And I say, sometimes it's all right and sometimes it's not.
Look at that picture. Young man—high school graduate, college bound. Smiling, well nourished. Bright, shining future. Well, if your Son looks nothing like him, you've come to the right place.
Now don't get me wrong. My son Sean is the apple of my eye. He always has been, and up to his junior year in high school 2 years ago, he could have been that kid in the picture. Now we are at a whole different juncture. His being 18 and of "legal age", well, your options as a parent concerned about his health are very, very limited.
To continue with the story of my kids from a previous post, Sean was diagnosed with clinical depression about a year ago. He didn't care about anything. He didn't care about school, he didn't care about graduating, he didn't care about taking care of himself, he didn't care about his sister or me, he didn't care about eating, he didn't care about working. All he basically cared about was sleeping and running around with his friends. My normally very funny, very personable son was turning into Mr. Hyde. Oh, he could turn on Dr. Jekyll for short bursts if he had to, but it was becoming harder and harder. He chain smoked, smoked pot. Came home totally wasted one night, where he had spent part of it passed out on my front lawn. A girl dumped him and everything spiraled out of control. Every thing went right downhill until my 5'11 inch beautiful son weighed 113 pounds, had a heart rate of 38 and a blood pressure of 90/60.
I had done everything I could think of up to this point to intervene. Doctors, counselors, psychologists, 2 different psychiatrists. I begged, I pleaded, I punished, I cajoled, I guilted, I bribed, I prayed. And then I begged and pleaded some more. Last July, I talked him into an assessment at a local behavioral health hospital. They put us in the ER because his heart rate was so low. When they released us from the ER, I took him back to the behavioral health hospital, where, even after acknowledging he was putting his life at risk, he walked out. I took him back after more talking. And he wouldn't get out of the car.
"He's 18," they said. "You can't force him."
That's a great thing to hear. You feel your son is dying and there's not a thing you can do until he 1. passes out; or 2. finally agrees to hospitalization.
Days came and went after that. Some up and some down. Mostly down. Then last week, after he slept through Thanksgiving and couldn't eat, I sat down again and begged and talked and pleaded and appealed to the one thing he has always held onto: his music. If it wasn't for music, I think he wouldn't be around anymore. But his love of music and the guitar and playing kept him alive. So I told him, how does he expect to go to music school next year if he's anorexic, depressed, and suffering from panic attacks? I refused to help him until he helped himself.
That sent us to the same behavioral health hospital that my daughter is at, where she is still in the Adolescent Anxiety/School Refusal program, but doing very well. He was assessed again....and with some quick moves and fast talking, they got him to sign the inpatient admission voluntarily and escorted him to the 2nd floor -- "High Functioning Adult Unit".
As a preview to come, when they started to walk us to the 2nd floor, Sean looked panic stricken.
"What's wrong?" asked the social worker.
"I'm going NOW?" asked Sean.
"Yes," he answered. "You signed the papers as inpatient didn't you?"
"Well, yes."
"Voluntarily?
"Well, yes."
"Then what did you think would happen?"
"Well," Sean said. "I don't want to go up there now. I'll come back in the morning and be admitted. I didn't know I'd have to go today...right now."
And he looked at me and said he wasn't going. I told him I hadn't signed a thing. They hadn't even talked to me but for about 5 minutes and I was there when he signed the inpatient agreement. I told him I couldn't do a thing. He was an adult in the eyes of the law and the hospital.
The social worker took him in a private room while Erin and I waited outside. Eventually, they got him admitted to the second floor.
That's when the real nightmare begins.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Here Comes the Son
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Emotional Rescue
I will spare you the details, but let's just summarize by saying that my two children have ended up as either an inpatient or partial hospital patient at a behavioral health hospital over the last 2 weeks.
