Fifteen years and a lifetime ago, I was completing two years of post-grad work to obtain a certificate of specialty in pediatric dentistry. Those two years were so awful they propelled me from Alabama to New York City, and they were awful for many reasons, but one thing I did right — or so I thought — was my major research paper. It focused on autism and dentistry and was, I believed, both well-researched and -written. 

If I could find that paper now, I suspect I’d want to delete the entire file. Because about a decade after I submitted that paper, my older son was diagnosed as autistic — and that was when knowledge went from factual to personal.

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!