Happy Easter Everyone!

Hope you all have a blessed day!


The Easter Mermaids were done by Laurie Leigh, another one of my favorite mermaid artists. You can see more of her work here...

Dogs or Drugs?

Dear Mom and Dad,
You might want to demand a college tuition reimbursement from my old University.

Apparently, I haven’t learned a thing.

While I vaguely remember hearing something once before…I seem to have forgotten.

Meet Little Dog.
He’s Little Man’s new puppy and best friend.
I should know that dogs are a lot of work.
I should know they have to be potty trained.
I should know they might tinkle on the floor until they learn that “outside” is the proper place for that sort of thing.
I should remember they have to be kept flea free.
And that they need baths.
And food.
And water
And walking
And love
And get sick and need to go to the vet.

But I put Little Man to bed last night for the first time in 5 years without having to perform one single bedtime ritual! He’s so focused on the dog that I didn’t have to check under the bed, or in the closet, or behind the door, or behind the t.v. I didn’t have to tuck him in 4 times, insure he had a glass of water, turn the fan on, check the nightlight, fix the bed drapery just so, give him three hugs, four kisses, and then come back and start over to make sure it was all done right the first time.

He just snuggled with his puppy, and hugged me goodnight. One kiss, and an “I love you Mom, thank you for getting me a puppy. Good night Little Dog, I love you”...and that was it.

Well ??
What was I supposed to do. The dog was cheaper than the prescription!!!

Part 3: Hey little boy…you want some drugs?

When Little Man was a toddler, the school teachers said:
-He had separation anxiety when he panicked about going to school. (I thought they must be right)

-They also said he lacked confidence. (I blamed his father for that)

-They said he didn’t draw as good as the “other” three year olds did. (I thought his pictures were beautiful, AND he could speak two languages….could they?)

- When he got older, they said he had messy handwriting. (I thought, I’ve never met a doctor with good handwriting)

-They said he didn’t pay attention,….seemed to day dream a lot and obviously wasn’t
getting enough sleep at home. (I thought, that’s because he’s up all night worrying about when I was going to die, or if there really was a heaven, or if the house would collapse, or if a bad guy was under the bed, or how if he couldn’t sleep he’d be the only one awake all night and then who would hear the burglar coming in who was going to kidnap him?)

-They said he couldn’t remember things. (I said he could remember every single solitary Pokemon or YuGiOh card out of a deck of 1000, it’s strengths, weakness, and attack powers. Not to mention the names of all the dinosaurs and species of animals according to habitat and geographical location.)

Sometimes they said these things in front of him.

He genuinely wants to do well and minds the rules like he wrote them himself, but he was struggling and no one had an answer.

We tried everything: Taekwondo, meditation, breathing techniques, therapy, counseling, tutoring yada yada yada, and nothing was helping. So we went the route of psychological testing and neurology.

Now we know it was Tourette’s all along causing the trouble and can be alleviated with medical help. But ...um...now we’ve got another little challenge.
There isn’t just one medication that treats all of the fun and gloriously wonderful symptoms of Tourette’s. You need one for the OCD, one for the anxiety and panic attacks, one for concentration, which hopefully will relieve the stress which cause the tics, but if they don’t, we’ve got a pill for tics too, only they are riddled with side effects.

And did we mention that these drugs all have side effects that may or may not aggravate the symptoms in the first place? This one is for anxiety, but it will worsen the tics. Take this one for the ADD but it will most likely worsen the anxiety…and so forth and so on.

It is possible to eventually find the right combination of pills that work on all three disorders without increasing tics, however they may cause headache, dry mouth, nausea, vomiting, stroke, loss of appetite, suicidal tendencies and depression, but don’t worry….

we’ve got a pill for that.

Once we get the right combination of pills we will have to increase the dosage every couple of months to accommodate for his fluctuating weight gain or loss, and for any tolerance his body may acquire for the drug. The change in dosage will most likely cause symptoms to worsen for the first few weeks….

Breathe in….breathe out…

Part 2: Now Let’s Throw in Some Tics.

In most Tourette’s patients, tics are usually simple involuntary motor movements of the head, neck or face like eye blinking, shoulder shrugging, squinting, or what appears to be tossing hair out of the eyes. The person might also exhibit some simple phonic tics like throat clearing sounds, sniffing, grunting, or humming. ( First find me a child who doesn’t do at least one of the afore mentioned things and you’ll understand how easy it is to overlook the tics as habits or simple annoyances).

With Little Man…, he hums.
Not a familiar tune, or particular song. Just a brief, two second humming sound that almost sounds like a monkey. In addition, he has gone through many varying tics such as head jerks, and repetitive facial expressions.

