Do You Realize?

Let's Try This Again...

I just couldn't stay away.  It's been more than a year since I last posted, the night before our oldest, beloved dog died of a massive cancerous lung tumor.  Some things have changed, some are the same.  What's happened since then?

Poogan died quite traumatically in my arms a few hours after my last post at the veterinarian's office.  

My vehicular bad luck continued for another couple of months.  I was rear-ended a third time, and then I was front-ended by another. Yes, you read that right. I was waiting to exit a CVS parking lot behind another car. As she pulled out into the street, I pulled forward. When she was almost completely pulled out, she braked, put the car in reverse and backed into the front of my car. What kind of moron does this? The kind whose moron boyfriend drops his keys out the window into the street while the car is moving, apparently. Only, instead of continuing forward motion & pulling into the next parking lot ten feet away, she decided to put the car in reverse & back her car back into the parking lot, regardless of the bright red vehicular obstacle in her way.

We had another full battery of neuropsychological testing for Youngest, who has gotten an "upgrade" on his diagnosis.  The new flavor of mental illness is "schizoaffective disorder."  In a nutshell, he has the distinction of symptoms of both schizophrenia and some sort of affective, or mood, disorder (in his case, bipolar disorder), and that he can experience the symptoms of both at the same time or independently of one another at any given time. I know, upgrades are usually exciting to win, but for some reason I can't quite muster up any fervor for this one. Maybe it's the raging paranoia or the complete and utter lack of ability to connect with reality, but that's just a guess.

I never did post about our experience with Youngest and the residential treatment center, but that's okay, because he may be going back. We had a slightly emergent situation arise at school yesterday, and he's spending two days at home, and we have a slightly emergent Saturday double scoop of psychiatry bright and early tomorrow morning.

After more than a year of cheating on Louis trying another purse, we replaced my Louis Vuitton Batignolles Horizontal bag.  I even tried a different style of LV bag, but I carried it for two days and took it back for the perfect bag for me, the same exact one some skank stole that was stolen.

I made Jello shots for New Year's Eve again... all different flavors this year, none of which I really remember.  I also didn't take photos because my camera was doing crazy stupid things (which were later alleviated by purchasing all-new data cards).

We still love our water-saving toilets and energy/water efficient front-loading LG Tromm washer & dryer. And I still owe a review of the washer & dryer.  And we have a new Energy Star GE Profile refrigerator to love.

We got a new really damned annoying precious puppy.  His name is Keller, as he is very visually impaired.  His name was thisclosetobeing Merkin, as he is a black kinky-haired poodle. I will gripe blog about him a lot, I'm sure.

I finally went back to college!  I'm a Cougar! (This status has nothing to do with my age or my age preference in men.)  I've been wanting to do this for quite some time now, and I'm on my third semester of part-time classes.  

I'm still a master procrastinator, and I'll still probably only post sporadically, especially when life gets crazy. Which it does quite often here.

Where in the world is Do You Realize?

I know I have been conspicuously scarce lately. Lots of reasons, few of them good.

Mostly affecting my blogging is the fact that my video card went kaput on the laptop. While I don't mind hijacking hubby's computer long enough to check in on Facebook, I really feel guilty about taking over long enough to compose a blog post.

Secondly, we've finally found a residential treatment center for Youngest. For insurance purposes, he had to spend time as an inpatient first, though, and then move directly to RTC, so for two weeks we've been caught up in insurance hassles, eeeaaarrrrly morning inpatient visitation, driving, and settling in at the new RTC.

All this will be included in a post soon, hopefully. As will my thoughts on Sarah Palin (and I have a lot of them). As will my answers for the meme for which I was recently tagged. I miss the blog, and I miss my readers (both of you)! (If anyone misses my endless wit and crazy shit that much, you can always hit me up on Facebook.)

Manic Monday--Residential Treatment

As I mentioned the other day, we are now shopping around for a residential treatment facility for Youngest. For the uninitiated, residential treatment facilities are part hospital, part boarding school for those who, for whatever reason, find it impossible to live at home, usually for six months to a year. Some of these are for drug & alcohol rehabilitation, some are for trouble-making youth, some are for patients with mood or personality disorders, and some treat all of the above.

