rumoring about me
I’m behind on blogging, so some of the posts you’ll see in the next few weeks may seen random, but they’ve been stored in my head. Ha. Making them even more random, I’m sure…
We had a bullying situation in my 8yo’s math class.
Her grades dropped to barely a B (80) from previous straight A’s and she was disorganized, fitful, teary and argumentative.. but ONLY in this class.
Her teacher, of course, thought it was an ADHD med adjustment issue, and/or due to her bipolar mood swings, but I knew better and I pressed Abi for more information.
She doesn’t often express herself in the normal ways — her words are “parallel” to the word most people would use which makes for interesting conversations, lol, but we were able to figure out there were 3 specific children in that class who had figured out how to push her buttons and were doing just that. She said, “they are rumoring about me” putting their fingers in their ears (like they didn’t want to hear anything she said) and making faces. She was adamant that she just didn’t THINK they were, they were, they were, they were and she was highly activated and emotional about it.
We had Abigail finish a letter that I started with: When the other kids whisper and rumor about me, I feel…
She wrote in her neat little girl handwriting, i’s dotted with hearts, “I feel like I am being bullied. I want to cry. The kids names are girl, boy 1 and boy 2.”
She listed their names, first and last and we sent the note to her teacher just like that. I was impressed that she named names and wasn’t scared. So many times we sugar coat things so no one’s feelings get hurt.
The following day, I had birthday cupcakes for Abi and I intentionally showed up during math class and watched through the window and had an impromptu parent/teacher in the hallway. I pointed to the 2 kids that I had seen being rude and antagonistic to Abigail just in the 45 seconds I watched through the door window.
Turns out, those were 2 of the 3 kids Abigail had named in her note to her teacher and the situation was eradicated THAT DAY. Our teachers are amazing.
The children are no longer near Abigail and are seated so that they can’t even SEE each other.
Abigail reports no more bullying, no more tearfulness, and her behavior has improved. She now carries a 96 grade point average in math.
That’s my girl.
the inherently male ability to open jars
My husband has man-strength. I don’t mean big muscles (though he’s got those too) or the inherently male ability to open jars (or cans of worms), squash bugs and lift small children high above his head.
I am talking about a strength that many a man possesses, but few express. Not because he is too proud (though surely that’s a stumbling block for many) but because he has no need to reach deep enough, grab a hold of it, and like those small children, lift it high above his head just to get through each day.
The reality is that I’m speaking of the strength that my husband has exhibited over the (at least) past 8 months while living daily with a debilitating, devastating bipolar depression. And for a lifetime previous, suffering in silence, not knowing anything was wrong, that life could be better, that he could feel better. And feel more.
The strength that allows him to get up each morning and not only get to work on time, but drop the children at school on his way.
The strength that gets him through each day, when there was so little work we thought we’d barely make it week to week with groceries, and now when there is so much work he has to carefully pace himself so as not to be overwhelmed or agitated.
The strength that causes the words, “I’m sorry” to roll off his lips every time I kick or poke him at 2am to roll over because his snoring (a depression symptom) keeps waking me up.
The strength that creates in him a worker, so steadfast and trustworthy that God saw fit to make him the sole (or should I say “soul”) provider of a busy, expensive family of five.
You can’t buy this strength, the kind that makes a man so self-less and comedic that he would allow his wife to speak freely, openly, and frankly about a stigmatized disease (and him personally at times, like now, at meetings and at appointments and to a handful of confident friends) and even wear a shirt sporting the logo, “iSwing.”
You can’t buy it, but my husband has it. Maybe because he needs it. But mostly, I think because that’s the kind of man he is – a strong one. Stronger than anyone who knows him knows he is. I’m not even sure he knows. Hence, I think, the surprise when they discover he has bipolar disorder… “Sean? But he seems so calm and normal.” (Direct quote from unnamed person)
My husband does seem calm and normal because he utilizes day to day a strength of character, moral, and conviction that most men can only aspire to and that helps him overcome…. Much.
