Lenore Koppelman had a professional conference to attend in Florida last week and decided it would be a perfect opportunity to visit Universal Orlando Resort with her husband and 9-year-old son, Ralph.
“Ralph is awesomely autistic,” she wrote on Facebook, later adding that she and her husband also are proudly autistic. “As wonderful, loving, intelligent and incredible as Ralph is, sometimes he struggles. (Don’t we all?) When he struggles the hardest, he can have something known as an ‘autistic meltdown.’ ”
Koppleman described in detail Ralph’s extreme excitement to go on The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man ride at Islands of Adventure. Because of the direction the family was walking, Spider-Man would be their final ride after traversing the park for a few hours. He asked after each ride if Spider-Man was next.
“He was SO patient for SO long. As patient as he possibly could be,” Koppelman wrote. “He would say, ‘Okay’ and sigh, and then enjoy the next ride. But all the while, the excitement was building up to the pinnacle of his day: The Spider-Man ride.”
As the family approached the Spider-Man ride in the late afternoon and was about to get on, an employee announced that the ride was malfunctioning and would be closed. Koppelman, 44, and her husband Steve, 49 — who had gotten the family free tickets because he works as a computer technician for NBC in New York — knew Ralph was going to become overwhelmed and lose control of his emotions.
“My husband and I know the signs. We could see it coming, like an oncoming train. And yet we couldn’t dodge out of the way. There was nowhere else to go,” she wrote. “The autistic meltdown was GOING to HAPPEN. And happen it DID...READ MORE
