Digsite

I’ll be blogging a lot more in the next few days because I’m trying to process some new information which, if I don’t write it out, will continue to sit in my head like a giant black obelisk.   My mind is already occupied by a large tangle of dust and debris, so it goes without saying there is little room left for this giant black obelisk.

So where do I begin….

My new ‘drug doctor’ (aka psycho-pharmacologist) and I sat down to talk about a month ago for the first time.  She did the usual boring stuff… read my old chart, asked me a million questions, chatted with me for 2 hours, and then she said I’m still depressed and that there’s a chance I could have either bipolar disorder or ADD and she asked if I have a family history with either.  I answered as best I could.  The bipolar disorder didn’t make much sense to me because I know what the criteria are for that and I know I don’t match those.  The ADD was a shock, but possible, I thought.  But I challenged it anyway.  She then had me fill out a bunch of questionaires.  She looked them over while saying “Oh.. ” and “Hmmm..”.  Made me quite nervous for some reason.   They were questionaires for bipolar and ADD.  Which would I be ‘lucky’ enough to draw, right?   She then said it might be ADD, renewed my prescription for the same stuff I had been taking for depression, tells me to stop forgetting weekend doses.  That concluded the appointment and I left.

All I could think on the drive home was  “ADD, wow… this is what my kid has, not me.  Me?   Just ridiculous.  It would explain a few things… but ADD?”

A month passes and I don’t give it much more thought.  So I go back last week Friday for my next are-you-psycho-yet appointment.  I tell her I’ve been consistent with the meds this month but nothing has changed except for the absence of my usual weekend headaches.  Makes sense, no weekend withdrawal from lack of meds.  But I still can’t concentrate on anything, my memory is still shit, I’m lucky I remember my way to work every morning (I didn’t really say this but I’m adding this one here for flare), and my sleep pattern is still a shambles.  Then she blurts out “you know you have ADD, right?”   Huh?  I said she hadn’t told me definitively.  ‘Might’ was suddenly being replaced with a ‘Definitely’ and I wasn’t expecting it.  “Yes, you have ADD”, she repeated.  I said ok, highly skeptical of course.  Maybe she’s another quack.

She replaced my anti-depressants with a different type which she said should help with ADD as well, and asked me to come back in two weeks.  She never did explain WHY she thought I had ADD, I was too dazed to ask.  I’ll be asking that when I see her again in 10 days.  I need a personalized professional explanation from her.  But I can’t wait 14 days to find out what this means, the obelisk has already formed.  Between it and the meds change turning in my brain to mush while it adapted, even my dysfunction was becoming dysfunctional.

Ok so obelisk transformed into action last weekend, I’ve latched on to a new interest of the month and that’s to learn as much as I possibly can about ADD or ADHD or AD/HD.  And I know what the difference between those acronyms is now…  Obelisk will explain later.  I never did this much research when Jada was diagnosed because I think we just wanted to ignore it (at least I did) and see if she would outgrow it.  She won’t be put on meds anyway, no matter how much the doctors would like to, so what’s the point in researching it, I thought?  Structure, consistency, stay on top of her academics, positive reinforcement, give the teachers the runaround,  then hunker down and wait.  That had been my plan.

Even if I find that I don’t have ADD, I’ll come away with a better understanding that will benefit my daughter. I have already learned that the odds she will ‘outgrow’ it are very low.  Once you have it, you always have it.  If she does outgrow it, it possibly won’t be until her 30′s.  People with ADHD will either  learn to cope with it and succeed in spite of it, or they won’t.   If you can learn how to succeed, then it’s no longer considered a disorder, but a trait.

People with ADHD are at higher risk for car accidents, incarcerations, early pregnancies, dropping out of school, ending up in dead end jobs, substance abuse, becoming disconnected from family, developing depression.   So what I’ve learned already is that my original plan for dealing with Jada’s ADHD is wrong.   There is more we can do than just structure, positive reinforcement, etc, etc…   None of those things help with the ADHD itself.    There are medication-free options to explore but none of them include “hunkering down”.