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…