Tonight Duhdee and I had a conference call with the developmental pediatrician. We caught up on what we’ve been seeing from Monkey over the last med-free week, none of which is particularly great. His sleeping which had been tanking continued to do so with a vengeance. Not only were the night wakings continuing but we had the new and added issue of not being able to settle down to sleep.
During the day he was…intense. Busy, busy, busy with an extra helping of busy. For those of you who’ve met him and marveled at our ability to keep up with him? We lost the battle this week. Duhdee has his own issues going on with back pain and sciatica but even still…Monkey has been an unstoppable force. He was a whirling dervish of motion. A Massachusetts Jumping Bean. An Umma-wearer-outer, squared. It’s no wonder I’ve had near constant headaches since last week, we get no sleep and we are constantly in motion.
The only not-awful part of the week of no meds was the deep pressure Monkey has been craving. That has resulted in a lot of hugs, including some of the full body hugs that Monkey specializes in ((He latches on to me so tightly with his arms and legs that I don’t need to hold on to him, he’s like a little…uh…Monkey.)). Of course, with me enjoying all the extra hugs I was also very aware that I was only getting all these hugs because my little guy was holding on by a thread and all that loving was really his desperate attempt to self-sooth. So, if I let myself think about it, yeah, that part was awful too. Disregard.
Earlier this morning I took a picture of Monkey just before he woke up. He was sleeping with his hands under his bum and his legs crossed tightly ((It’s on Facebook.)). When I showed the picture to a co-worker she commented that it looked like he’d put himself in a straight-jacket. And it kind of did. Even in his sleep he was still trying to self-soothe. My poor babe.
After dinner we sat down and paged the pediatrician as instructed. He’d had Duhdee give Monkey a single dose of the A.dderall to see if it helped alleviate any of the symptoms and it did to some extent but he was still rather intense. After a lot of discussion we’ve decided to go with T.enex. The Dr. is still trying to decide if we’re seeing symptoms of ADHD because of anxiety or if we’re seeing anxiety because of the ADHD meds. Treating the anxiety could take weeks for the medication to kick in and show a changes, we should see some immediate changes with T.enex though so, ultimately, that’s why we’ve gone this route.
You know, this really just sucks. Fine, he needs medication to be the very best Monkey he can be but it just plain sucks that we’re “hoping” most of the time when we have to make these calls.
We kept Monkey up until the pharmacy could fill the prescription and started him on it tonight. Here goes another ride on the medication roller-coaster! Wheeeee!