One of the bigger challenges of living with autism in our house has been trying to stay one step ahead of Micah’s compulsive tendencies, his obsession with the toilet in particular. When he was quite young, and around the time we began toilet training, he became enamored with one step in the toilet training process; flushing. The problem was that he liked to flush random objects down the toilet often with disastrous results. Items in our bathrooms began to disappear as Micah ventured in and practiced his flushing skills. Larger items, like hair brushes, needed to have the toilet dismantled to get them unstuck. Some flushes were quite costly, such as the time his father forgot and left his partial dental plate on the sink at night thinking it was safe up in our bathroom. It was not. It seemed that no amount of firm talks, begging, and ranting helped to decrease his obsession to flush inappropriate items, until he just stopped.
For a period of time, for whatever reason, we could let our guard down when Micah entered bathroom. We enjoyed this phase until he began to focus like a laser on soap. Soap began to get used up as quickly as it was replaced and we realized that Micah was using as much soap as possible if left unattended. This was at least a clean problem, but leaving mounds of bubbles and little soap left after each bathroom use was annoying, especially for the poor people who used public bathrooms after Micah had departed. Switching to the pump action soap just made it so much easier for him to create mountains of bubbles in record time. Looking back, the soap overuse problem, while not good, was far preferable to the his next phase that we have been mired in for the past few years: toilet paper over load.
This has been the most frustrating phase of all as Micah, began using an entire roll of toilet paper each time he spent time in the bathroom. IF the toilet flushed after his visit, the poor person following him would find no toilet paper in the bathroom anywhere as we could not keep any extra rolls as spares as they would be found and used by Micah in a flash. If the toilet did not flush, we began to experience toilet overflow disasters, that not only flooded the bathroom and created a huge mess, but resulted in water seeping through the floor to the bedroom ceiling below. This resulted with ceiling tiles collapsing and items on the bookcase below needing to be thrown out, not to mention hours of cleaning, bleaching, and tears of frustration (mine, not Micah’s). Trying to have Micah help clean up the mess he created did not seem to make any difference and just made each overflow even more frustrating for everyone. Micah’s neurologist once described autism as “brain blindness” and this term does seem to best describe his inability to understand concepts such as the fact that overusing toilet paper not only causes a flood in the bathroom but causing damage to the room below the bathroom. As Micah was seemingly not able to understand the cause and effect, we needed to not have any toilet paper in the bathroom. Family knew that they needed to bring their own from the other room before entering the bathroom, but poor unsuspecting drop- in guests needed to call out for help once in there (or worse, did not call out, perhaps out of embarrassment or concern for a family that did not have toilet paper anywhere in the bathroom).
At one of Micah’s meetings with his case manager, I mentioned the ongoing bathroom problems and she researched toilet paper dispensers that might help alleviate the problem. We ordered one such devise that delivers a sheet or two at a time, which seemed for about a two week period be an answer to the problem. However, after that short reprieve, Micah figured out how to deftly lift the band that limited disbursement and we were back to dealing with occasional floods when Micah was not constantly monitored in the bathroom. One Sunday I was immersed in reading the Sunday paper when I heard his brother Ben yell as he raced upstairs asking if Micah was in the bathroom because water was pouring through the ceiling of his room where he had been peacefully watching a movie on Netflix. Years of frustration of living with the challenges of having a brother with autism poured out as Ben helped me clean up the damage.
Knowing none of us could continue to deal with stress of the flooding, I called Micah’s caseworker the next day to ask if there were any other options besides never having toilet paper in the bathroom. Micah’s caseworker found a toilet advertised as one that would not clog even if a bucketful of golf balls was flushed down it. This ad did make me pause to wonder who in the world would even think of flushing a bucket of golf balls, but perhaps the inventor lived with someone with an odd flushing obsession. Long story short, we purchased and installed this new toilet a couple weeks ago and for two blissful weeks there have been no floods. My husband has already warned me not to get complacent about this new level of normalcy in the house and he may very well be right. But if there are no floods for six months, I plan to replace the ceiling tiles in the room below for hopefully the last time. If there are no floods for a year, I think sending flowers to the toilet company and offering to do promotional ads for them is the least we can do in appreciation of their miraculous invention.
Jan Lessard Peightell
June 11, 2019