Here's another test to get you back into his shoes for a moment. Remembering how you did on the previous test counting the “E”s, let’s now add “tics” to the mixture. As you read the paragraph below, frequently jerk your head back hard and fast. Try to do the head jerk in bursts—like two or three at a time. Wait a few seconds, then do it again. Do it frequently throughout your effort to read the paragraph. OK?
Begin:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Children with Tourette’s Syndrome follow the same normal curve model for Intelligence as the general population. In fact, some believe they may actually be more intellectually or creatively gifted than the general population. Tics of the head and eyes are the most common and often interfere with math and written work.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now how did you do? Did the head jerking interfere with your ability to read? Did you get dizzy or nauseous at all, or maybe felt a tad frustrated? Did your neck start to hurt, and oh yes…did you remember to count all the “E”s? If you were a kid being asked to read, would you get irritable after a while, or just plain fatigued and want to give up? What's wrong, I only asked you to read a few sentences!

The tics you actually see are only the tip of the iceberg too. A sufferer of Tourette’s will suppress his tics as best he can to prevent being teased at school at the expense of great mental and emotional energy. This often misleads teachers to think that the tics that do pop up are voluntary, or that Mom is most certainly crazy because “We’ve never noticed him do that before.” While suppressing tics may keep your condition a secret at school, it leads to an explosion of tics that will happen once you come home compensating for what has been suppressed all day.

Did I mention that stress makes your tics worse? Let’s add a teacher into this story. One who thinks you’re just not paying attention, or can’t understand why you have to read something several times to comprehend what you’re reading, when you are obviously so intelligent. Throw in the stress of a timed test too, just to make it realistic.
Still having fun?

Part One in a Series of Several:

I don’t talk about these kinds of things on my blog as a rule. Mainly because Contemblogging is my channel for humor and writing, but more importantly because it just never seemed appropriate in my mind to discuss another person at length in a way that might be construed as negative.

As of late, however, I find myself very stressed and in need of an outlet to collect, organize and come to terms with certain issues effecting my sleep and sanity. It is my Blog after all, and I make the rules…so I thought I’d throw some things out there to the giant collective that is the internet. I’ll see what it might unveil. Perhaps someone will know something, or have the missing information I’ve been looking for.

My son has Tourette’s, and although most people associate this syndrome with verbal outbursts of profanity, it’s actually much much more. In fact, only a small percentage of individuals with Tourette’s exhibit such verbally offensive symptoms. Rather they suffer from a spectrum of disorders such as attention deficit, Obsessive Compulsive thoughts, and anxiety/panic disorder, combined with tics either vocal or motor.

Meet Little Man. He’s a good boy. Polite, smart, intellectual and for most outward appearances... Normal. A little nerdy maybe, using an extensive vocabulary that far exceeds his peers, but nonetheless…normal.

From the time he was old enough to talk, we began noticing certain obsessive thought patterns and behaviors. Namely, worrying that something would happen to me, and I would die. If I left, he feared he would never see me again, and would have to hug me many times before I could leave the house. If he was upstairs, and I downstairs, he had to repeatedly check (literally every 3 minutes) to see if I was safe and still alive. Odd for a tiny fella, yes, but we wrote it off to separation anxiety. Just a phase. Something he would outgrow.

Getting him to school each morning was like capturing a feral cat, and attempting to put it into a box. It would take myself, the counselor and his teacher to coax him out of my van in the mornings, prying his gripped fingers from the door handles, as he would scream and cry out of pure fear.
He was scared to death and having a full fledged panic attack every day.

The panic attacks have to an extent, waned with age but will flare up in certain situations.

Obsessive thoughts are a constant source of distraction for him as well. Try the test below to see what it’s like to be Little Man, and then imagine how hard it is to keep your grades up under those circumstances.


As you read the excerpt below, tell yourself that you must count all the times the letter “E” occurs in the paragraph. But here’s the catch: You have to count and read simultaneously—you can’t just read and then go back and count the “E”s, nor can you keep track of them on a piece of paper. You have to do the counting in your head for this exercise. Then to make it a bit more realistic, assume that accuracy is very important to you—if you lose track of the count or aren’t 100% sure that you’ve counted correctly…you’ll have to go back to the beginning of the paragraph and start again. Since you have OCD, you probably will doubt that you counted correctly at least once during the exercise, and need to start over.
Ok? Begin:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Children who have OCD often have hidden or silent compulsive rituals. These hidden rituals often confuse teachers who may look at a child and not realize what is going on internally that may make it almost impossible for the child to function normally at times. Young children often don’t realize that what they are doing is abnormal, and older children, teens, or adults are often embarrassed by the rituals and won’t tell you about them.
--------------------------

Well?
How’d you do on that one? If you were a student with OCD, how would you feel trying to read in school or at home and how do you think it would effect your reading comprehension? What if you had to read it in 2 minutes, fully comprehend the point, yet timed tests make you nervous and cause the obsessive behavior to intensify? Isn’t this fun?

My case in point.

Staying on target with grades is a constant battle, and finding the right school or learning situation for optimal performance is difficult at best. Little Man is currently attending private school at exorbitant tuition prices, yet they offer no special assistance to children with the need for modified learning environments. Public School’s in Georgia are not worth their weight in peanuts, so that’s not an option. What’s left? Home schooling? Private tutoring? Valium for Mom?

This is what keeps me up at nights. Wondering what to do. How to help him succeed in an education system that prefers the teaching path of least resistance, not necessarily what works for each individual child.