Erin was diagnosed with ADHD when she was in second grade and I was finally able to secure an IEP for her last year after much wrangling, letter writing, meetings with the school staff and emotional pleading. This year, Erin moved to the middle school for 7th and 8th grade, and the transition has been one trauma after another. After another....until she pronounced every morning with vague physical symptoms -- stomachaches, dizziness, sore throat, headaches, muscle aches, back pain, neck pain, light sensitivity -- to name a few. I continued to try to get her to school at least at SOME POINT over the course of the day. I met with social workers, teachers, principals and asst principals. Counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians. If you have an M.D. or PhD or MSW after your name and live within 25 miles of me, I SAW you.
I spun so fast I'm surprised my head is still attached.
But finally, not through professional channels however, I opened up to several women who had opened up about their struggles with their kids. I found out about a School Refusal/Adolescent Anxiety program at a hospital that is about 25 miles from my house. After Erin had a panic/anxiety attack which resulted in her taking a butcher knife to my door frames, furniture, counter top and walls, I made an appointment and took her in immediately. They placed her in the program which is a PHP (Partial Hospitalization Program). This means that she is at the hospital every day, but comes home at night. She gets individual and group therapy, medication management, behavioral and cognitive therapies, coping strategies, expressive and spiritual exercises, as well as what they call "Exposures". This places the child in an anxiety producing situation in a safe atmosphere, and allows the other program participants and therapists to help the child work through it. The more "Exposures", the better they become at handling potential anxiety producing experiences. Erin has blossomed over the last couple of weeks and was comfortable in the program from day one. It is definitely a reassuring thing to learn there are other people just like you, struggling everyday with the same things.
They also provide team meetings and support groups for parents, which I have attended faithfully and have been a tremendous help. I'm learning just as much as Erin about how to help her cope and keep myself sane.
Here are some of the program's highlights:
"Our treatment approach includes working with your child's school, the parent(s) and other outside resources to best identify and meet your child's unique needs. Our school liaison and educational staff will work with your child or adolescent on issues such as:
* Returning to school
* Problem solving
* Time management
* Study skills
* Regulating moods such as depression and irritability
* Overcoming extreme shyness
* School phobia
* Panic attacks
* Obsessive compulsive disorder
* Goal planning"
It's a 3-4 week program and the one I found has a excellent success rate. Should your child be experiencing School Refusal/Anxiety, there is help out there. It's taken me 8 years to get to a place where I feel my daughter is really getting the help she needs.
She will be transitioning back into her regular school on Monday after 3 weeks in the program. They usually begin by 1-2 days at regular school, 2-3 days back in the program and taper from there. Keep your fingers crossed.
My son is a whole other story.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Hospital Holiday
Sure. I miss my Thursday Thirteen and then I missed the entire next weekend because I took a Hospital Holiday on Friday and Saturday.
As a rule, Hospital Holidays are awful. Food sucks, you can't get decent cable channels, no one lets you sleep and the beds are just forensic autopsy tables with a white sheet over them. Room service is atrocious and you have to sleep with strangers with only a thin sheet hanging between you and whatever bodily functions they need to discuss or operate.
The lady next to me moaned the entire time. She kept calling the hospital operator (not the nurse's station) to ask for a bedpan for her hotel room. Everyone from the hospital operator to the nurses thought she was a prank caller and no one answered her requests until she started screaming that she had an accident in the bed.
I have already put in special requests to those closest to me that if I ever get like that, they have my permission to drive me out into the country, kick me out of the car and leave me for dead.
All I wanted to do was have my tests, rest and go home. While I felt extremely sorry for her, I wanted her to remember that midnight is NIGHT and is the typical time for a trip to REM sleep, but she didn't quite understand that. Well, not until 5 am when she shut off the light, the TV and fell into a blissfully undisturbed sleep, while I was awakened by my doctors and the need to go have tests.
I wondered though, did she plan on living in the 1940's during her dementia and waiting for Errol Flynn to pick her up for their date at the Brown Derby? You know, my friends and I have PLANS for our dementia. This frightening incident awakened me to the fact that we need to be prepared for a Dementia Plan B, in case I can't remember who George Harrison is, Anne can't remember Sir Paul and Colleen can't recall who the hell that boy from Brooklyn was whom she thought was so HOT.
