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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

So in Today's Strange News...

I got a call from NBC's Dateline and got interviewed by a correspondant named Kristina Balotto. I must be misspelling her name because I could not pull her up on google. At any rate, before I go any further, I should give you the backstory on this madness.



On Sunday afternoon at the DAN! conference last month, I decided my brain had absorbed all it could, and I was ready to go home. On my way out, I saw an NBC camera and a newsperson just standing around. I had seen them on my way into sessions that day and my first thought was "THANK YOU!" There were countless times during the sessions that I thought "WHY isn't this ALL OVER the news?" So seeing them made me happy to think that maybe Autism and biomedical treatment would be getting some media attention. I thought no more of it until I saw them again as I was walking out. I swung by and said "Excuse me. Are you with local (Atlanta) news or National?" She said 'National'. I said "Oh great! Thank you for being here!" and started to walk away. She said "do you have a child with autism?" Me "Yes. we have triplets. 2 of them are on the spectrum." Christina-"Can I ask you a few questions?" Me-"Sure". Well about this time the camera man starts picking up his camera. I said "Oh. You mean on camera?" She asked if that was ok. I agreed. So she did a 15 minute interview about my kids, autism, treatment, vaccines, etc. She took my card and said she might follow up. Honestly I did not expect to hear from her. I just assumed it got cut from whatever segment they were doing, and basically forgot about it.



THEN--my phone rings at 3:30pm yesterday and shock of all shocks, it is Christina. She told me that they are working on a Dateline 'episode' about Autism with Matt Lauer as the correspondant and wanted to know if she could ask me more questions about our life, autism, and specifically vaccines and my views about vaccines contributing to my kids' autism. So we talked for almost an hour. At the end she asked if we would be open to them filming our family next week. She said she is not sure that they can get it squeezed in to the production schedule. At this point I am not holding my breath. Honestly I am not sure whether I want this to work out or not. I had NO idea that she was with DATELINE! Oh my goodness.

So my prayer, and the prayer I ask you to pray is this: If this is good for our family and will help people, we want to do it. But if this will be bad for our family or somehow spun in a negative way, we prefer not to.

4 comments:

Tothblog said...

Yea! I cannot wait to see what happens. Honestly, I have always pictured you going on Dateline or Oprah. I won't be surprised at all.

Kristen
http://tothblog.blogspot.com/

Mindy said...

WOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!
Praying for you girlie.

Heather - CDO said...

Wow, Sunny, that's amazing! If it's God's will for your family to be on the show, then the exposure for autism awareness will be amazing! And don't worry about having a clean house...let them see what life is like with three preschoolers, two of whom have autism.

Tracey said...

Wow! This is really exciting. I will be praying for your family and that God will lead you in the right direction and Dateline too! You are very knowledgeable about autism and treatments so you would be a great person to speak for parents of autistic children.
Keep us posted!
Tracey