Shortly after my DD #2 began medication to try and help her control her anger and behavior issues, I found out what "the lesser of two evils" truly meant. Medication can do several things to the body as a whole. It can help it (make behaviors better) or it can hurt it (make even more behaviors or make the ones present worse). My DD #2 was very much a "tom boy", the dirtier she was the happier she was. I was forever trying to get her out of the tree she would try to climb or down from the celling (and yes I do literally mean the celling). Her favorite pass time when the weather wasn't being nice, was to straddle the hallway and shimmy herself up to the celling. Now if you have never seen this done or don't understand what this is, imagine placing both of your hands on one wall and both your feet on the opposite wall, then you slowly "walk" up the wall towards the celling. Once she had her back against the celling she would do a "count down". When she hit "blast off!" she would pull in her arms and legs and "fly" to the floor. Once she caught her breath she would repeat the process till I physically made her stop. These type of behaviors got worse when she was placed on her first medication for what they called ADHD (she was misdxed with this when she was 7 years old).
I began to see behaviors that I thought I would never see in her, like "flying" wasn't bad enough. One day shortly after she began her medication, I had gone to the bathroom and on my way there told my DD #2 not to "fly" while I was gone, she had to wait till I came out of the bathroom. Well she followed what I said about "flying" but she was not in sight 1 minutes later. After I looked around for her and even opened the door and hollered for her (thinking she went outside) I hear from behind me "I right here mom". I turned around and to my surprise she had climbed up my half wall and was standing on top of my six foot refrigerator with my 10 inch carving knife, holding it out like it was a sword. I frantically went over to the refrigerator demanding the knife and she proceeds to tell me "no, you cant have my sword! I a pirates, stick um up". If the situation hadn't been so dangerous I would have laughed my fool butt off and explained to her that pirates don't say "stick um up" they say "on guard". I don't even remember how I got her off the fridge without anyone getting hurt but she never did it again, thank God.
One medication down and on to the next one. Another common se (side effect) to some of the medication is drowsiness or what I like to call zoning or zombiland. Now like a lot of medications you need to allow your body to adjust to it before some of the se are no longer seen, usually about 2-4 weeks or more. This zombiland is what we experienced with her second medication and when that se was still there a month later just as it was the first day, I knew this wasn't the right medication either, this was no longer my energetic DD #2. After the third trial of a medication had even worse se (she would scratch her face to the point it bled, I stopped trying the medication route. I would take my chances with her behavior's getting worse before putting her and the whole family through anymore.
It was years before I looked into some new medication but in the mean time I tried different ways to cope with her behaviors. I tried the age old sticker chart of chores and good behaviors. For every day she got the set number of stickers, she would get a prize and for getting 3 stickers in one week she got another prize, so on and so forth. This only worked on her "good days" though and always made sure that her minimum number for a sticker was things she did everyday anyway like brushing her teeth, brushing her hair, making her bed....To some this may not seem very logical to give her a prize for things she does everyday but this showed her that she could do it if she put her mind to it. On her bad days even logic gets thrown out the window in the minds of someone with MI. These simple tasks of doing the sticker charts only works on younger children.
Years later, my DD's # 1&2 are now teenagers and my hands are tied on what will work. Constantly grounding them or taking away privileges just plain does not work, specially when they are the same size as you. The older the person is the less likely things will work if they do not see the sense in doing it. They have a mind of their own and as a typical teenager, they know everything and we as parents, know nothing. We don't understand what they are going through and we can never help them. Oh how I would love it for my DD's to be able to see things through my eyes and with my heart and my knowledge both as a parent and as a college graduate with a Human Services degree. Knowledge doesn't prevent all things, it just helps to know what is going on.
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