On a good day, parenting will test the integrity of your character. On a bad day, parenting will test your will to live. Parenting children with trauma histories will cause you to test the integrity of everything and everyone you thought you knew, for the rest of your life.
~J. Skrobisz

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Days 2 & 3 and a little more

Yesterday was a flying flop. We were outside all afternoon trying to level off a patch in the yard to put up the pool. 5.5 hours of digging, shoveling and shoving dirt around, believing it to be level and yet, now that the pool is full, it still pitches hard to one side, just as bad as last year. Which begs the question, did last year's lopsidedness warp the lining? Probably.

ugh.

and of course, sweaty, dirty and unbelievably disgusting, I didn't dare hug a soul. However, I did get in some touch time with Sissy and did what she wanted to do, which was more touching time, as it turned out. So maybe that makes up for the lack of hugs?

Today:
3 hugs
no touch time or time spent doing what she likes, but the day's not over yet.

How are the rest of you doing?
Anyone taking the time to contemplate what things about YOUR life make this challenge so hard?
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In other news:
the pdoc has taken Sissy off the regular tenex and we are now titrating her onto a controllable dose of intuniv, which is extended release tenex. I haven't checked to see if her tremors are gone but I can tell you that she'll definitely need more than the 1 mg of intuniv. After we get Sissy titrated on the correct dose of intuniv and we watch for side effects, we will discuss reducing the resperidol.

Something else the pdoc asked, that he's never asked before was "is she having any overly dark obsessions or religious thoughts?"

and I thought that was curious. Usually he asks "do you want to hurt yourself or others? Are you hearing or seeing things that others don't hear or see?" but this time he asked about the dark or religious obsessions. I answered "no" to both because Sissy's answer was "huh?"

Has anyone else ever heard of a connection between mood disorders and religious fanaticism or obsessions with cults, goth, etc? This has me really intrigued and I'm going to do some digging/researching about it. Insurance has truncated our time with pdoc to a maximum of 15 minutes so I didn't get the chance to ask pdoc more about it or I would have.

6 comments:

Jules said...

Absolutely. Religious symptoms have been recognized as a presentation of obsessive-compulsive disorder for centuries.

Integrity Singer said...

thanks Jules. Are you able to provide some links or texts to help me in my own research about this topic?

Jules said...

I think I should be able to. Give me a few minutes if you don't mind.

Integrity Singer said...

thanks Jules. Do you think we can take this discussion private? If you click my profile you'll see in the left side bar that you can click a link to email me direct.

GB's Mom said...

You are still in the challenge- that makes it a success. MK went through that phase from 14-20 years old. She was Bipolar and NOT stable. As she got stable for longer periods of time, they disappeared. Maturity or stability, I don't know. I am just glad they are gone. {{{Hugs}}}

GB's Mom said...

MK's were the dark, cultist, goth things- with a spell of witchcraft and another spell of Satan worship. We mostly ignored it, after telling her we thought she was brighter than that. At that point, she called our friends (including Booboo's father) "Jesus Freaks" LOL