Starting Meds

Sonshine's anxiety has been just overwhelming the last couple of days. Ever since I started back to work, he's stepped up his handwashing, to the point that I have to clean soap off the bathroom and kitchen floors just about every day. There have been a rash of restroom accidents, and I've had to get up several times in the middle of the night to rescue him from where he was standing at the bathroom door, overwhelmed with anxiety that kept him from going in. One night he made it onto the toilet, but wouldn't get off because prior to getting on he had knocked the soap pump into the toilet. He'd bravely retrieved it before using the toilet, thank goodness, but he was overcome with distress thinking about how he now had nothing clean with which to clean his hands.

On Saturday it reached an apex; Sonshine crossed the line from merely having to be rescued all the time to being a danger to himself and others. He became hyper and then manic. He constantly sought sensory input, ran his feet all over everything, jumped off anything more than a foot off the ground (and more often the higher it was), crashed into the childproofing gates, and spent the entire day alternating between whining and making anxious little sounds that he thought were words (and which might have been understood only by Curious George), which are like trying to talk without moving his lips, teeth, or tongue. Finally, unable to keep him safe in the house, I put him in his room, where he promptly pulled over a dresser on top of his little brother.

Sunday I kept him home from church. I let him writhe around in a puddle of fabric. We talked about the medieval campout and what it would be like. He was difficult to handle, but not impossible.

This morning I made him an appointment with the doctor. As all trips to the doctor are, this one was hellaciously draining. Sonshine didn't want to go to the doctor, so there was a lot of prep work involved in just getting him into the door. By the time the doctor came in to see him, Sonshine was acting like a chimpanzee on crack. He was climbing the walls with his feet, hiding in the corner behind the exam table, pulling the cords out of the wall sockets by using them as footholds to climb, shredding exam table paper, jumping off the biohazard hamper, switching the lights on and off... and that's just the bits I remember; the rest I've already blocked out of my mind and will remember later only in flashbacks.

The doc prescribed Adderall, an ADHD drug. We are supposed to try it for a few days and stop it if we notice any of his problems increasing or his appetite disappears. He starts tomorrow and has a follow-up appointment for Friday.

Here we go.....