So last summer we had bug see a counselor. The match wasn't there, so a few visits in and we stopped going. This past summer we tried a pediatric psychologist and the match was much better. After some questionnaires, talking to us, and a handful of visits with Bug, she felt that Bug exhibited ADHD, Anxiety and Depression.
School started, and she went to her 7 year well check, a month after her birthday. K took her while I worked, and he called me after. He said she wasn't being bad during the visit, but was being 'her' and it drove the ped to start asking questions. The questions led him to discussing anxiety with K, to which he filled the ped in on our summer with the Psychologist.
The ped asked if we would ever consider medicating. We have been, well, not in a rush to consider doing that. It's not that we are against it, but it worries us when it comes to her age, and how it can affect her long term, how it can affect her young brain. He asked us to consider talking to a pediatric psychiatrist. The one thing that drove us to consider was he explained that with something like anxiety in a young child medication can help by helping to calm them and teach them coping skills before they become teenagers.
We decided to go ahead and meet with a ped psychiatrist, to hear it out. Rehashing everything over and over is hard. She was great, she was concerned, she listened and heard. She actually told me that we had been dealing with a whole lot, and that she was sorry that no one had listened to us, or done anything beyond what had happened so far. So agreed with the psychologist, she advised that Bug had almost all the markers for anxiety and ADHD. She said she wasn't giving the official diagnosis just yet as she wanted Bug to get Neuro Psych testing to rule out other behavioral health issues, including Autism. She doesn't feel that she has Autism but wants to rule it out, and if she does, she's very high functioning.
She thinks that prior doctors that we've tried to talk to (including a developmental neurologist) tried to look at just what 'they' deal with, and not the entire picture.
So we agreed to the testing. As she was giving us the paperwork for it, advising on next visit, and giving us some questionnaires to fill out, she also asked us to consider medication.
The testing comes in 4 parts; the first and last are parent only meetings. The second and third are 2 sessions of 3 hour testing with a 10-15 minute break in the middle. The initial first visit was going to be in March 2018, but we managed to fill in a cancellation and that first visit is now December 11.
Medication scares me. I don't want my 7 year old daughter to become numb. I don't want her to lose her spunk, lose her stubbornness, lose the person she really is, deep down inside. I want to help her, I want to help us and try to get everyone some sanity back. I want to see the little girl that she is 85% of the time instead of only 15% of the time. I want that smile, that goofiness, that love that shines from her. But I don't want to numb her.
And once we get the official diagnosis we will need to update her IEP. I need to make sure she gets everything she needs.
So now we have a monthly psychiatry appointment and a monthly GI appointment for her encopresis. Which we are getting ready to do a clean out this weekend, along with a specialized X-ray called a sitz marker test, and likely some blood work.
All in my last semester of my MBA. I'm struggling. I'm feeling very overwhelmed. Life is hard right now, and we are trying to balance it all.
And poor Bubba, he just deals with all of this. And in the midst of it all we got a call from the school (he is in the preschool program in our school system as a typical peer) that he failed 2 vision tests. They go down to 20-35 for preschool, and both times he couldn't make it past 20-50 in his left eye. So an eye appointment is set up for a few weeks from now.
But we are hanging in there. We will get there. Life will continue on and we will push through it all.
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