Sadly, Sean will probably never read this, since he rarely checks his email or Facebook or remembers to log on even if I tell him I blogged and it’s about him.
His mom will read it (Hi, Kathy) and call him to talk about it and he’ll come home intending to log in and check it out, but then Dek will want a scooter ride, Abi will need something from the top shelf (pun intended), Ellie wants to be tickled and bedtime rolls around….
But now you, the world know, so when you see him, you can tell him. Or just silently be in awe. But words spoken would be better.
plotting against round 2
In the last 99 minutes:
I….
took a shower
got ready (hair, make up, outfit, shoes, purse and backpack packed)
got Ellie ready (new outfit, shoes, diaper, hairbow, medicine)
took Ellie to a friend’s house (yea friend!)
took Abi’s glasses to her at school
took medicine and snacks to the nurse (hey, even nurses get hungry!)
met Sean at his appt (where the chart prevailed)
got him new meds and a new appt
got a walk in nurse appt at the pediatrician
called the dev ped to tell them to talk to the reg ped
so the reg ped can talk to the school nurse
so that tomorrow I don’t have to go up to the school to give Abi the new med dose
which I will do in 2.5 hours (during round 2, you are welcome Mrs. Willy — the afternoon teacher)
then I met friend (yea friend!) and got Ellie
had a quick chat in the randall’s parking lot (chat, ha, I talked her ear off for 10 minutes about the doc appts)
dropped off Sean’s Rx (to be picked up during round 2)
cashed Dek’s birthday check
put Ellie in bed (she should sleep until round 2)
switched laundry, completing one load (loads 2 and 3 for round 2)
loaded the dishwasher (to be unloaded and loaded again… you guessed it — during round 2)
cleaned the counters while my tamales heated (gluten free, wheat free, soy free, low fat pork organic tamales)
And now here I sit back in my PJ pants on the couch watching Rosie, eating lunch and plotting (against) Round 2.
people make fun of my charts
People make fun of my charts.
Don’t worry. It’s okay. Not only do I have thick skin in this regard, but I also know better… And they do it with love… well mostly love… Ha! At the end of the day, they see the light and a few of my friends (not the fun makers) have actually adopted a few chart and graph like systems themselves.
What it comes down to is this: charts and graphs are excellent ways to organize large amounts of situational specific information (that often changes over time) so that others who do not experience it can understand it. And they give us a solid picture of the past and the present so that we can forcast the future — and with a bipolar family, that’s very important.
We have had great success with our charts. We have charts for daily tasks, we have charts for discipline tracking, we have charts for daily moods, medicine regimens, work schedules, monthly commitments, and chores, and they aren’t that much different for us day to day than a daily planner. And it’s a system that every member of my family can understand regardless of age.
Doctors love them. LOVE THEM. And if you walk in with a binder, full of charts, documentation and organized thoughts, requests backed up with said charts and documentation — guess what? The doctor will write the script, the orders, and basically do whatever you ask.
Recently, Abigail was up for 39 hours. And I was up most of that with her. While she went on to school Friday to perform amazingly on all her weekly tests, I barely made it through my day, all the while thinking about how we should be much further past this form of manic episode by now. (My previous charts and mood history for her tells me so.)
Closer examination, and we conclude that (and we knew this a bit before) we had been using her ADHD meds to control some (most) of her manic symptoms and if she’s shifting out of mania and we’re still medicating (with a stimulant) for those symptoms…. It seems we are creating them now and not medicating them.
So, over the weekend, we dropped her second dose of ADHD meds. Actually during Deklan’s birthday party, we both FORGOT to give it to her.
Sunday we intentionally didn’t give it to her and I wrote notices to the school and teachers not to give it to her.
And now we observe.
What are we observing you might wonder? Well, I’ll tell you. (with a chart!!) Sean and I have been naturally watching her for years… oh you know, about 8. And so as we talked, I started typing the various “stages” or “conditions” or whatever you want to call it, of her moods and behavior. (BTW her behavior is an outward showing directly related to her mood (or other symptom of unrest/struggle) – if you don’t treat the mood, the behavior will not change. Make a note – many children work this way even without mental illness.)