This is a sad state of affairs. I had been looking forward to my old age, sitting in the rocking chair, fully mentally immersed in the 1960's London music scene, with George driving us back to our house in Esher in the new mini. Now, I face the fact that I might be screaming for a nurse to deliver a bed pan to my hotel room and then rotating only these 2 thoughts: #1 -- I WANT TO GO HOME and #2 -- I DON'T WANT TO GO HOME.
And you are completely right. My roomie did nothing to help my panic/anxiety attack, chest pain and shortness of breath (my standard hospital ER diagnosis). However, the tests show that my heart is fine. My panic isn't so fine, but I'll keep working on it.
I will also contact Anne and Colleen. We must begin preparing Dementia Plan B. Perhaps I could convince Colleen that I could take the boy from Brooklyn.....
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
A Little Advice on Panic Attacks
Don’t have them. And while the mechanics of panic attacks aren’t well understood, as are most brain chemical imbalance disorders or how various medications work on them, let me tell you first hand, they suck.
I suffered from clinical depression for most of my married life. I knew it wasn’t normal for a social, generally upbeat, positive person like me to have immense difficulty just managing to get out of bed in the morning. There were days when I would take the kids to school and sit on the sofa the rest of the day until I had to go back and get them at 2:30. Sometimes I would sleep. Sometimes I would just sit there. No TV, no radio, no noise. I’d turn off the phone. I didn’t even think. My mind was just sort of shut off, like it had overloaded or something.
My panic attacks originally started when I was about 25, but they escalated after I got married. I was a bag of jumbled nerves on the verge of panic every day. Every day. Every day I was in fight or flight (or the new "chew" or "stew") response mode. And the stress would have killed me if my son hadn’t dialed 911 that day I had a heart attack. So take heed, those of you in abusive relationships. Your life may be in danger in more ways than you can imagine.
Grand mal panic attacks are the flip side of depression. While depression “turns you mentally off”, panic puts your system in revved up overdrive. I was in the grocery store one time and actually had to leave the cart of food and go home because I thought I was dying. The place was closing in around me, I was getting tunnel vision, my heart was racing, I was sweaty, cold, jittery. I was sure I was going to die. Panic attacks woke me in the middle of the night, kept me from sleeping, sometimes kept me from going out of the house. I had them in the car, in restaurants, at work. Unless you’ve had them, there’s no describing how debilitating they are. You think you are going insane.
Eventually, I started opening up to my doctor, my counselor, my friends. The years of counseling and medication, along with my freedom, did the trick for me. I still suffer from panic attacks, which we know from previously discussing Dr. Donald and all my friends in the local ER, but they are better controlled and milder. Also, understanding what is happening to you is imperative in handling them.
Panic attacks are extremely difficult to explain to those who never experienced them and like all “mental disorders” are looked upon with some mistrust. My favorite is calling into work after a night in the ER, zoned out on anti-anxiety medications.
“I won’t be in today. I was in the ER all last night.”
“Why?”
“Uh, well, I really didn’t feel well and I thought I had better get checked out.”
“What was wrong?"
"Uh, I had a panic attack.”
“Oh.”
Doesn’t have the same huumph as say, “I cut my arm off in a tree-sawing accident” or “I ended up with double pneumonia and blood squirting out of my nose”. Basically, when you say “I had a panic attack” people think you’re just nuts.
But I think things are changing. At least I can hope so.
Now I’m not suggesting that any one thing…divorce, meds, counseling…is better than another to make your life livable again. I’m saying you need to find what is going to help you save your own life and begin enjoying who you are, who you have, and where you are going. When you are depressed, life has no meaning. Especially your own. You need to hold onto something and fight for yourself. You are important to so many.
My only advice? Hang onto friends, hang onto your family, hang onto your career, hang onto Barry Manilow, hang onto Star Trek, hang onto whatever you need to, get medical advice….and don’t give up. Remember, you are worth it.
If you forget…come back. I’ll remind you.
