Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Teen Troubles

Lately, it's been quite a roller coaster around my house. It isn't something that can be blamed on my babies, either.

Back around his birthday, my eldest starting having super adverse reactions to his ADHD medication.

It started with the misplacement of his Nintendo DS, or at least that is the event that really showed that something was amiss.

My child has every piece to every toy that he has ever had, literally. They may not be kept in the exact same location as one another, but a piece can matched with its mate fairly quickly.

He NEVER loses anything, 'til now. To add insult to injury, he doesn't really know if he lost his DS or if he took it to school and it got stolen.

He honest to God cannot remember. It was so bad, that one day he came into the dining room and confessed having broken the house rule of having taken the DS to school and that he has faced the consequence by losing it and was asking for his house punishment.

The next day, I found him rummaging through his bedroom and the garage frantically searching for the missing DS because in reality, he had no earthly idea what became of it.

When I sat him down and talked to him, I discovered that he had been falling asleep on the school bus every afternoon on the way home from school.

This behaviour had been going on for weeks, and he had assumed that it was normal and was living with it.

I felt awful. Over the next week, I noticed that not only was he sleeping on the way home from school, but that he just could not stay awake in the evenings at home, either.

Then, one weekend, it happened. I experienced "Zombie child" behaviour first hand. I had always heard about the adverse affects of ADHD medication, but I had never in my life expected something so awful.

My child came home from school, and just vegetated. He lay on my couch and stared at the wall for literally hours on end.

The television was on, but he couldn't watch it. His siblings tried to get his attention, sometimes even climbing up on top of him, but he didn't seem to notice.

After the babies went to sleep, I tried snapping him out of it, but NOTHING worked. I even tried to get him to run to Wal-mart with me at 9 p.m. at night (usually something he would have found funny and jumped at the opportunity of going) but he would not budge.

The entire weekend went that way. Monday, I put a call into his Doctor's office about him having adverse reactions to his medication.

The only call back that I received was to schedule a re-evaluation of his situation by the clinic where he sees that doctor, which was to be the following Friday.

I had thought that they might help us or that we might find out something from his doctor by then.

We went in for the evaluation, were told that our case was a priority because of the bad side-effects that he was experiencing, and that the doctor would be calling us shortly.

I finally had to make the decision to take him off of the medication myself so that he could function enough to stay awake at school.

The doctor NEVER did call me back. The only correspondence that we received from the office was a letter referring us back to our pediatrician saying that because my child was not aggressive, violent, or mentally unstable that they could not help us.

So, here we are, without any sort of medication, flying solo in a world of distraction. My child did poorly this past 9 weeks on his grades because the brunt of it was spent on that high dosage of medication that was having the opposite of the desired effect and scary side effects to boot.

Now, we are working together to try and find ways that he can teach himself to focus without the medication in some attempt to get his grades up.

When we had the re-evaluation with the clinical manager at that doctor's office, we were informed that our diagnosis may be off, but that he just could not tell us anything because he wasn't licensed to do so.

I do not have any idea where to start anymore. The teachers were the ones who decided that he had ADHD and all of the questionnaires sent to them by the doctor were filled out to that affect.

His symptoms off of the medication are mainly concentration and focusing. He isn't really hyper and never has been unless he was taking that last medication.

We had an incident over the weekend that I do not know whether to blame him for, or chalk it up to lack of concentration and being able to focus.

Last night, I found myself having to ride him about a project that should have been being worked on for the past WEEK.

He had to re-research everything because the original work printed only half of what was on the page (the left half) and it took most of the evening.

Getting him to write a copy that was spelled correctly and not scratched out on was also difficult.

It took us until 11p.m. to get it finished and even then it was not as good as it should have been.

So I am torn. I do not want him to be put on another round of medication that will make things worse, yet I do not know where to start in asking for help.

I only have focus and concentration problems to go off of, and the idea that a clinical manager thinks that he does not have ADHD.

What is a Mum to do?

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

That is horrible! I can't believe his Dr. didn't call you back. I would be filling a complaint against him. It sounds like your son was in pretty bad shape, that Dr. should have had him seen immediately. I hope you both find a solution to his problem soon. He is so young and should be enjoying life not having to worry about being a zombie or not being able to concentrate.

January 23, 2008 at 6:36 AM  

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