The Foorce

Michaela,

I totally get what you are struggling with right now. I didn’t like putting my son on medication either but it’s helping ALOT! It’s helping him. It’s helping me. It’s helping our family. I felt guilty at the beginning that I didn’t explore all of the naturopathic treatments. But ADHD was having such a significant impact on us that it was either him or me. No amount of self care was helping me in my struggle to do homework, deal with all of the yelling and screaming and get an earful everytime I picked him up at school. I was starting to feel depressed.

It has been a year since my son began medication and we are still trying to find the appropriate medication. We have changed medications 3 times. With each medication we have to go up to the highest dose of the drug before we change. Then we begin again with a new medication at the lowest dose and work our way up. The first medication that we tried helped him so much at school with the impulsiveness and hyperactivity. It took a few different dosages before we found one that dealt with the inattentiveness. Unfortunately that medication left his system as school let out. He would have melt downs on the playground and couldn’t make it through homework without a huge struggle. So we tried the “after school” pill. It didn’t seem to have any effect.

Next we tried Concerta which is a longer acting formula. I was totally happy with the effects of this medication except that it affected my son’s appetite and sleep to the extreme. Being tired created new attention issues at school. In addition, my son was growing and losing weight at the same time.

In the past month we have switched to a medium acting formula meant to get him through school and homework yet wear off so that he can eat and sleep. We started at a low dose but I can’t wait until our next appointment with the psychiatrist. The irritability, tantrums and inability to manage disappointment and anger when the medication wears off has been difficult to deal with and I am not sure whether increasing the dosage will do anything. I feel like we have taken 20 steps back to where we were before we started medication at least at home.

The tough part about this is accepting that we might not be able to find that balance. Maybe we will have to accept that he doesn’t eat and sleep so that he can manage himself in a peaceful manner. Or maybe we will have to continue to learn strategies to deal with the outbursts and say “NO!” to homework so that he can eat and sleep.

There is so much uncertainty at this point. What I know for sure though is that it’s so much better for everyone that he takes medication at this point. The day that he quietly spit out his medication and left it on his bed was telling. When I picked him up at school his teacher looked at me with exasperation as though it was the longest day in history. My boy has to live in the world and we have to live with him. All of the coping strategies, social skills, planning and organizational skills that we help him develop become so much harder if not impossible for him to implement when he’s not on medication.