Nothing Has Changed.
For a variety of reasons, we have taken Dylan off of medication completely.
We originally tried everything imaginable so that we wouldn’t have to use medication. We added and subtracted a hundred things to his diet, put him on morning exercise routines and gave him stress balls, bouncy pillows and texture strips to play with during class time.
Still, he couldn’t focus on anything the teacher said. He would just stare at the classroom fish. He took hours and hours and hours to complete just a tiny bit of homework. And he would go off to school sad, angry and lonely because he hated it so much.
Bill and I are not huge fans of medication, but I read somewhere that 80% of kids who have ADHD will medicate themselves if they don’t take ADHD medication. And that was the final straw. We put him on stimulants.
But if you’ve been following along… he can no longer take stimulants. So we had him on high blood pressure medication, which didn’t help anything. Then we moved to anti-depressants, which helped very little. Both medications were supposed to help focus (first) and secondarily help blood pressure or depression.
Neither medication did much for his focus, but a quick return to stimulants assured us that NO – he should NOT be on stimulants! But his teacher comments this quarter – they sounded exactly like the teacher comments in 4th grade – before he’d ever taken any pills.
So we’ve taken him off of everything.
And… here’s the best part: nothing has changed.
Dylan is still Dylan. He is brilliant but bouncy. He can be incredibly obnoxious. As I write, he is screaming, “Kick in the face!” and jumping around in the other room.
Oops, now he is spinning Shane around in the kitchen.
Okay, so nothing has changed since we took him off of stimulants. The new med’s have done so little, we are already used to Dylan this way.
There is nothing I would change about Dylan. He is who he is, and how he is, for a reason. But he is going to have a hard road ahead of him. Not everyone is ready for someone like Dylan. And while everyone mellows with age, I suppose, I doubt Dylan will ever be mellow.
He’s also going to remain unfocused, disorganized, fun, frustrating, anxious, beautiful, and simultaneously loud and completely spaced out to the point of silence. Heavy sigh.
We’re all in it for the long haul.