Synchronicity, Luck or Fate (whatever it is, I’ll take it!)

Well, it’s official. The blood test results are in and my son does indeed have a new gentic diagnosis as I wrote about suspecting a couple of months back. It feels weird. I’m not going to go into the details of which arm of which chromosome has been duplicated or deleted here because what interests me more is the universality of the experience of parenting a child with special needs, not the symptoms or their specifics. More unites it than divides it.

What I’ve been reflecting on instead is the event that made this diagnosis possible: the mother of boy who also has this incredibly rare syndrome happened to be sitting in the same waiting room of the same office at the same moment as me and my son. Despite years of being examined, poked and prodded by experts, it took another mom just a moment to look at my son and see some spark of recognition that led us to the truth. A different doctor, a different day, a different area in the waiting room, and we would have spent who knows how many more years in the dark. Do you have chills? I do.

Some people would call it Fate or maybe even Divine Intervention. Out of all the appointments of all the neuropsychologists in all the suburbs of the world, that we should meet is such a statistical improbability that only a divine hand can have played a part. “Things happen for a reason” is a common mantra of special needs parents and I suspect a lot of folks would say that to us in this instance as well.

Others might call it Coincidence and chalk the shivers that are still running up and down my spine to apophenia, or the human propensity to see connections between two unrelated events. I mean, it’s not really that odd that we’d be seeing the same doctor (there aren’t that many of them, probably) and the appointments involve multiple long visits. The chances that we would meet seem small but aren’t impossible.

Still others who fall in between the two extremes of the religious-skeptic spectrum might give credit to Synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence. They might even go so far as to say I attracted this mom to us using Synchronicity; just weeks before, I had become very clear about wanting a rock-solid diagnosis for my son, re-arranging my life to focus on his needs, and trusting that the answers would come.

Who knows? Who cares? Whether it’s because of some divine conductor or damn good luck, I’ll take it. While it would be nice to have a definitive answer about the big questions of life, I’ll settle for the little truths. Certain ambiguities — like whether there’s a force out there looking out for me — I can handle. Others — like having a proper and accurate diagnosis — not so much.

P.S. I love a good Coincidence/Fate/Synchronicity story. Share one if you have it!