The Po Show

This is your child. This is your child on drugs.

In the continuing saga of getting Matthew additional help, another loop was thrown. On Tuesday we went to see the psychiatrist, who had reviewed (in a really cursory fashion, naturally) all the records of his past evaluations that I had given her. These included all his report cards from over the years.

She asked if I was adverse to meds for him. I said I was not, having come into this open to the possibility of him going on antidepressant/antianxiety meds. However, she remarked that there had been a lot of notations in his school reports about him being distractable, needing frequent redirection, requiring help staying on track during tasks. She asked if I would be okay with him going on Ritalin.

Well bowl me over with a feather YET AGAIN! This had never occurred to me as a possibility, that he might have diagnosable attentional deficits. I mean, he's always been spazzy, and yes it's damn hard to get him to buckle down with homework, and I knew it could be difficult for his teachers and aides to get him to concentrate on reading/writing tasks in class, but still. He was the two year old who stood and waited by the door for it to stop raining so he and Ross could wash the car, for TWO HOURS. He was the kid who could sit and concentrate on building train track configurations for hours. Who could sit and figure out a video game, despite the fact that he couldn't read. He could always focus on anything he was really interested in. Thus, I thought it was not possible for him to have ADD.

Shows you how much I know. Apparently that is incredibly common for ADD kids, to be able to hyperfocus on certain things, particularly mechanical activities, but then be so distractable on other tasks, that they can't perform.

So, Ritalin. Just 5mg a day, short acting so it won't even get through the whole school day. He takes it right before he leaves (even though that's after breakfast; he's prone to dizziness and nausea anyway so I chose to give it to him on a fullish stomach). Peak concentration is 2 hours, so that's only mid-morning. By the end of lunch and recess, it should have cleared. This is problematic, since he tends to have a harder time with schoolwork in the afternoon, but if this drug seems to be helping at all we'll move him to an extended release version.

Being me, I had to understand what Ritalin was all about. I really didn't know ANYTHING about it, other than lots of people have considered it wildly overprescribed for kids in the last decade or so. So, hello Google my old friend. I was able to figure out its mechanisms, its pharmacokinetic data, all good stuff. I feel better for that. But what I also found out is that no one really knows WHY this drug increases attention and reduces distractability. I hate that. I hate not knowing exactly it how it works.

Also, I found out the difference between Ritalin and Strattera (which a lot of parents seem to be opting for for their kids, the main reason being that it's not a stimulant). Ritalin increases norepinephrine production, while Strattera is a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. Those damn neurotransmitters. They are such troublemakers when they don't behave.

Any questions?

You bet your ass.

All Right, I Finally Did It

I've been meaning to do this for months now. I mean, it's been almost three months since my birthday.

I changed my tagline, which read "A 30-something California girl on the East Coast."

'Cause I ain't 30-something no more.

I tried to think of something to change it to, but couldn't come up with anything good. I SURE as HELL wasn't going to change it to "A 40-something California girl on the East Coast." I thought of "A younger-looking than she is California girl on the East Coast" but somehow that didn't flow very well.

So for now it's "A not altered by plastic surgery California girl on the East Coast." Don't ask me why. And I know there should really be hyphens in there.

I'll change it when I think of something better. But given my general level of sluggishness, that might take awhile.

Wrong Turn?

So I've been told by two people, a child psychiatrist and a pediatric neurologist, this week that they feel Matthew might not have Asperger's.

I know it will be a good thing if this is not true, but the whole idea just blew my fucking mind. The thought that we have been seeking counsel and therapy for Matthew for 4 years based on an incorrect diagnosis makes me feel like running out into traffic. The psychatrist was APPALLED that we had never brought him to a psychiatrist before, and was really shocked that we had never had him evaluated by a neurologist. So basically I felt like the worst damn parent in the world, sitting there answering "No" over and over again. The neurologist kept asking me what behavioral modifications Matthew had received after his diagnosis (and I soon realized he meant *formal* modifications like ABA, not the little in-class plans they have put in effect every year), and was surprised when I said none. Again, making me feel like shit (he was nicer about it than the psych had been though). He did say he usually sees "kids like Matthew" between the ages of 18 months and 4 (giving the implication that Matthew really should have been seen a lot earlier, certainly earlier than age 9. BUT NO ONE EVER ADVISED US TO SEE A NEUROLOGIST!). He went on and on about how CA has been at the forefront of establishing the standard of therapy for PDD/NOS kids and how impressive care has been there. I finally said, "That sounds great, but that was *not* our experience." He just couldn't seem to believe that we had had to fight for services while in CA and we had gone through so many avenues with just no help whatsoever.

Anyway, I know it's good that Matthew's gotten OT and pragmatic speech and social skills group and his one on one aide all these years, and regardless of his final diagnosis, these were all beneficial therapies for him. But what if they are not all, or primarily, what he needed? What if we've wasted all these years, half his life, not giving him the help he needs the most? He has suffered *so* much over these years; what if much of it could have been avoided? What if we took a wrong turn four years ago, and the road we missed would have so much smoother?

I know a lot of people disagree with this, but I feel that my job, my primary directive, is to help my children be as happy as they possibly can be. Not on a minute to minute basis, but in a global sense. And I feel like a miserable failure.

9/11

I didn't live in NY on 9/11/01.

I was in L.A., and I was online early that morning (I had dial up back in those days, so no one could call while we were online), and didn't have the TV on. So I didn't know what was going on. Finally a friend got through to me on my cell phone and told me *not to go to work*, that the Twin Towers had fallen, that the world seemed to be ending.

I quickly switched on the TV and saw what had happened. I had 3 month old Tessa on my lap. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

Ross decided we should bring Matthew to daycare as usual, to normalize the day, so he did. Then Ross went to school himself, like everything was normal. Not wanting to be alone with Tessa, I went to work after all, like normal. There weren't many of us there, but we craved each other's company. We brought a TV into the main room and watched CNN from there.

Ross and I had received an email from our friend Eric, who was the best man at our wedding. He worked 6 blocks from the WTC. The email was from right after the first tower was hit, basically a quick "You've probably all seen what's happened, and I wanted to let you all know that I'm okay." But after that, the second tower was hit, and the towers fell, and we didn't hear from him again. We called repeatedly, to his home phone and his cell, but couldn't get through. It would be three days before we heard from him.

My dear friend Darryl lives in D.C. It was four days before I got ahold of him. When I finally did, I snapped, "I've been trying to call you for days!," relief boiling into suppressed anxiety. "Sorry," he said wryly, "but we had an airplane crash into us, in case you hadn't heard."

These are tenous connections to the event. So many were so much more strongly touched, many so tragically you can't believe the universe could be so cruel. I feel I really don't have a right to even bring up the subject of 9/11, that it's completely, morally off limits to me.

But I will never, ever forget it.