We came up with 3 different areas: medicated, ADHD manifestations, and mania manifestations. And we picked a few day to day areas of functioning and detailed what we observe and experience with her in each area based on whether she is medicated for ADHD, not medicated for ADHD or in a manic episode (which the mania presented up and over being medicated for ADHD just so you know – the meds helped, but didn’t completely cover). **Forgive or read past any typos or errors, you are viewing a “internal family document” that hasn’t been edited or revised in any way.**
Since Saturday, two different times (one observed by me this morning and one observed by a close friend at the party) she entered meltdown territory – where all signs of “this will end badly” were present.. and Abigail gathered herself QUICKLY and moved along.
We’ll have to just see if the one dose is enough to maintain her focus at school and get her through to bedtime, we may end up adjusting that morning dose or adding a small short acting dose – but at least now we have drawn the line and we are focused on just treating her ADHD symptoms – any mania symptoms that show up and over this – are going to have to be treated (at this point) with a bipolar med.
And guess what – I have no doubt that our doctor will agree and when presented with this information, will get us what we need for Abigail to maintain a nice green engine and perform to the level we know she can – which is by the way – STRAIGHT A’s with the Citizenship Award for her class.
**If you are interested in discipline, mood, or medical charting – email me at abismom04@yahoo.com ** I, of course, can provide samples.
my husband swings
I’ve been blog silent and Facebook guarded for a few months. I know most of you are scoffing at Facebook guarded – seeing as I post all the time and on a wide variety of subjects – it may indeed appear to be quite “tell all” (lol) but I assure you. It hasn’t been. Not by a long shot.
There has been stuff going on in our house that is probably going to be shocking. And I’m not sharing it all. Not all at once – maybe not ever. And just know reading forward, that we are not accepting questions at this time. We also, unless you personally deal with what we are dealing with, do not need or want any advice, no matter how well intentioned it may be.
We will share, advocate and educate those in our lives at the rate that we can, seeing as we’re still learning what all this means for our family and our future and while hindsight is helpful, abundantly helpful, it’s not exactly 20/20 even now with what we know.
What the hell am I talking about?
In October 2011, both Sean and Abigail were diagnosed with Bipolar Spectrum Disorder.
And our entire line of thinking, our entire approach to Sean’s depression and Abi’s plethora of issues had to change. Immediately.
My mind is still spinning. I have broken down completely about 3 different times – once in Sean’s doctor’s office right in front of him and occasionally (read: once a week), I take some pretty hard core, fast acting anxiety meds.
It’s one thing to advocate for a child, to manage, control even, a course of treatment and medicines and to tell doctors what to do. (Yes, I actually go in and tell Abi’s doctors what I want them to do – and they do it.) And with Abigail, this diagnosis of Bipolar I actually didn’t change her course of treatment – but it will in the future. She is currently coming down out of a manic phase that lasted almost the entire year of 2011 – peaking in October and then drastically diminishing by mid November. This is actually (hindsight help) her 2nd possibly 3rd manic phase of her short little life. She’s suffered depression twice – with her first bout of depression occurring at 15 months old – mistaken for the onset of Autism.
The hardest part of Abi’s new diagnosis (though it’s a strange relief to have a diagnosis that encompasses everything – literally everything – right down to her motor control problems and her speech delays and her insomnia) is shifting away from the autism diagnosis which has lingered and haunted and become almost comforting (as an explanation that allowed us to “let things go” here and there) and now is completely wrong.
We need new goals, new routines, new expectations based on the fact that she has no incapability to learn, she is simply delayed drastically in specific areas due to the sensory issues (from atypical brain development) and the large amount of time at crucial developmental ages where she was depressed (15 months old and again at age 5) and manic (age 3 and age 7).
But advocating for a spouse is tricky – to say the least. And hindsight again – I let Sean handle his own medical care (doc appointments, medications) for far too long – specifically one month too long back in September, when the doc said she wanted to continue one specific antidepressant and I knew it was wrong but I hadn’t been at the appointment.
