Parenting

A couple of months ago I wrote about my oldest and the suspected ADHD that had gone unnoticed until now.

As it turns out, we got him into the specialist who subject him to several hours of testing. The person who performed the testing strongly indicated that the inital observations suggested ADHD.

My Pie had been prescribed a low dosage, 18mg per day, of Concerta so the specialist advised he continue taking it and he would re-assess at the follow up visit.

A few weeks later and the three of us, Pie, Me and The Dad, sat across from the ADHD specialist as he confirmed that our Pie was most definitely suffering from ADHD and prattled off the percentiles and showed us graphs and charts that illustrated the facts to us.

He sent us off with a book for the Pie to read and one for us that was full of charts and checklists that we and his teacher is to fill out to gauge his progress and symptoms.

The doctor also doubled the dose of Concerta but indicated that he probably would need several adjustments before we found the ideal dosage.

I'm sure that every parent struggles with medicating their children. Especially given the stigma of ADHD and the over diagnosis and status
of "condition du jour". Parents don't want their kids "drugged" and the
potential side effects make you think twice and three and even four
times about doing it.

The thing to remember is that ADHD IS a
real condition and it's effects cause real issues for the kids and
adults that are afflicted with it.

We've parented The Pie for
over 12 years without medication, without treatment and I feel awful.
How unfair of us to make him go through this without even noticing -
it's like 'not noticing' that a child is diabetic.

So, aside from parenting my intense high maintenance kids, I now have a
nearly 13 year old boy, a teenager, smack in the middle of puberty, a couple of
weeks before school starts at an all new school where he knows very few
people, newly diagnosed and still digesting that he has ADHD, on
medication for this ADHD. So I wasn't terribly bowled over to find that his moods were swinging like they were being controlled by monkeys swinging on vines but I sure wasn't happy and honestly, started to panic just a little.

I was afraid that the medication was making him worse or that he had been misdiagnosed.

The thing is he was downright awful for the last 4 or 5 days, just about as long as he's been on the increased dose of Concerta, also the same amount of time he's known absolutely that he has ADHD, also mere days before he starts back to school - his NEW school and also in the middle of puberty. It's overwhelming to me as the parent, I have to assume it's overwhelming to my near teenager.

I had to take a step backwards and pull The Dad back there with me.

We've decided that as is needed with much of parenting, a little detective work and a little wait and see.

Discipline is still the first action. When the pie is mean and rude and sarcastic and full of attitude - we still need to deal with it but we've decided we need to discipline the behavior and work on keeping it in check without declaring a national emergency - without panicking. We need to watch, we need to see how things go after the first few days and weeks of school as he adapts to the new schedule and surroundings. We need to keep an eye on the medication and gauge the moods, are they getting worse, better, more or less frequent or severe? We need to keep notes, and keep our eyes open to know what's REALLY going on.

We've decided to give it 2 weeks of observation as long as nothing gets worse.

We'll see what happens.

I'm the first to admit that my two intense kids take the majority of my energy. The Dervish and The Girl are younger and well, they are "intense". Virtually every moment is a challenge.

However, I didn't think I was ignoring the Pie ... the oldest, mr. stability, mr. dependable, mr. 12 going on 25.

Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly what happened and I think I know why.

It all started a month or so ago when I was looking for a "chore chart" online (something we were trying that didn't work - again... but that's another post). In my search I found a site that had charts for every imaginable thing and one of them was an add/adhd checklist.

I don't know what prompted me to look at it, I had no conscious concerns for any of the kids at that particular time but I did look at it and was shocked when I realized that I was answering yes to virtually every question with regards to my oldest son! Don't people usually look at and find add/adhd much earlier than 12 years old?

So I talked to The Dad about it and we looked at the checklist together and sure enough, we both had to admit that as hard as it seemed to be to believe, it looked like our oldest, our "normal" child, had been wandering around with undiagnosed add or even adhd!

The Dad discussed it with our Doctor before we talked to The Pie about it and he said we'd have to have his teacher fill out the same checklist before they would make a diagnosis so I emailed the teacher, explained just what I said here and attached the checklist. A day later the list came back - validating my initial idea.

Now for the fun part! After getting the letter from the teacher and my own check list to the Doctor with The Pie in tow, the Dr. says he has to see a specialist! I didn't even know there were add/adhd "specialists" but apparently there are and The Pie has an appointment with one such guru in DECEMBER! In the mean time, do nothing.

This just doesn't seem acceptable to me. Originally I had thought that the timing of this sudden noticing of symptoms was great. It was nearing the end of the school year so it would give us the summer to deal with treatment options and hopefully, by the time school started in the fall, we'd be all set and The Pie might actually have a good school year! Now it looks like that's not going to happen.

So why did it take us until he was 12 years old to discover that he was demonstrating so many add/adhd symptoms?

Well, first of all, no one had ever suggested it was a concern. In the 8 years of formal education, not one teacher even hinted that there might be an issue. Of course, there were always 'issues'. He fidgets, doesn't stay on task, spends too much time talking with his friends, gets out of his seat too much etc., etc., etc. and ya, now it screams loud and clear but in the moment it was always accompanied by 'he's so popular', 'he's got so many friends', 'everyone always wants to chat with him', 'social butterfly'. So we saw these as discipline and self control issues related to his personality - the teachers liked him, his classmates liked him - disruptive? ya, a little, but in a class clown, charm your socks off kind of way.

Then there's the comparison factor. Standing beside emotionally intense Dervish and The Girl, The Pie looks for all intents and purposes, like the golden child. What's a 'fidget' beside a child having a major meltdown over being asked to put her socks in the laundry?

So as it turns out, the challenging kids not only vacuums the attention away from the 'normal' kids, they also change the perspective in which you look at your 'normal' kids.

sigh.

What's next? Well, I think I have to push the dr. towards considering some interim treatment and of course, I am looking at alternative treatments as well.