire. Every day in our life was a party. Every single day, they were smiling and laughing and looking at each other, engaging in each other. On 06/25/2007, we brought him in for the pneumococcal shot. My daughter still has the mark on her leg from the shot. She was the first one to get it, and she screamed and never really stopped screaming after that. But we continue we didn't know. We did the boys as well. By noon, Claire shut completely off. It was as if she was blind and deaf, and all she did at that moment was stare at the ceiling fan. So that was at noon. We had the shot at 10AM. By 02:00, we watched Richie shut off. They lost all their reflexes. I'm an educational audiologist. I actually did the test for the stapedial reflex, which is a little muscle in the middle ear just to see if a muscle they can't control was still working, and it it didn't. The stapedial reflex dampens sound so your ears don't hurt from a really loud sound, and both of them had no stapedial reflex. They stopped blinking, stopped yawning, stopped coughing, stopped sneezing.
The worst is when we saw the final one shut down. We were told it was genetic, and then we were told by geneticists that there's no possible way three children would shut off on the same day. So we had severe autism spectrum disorder for all three kids entering kindergarten. We have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to recover them. The only person that we got back is Rich Robbie, the one that was last to shut off.
Richie can only say single, maybe two words together. Claire is still completely nonverbal, not potty trained, and Robbie is approaching grade level but severe OCD.
Let me tell you what a day in our life isn't. So you got, say, a six or seven or eight year old child who's not potty trained, and at two or three or 04:00 in the morning, they fill their diaper. I want you to assume that's pretty uncomfortable, so they take it off. Pretty soon pretty soon it's all over them. It's all over the bed. In short order, it's all over me. It's all over her. Mhmm. I'm snapping at her. She's snapping at me. We're both snapping at the kid who is the only innocent party in the whole scenario. And the one thing that's conspicuously absent from that scenario is is anybody who told you that shot was safe. They're all asleep in their bed. They haven't got a problem in the world.
There were lines down the block everywhere we went. Look at this crowd behind me. Look at this line. It goes on and on and on. In fact, the very first day we screened at Angelica Film Center in New York, I wanted to know why there's this giant line down the block. What are these people here for? Can every parent or someone, you know, if you have a family member with autism, would you please stand up right now? Like, see. Three quarters of the room stood up. I remember feeling like the air just got sucked out of the room. I had no idea that there was this many people suffering from this issue. I ended up asking that question three screenings a day, five days a week, for an entire year. And every single time, three quarters of the room stood up. I realized I had stumbled on something absolutely massive.