There’s a fine line between supportive spouse, loving partner, friend and confidant… and controlling parental figure and nursemaid. I’m crossing back and forth across that line – often rapidly with reckless abandon in a fervent attempt to keep our family functioning. I question to the point of my husband’s growing irritation. I double-check medicine takage, moods through the day, and why he’s got that look on his face. I am annoying to say the least.
But, the fact that I’m even writing this tells you that we have come out the other side – we are seeing a light at the end of the tunnel — at least for this go round.
I have attended the past 3 (and will every appt from now on) psych appointments with Sean and I am pleased that his doctor can keep up with me when I lay out how it has been, how it will be and what I need her to do. At the last appt I finally just told her no, no more SSRIs (and no more SNRIs or NDRIs either, that’s right learn your pharmacology people) – you find him something different. I told her I needed something in a different class, that worked faster – I was not going to make it another 4 weeks “waiting” on a medicine to give our family relief.
And she did.
And it’s been working to provide him with relief as no antidepressant med has worked in the past 10 years.
Written out like that, it sounds so confident, but I can assure you it’s hard, hard, hard, hard to go into an appointment like that and talk about a spouse like you do your child – right there in front of him. And I discussed this ahead of time and he said he was okay with me talking to the doc about him “almost” as if he wasn’t in the room.
I’m so proud of Sean because he really was. I mean, he paced the floor behind me with a tension and intensity that I knew was the verge of a full blown panic attack – but he trusted me to do what I know how to do and take care of him.
And the trust between us in this area continued to take a turn for the better (not that he didn’t trust me before but we are in uncharted territory – totally off the map here people) and he now has fewer flickers of annoyance at my annoying questions – right up until New Year’s Eve when he let me question him in depth about some very painful, very sore subjects as we, over the course of 3 hours, created a full emotion and life event timeline that we then turned into his bipolar cycle graph.
It covers 27 years – starting with his earliest memory at age 5… and going right up until today, with room for us to “forecast” the next 5 years.
Abigail has a bipolar cycle graph that I created about 4 months ago, but she is graphed in months starting at age 1 and going through December 2011, almost age 8.
Sean’s graph looks like a heartbeat; Abi’s a roller coaster.
Sean cycles twice as fast as Abi (from mania to depression) with 5 years in between, whereas Abi spends more time in each phase, with it taking twice as long to get from one phase to the other to complete her mania-depression cycle over several years – with only 18 months before starting it all over again. In the last 12 months, for 9 maybe 10 – all of them?? It’s a brightly colored roller coaster blur — Sean and Abi were both experiencing manic symptoms that explain… a lot about me. Ha!)
Confused? You’ve got to learn the lingo – which has taken me every bit of 4 months.
And in those 4 months I have joined support group forums for information and read as much as I can – but not so much that I melt down. Another fine line.
I have also joined NAMI Gulf Coast (www.namigulfcoast) that is the local Gulf Coast (Brazoria county) chapter of the National Association for Mental Illness, and Sean and I discussed over dinner last night forming a team to participate in the NAMI Gulf Coast walk in April.
These days, it’s almost trendy to have a child with Autism – or be on the spectrum yourself. And the awareness for breast cancer is worldwide. But you say mental illness, or “bipolar” and people… take a big step back (though probably not realizing that common ailments such as anxiety, depression, and OCD – that people often joke about fall right smack dab into the middle of mental illness).
Bipolar disorder is something Sean has lived with his entire life, and Abi as well. As a family, we’ve lived with it for 10 years – unknowingly, but not knowing was just as hard as knowing. At least with knowing, we can prepare, medicate, and forecast.
So praise God for my love of charts, my love of graphs and my superhero ability to take HUGE amounts of seemingly unrelated information and find the commonality – the pattern that can be graphed.
And praise God for the sarcastic humor my husband possesses that let him see just how funny it was that I want my NAMI walk shirt to say: My husband swings.
“This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.” John 11:4