The problem with residential treatment is that it is expensive. So expensive, in fact, that I've read reports from parents taking a second mortgage on their homes. Also, more and more parents who don't have the money have had to rely on a very tricky method of getting help for their child. These parents have to wait for their underage child to do something illegal, something dangerous enough for a judge to mandate residential treatment, but, hopefully, not dangerous enough to hurt themselves or someone else. Sounds fun, huh?

I've located residential treatment facilities online. I've only been brave enough to call one so far. Their estimate was... are you ready... $400 to $475 per day, depending upon the individual situation. Yes, you read that right. Per motherfluffing day! Six months in this place would cost almost the same as four years' college tuition. We would have to live in a cardboard box or I would have to start selling my body on a street corner for that sort of money! Okay, so I might not even be able to bring that sort of cash any more; maybe I could sell a kidney on the black market instead. Needless to say, we're still looking.

I've also discovered that residential treatment facilities employ an astounding array of techniques. Some use equine therapy, some have each child take care of a golden retriever of their own. Some use behavior modification, some employ something called Positive Peer Culture to exact change. I've even found one where the incentive for personal changes is aviation lessons! How the hell are we supposed to navigate this landscape of options? Pick one that sounds like fun, because I'm totally digging the flight lessons thing? Their websites all generously invite us to visit their campus, but by the time we did that, we could have paid for, like, a whole week at the first place we called.

It's often said that money can't buy happiness. I guess we are supposed to believe it can buy sanity instead. At $400 a day, though, I'm not buying it.

News

Youngest's psychiatrist told us yesterday that she believes that very few of the meds he is on are having any effect whatsoever. He's still cycling, regardless of the lithium, and a lot of his behaviors now are behavioral in nature. Residential treatment is next.

So that's where I've been... dealing with daily chaos and crazy. Don't give up on me. I'm like the Terminator.

Manic Monday: Reality and Authority

One of the most frustrating things about youngest's illness is his uneasy relationship with reality. Oftentimes, dealing with his rageful rants would be funny, if it weren't really happening, and happening to me. For those just tuning in, my youngest son has been diagnosed with Early Onset Bipolar Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, and an anxiety disorder; his combination of disorders makes life here interesting and uncomfortable on good days and a downright miserable existence on bad ones. Anyway, back to his view of reality. When his frontal lobe is lit up like a Christmas tree, firing neurons that rarely get fired in a normal person's brain, he can see some of the most innocuous situations as conspiracy or neglect or abuse or hate; his paranoia runs higher than a Formula One tachometer. For example, my not dropping everything I'm doing to come unlock the cabinets or the fridge (where we have to keep high-calorie, high-fat, high-carb foods, which is another post altogether) rightnowbecauseI'mstarvingtodeathrightnow means that we are depriving him of food and starving our child and worthy of a call to 911. This view might be humorous. If he were four. He's thirteen. Not funny. Any more.

His tenuous grasp of reality causes an incredible amount of parenting anxiety, not the least of which revolves around authority. Hubby & I have always wanted to raise children who could think for themselves, who could respectfully question authority, who didn't have to bend to authority simply for authority's sake. (I don't necessarily expect them to respect the authority of a seventh-grade reading teacher, for example, who does not know the pronunciation of the the word rendezvous and who cannot reliably execute cause and effect examples, simply because she is a Reading Teacher. This teacher is not may or may not be hypothetical.) Wielding Authority sometimes only requires a Job Title or a College Degree; neither of these things guarantees one an inalienable right to be respected, in my opinion.

However, and it is a large and confounding however, Youngest's poor reality testing makes this teaching impossible for him; he would simply question and reject all authority, regardless of whether said authority warranted questioning. Much as we have altered our discipline to suit each child's personality, we've also found ourselves having to alter our teaching of ideas and principles, teaching Youngest some that are not ones we particularly ascribe to, simply because he lacks the executive functioning to ask the right questions to make situation-based moral decisions. Rarely do I think that "always" and "never" are the correct choices to make. (See? Even in that sentence, I said that I rarely think that, not never.) Often, though, Youngest is capable of only such black & white philosophies that "always" and "never" creep into our teaching more than which I am comfortable. Anxiety and doubt ensue, both of which are banes of my existence.

And so, even as he barrels unwaveringly toward adolescence, we're still making stuff up on the fly. Life lessons have to be slid slyly and hastily into cracks and crevices where they would never come up with normally functioning children. Adjustments to our parenting have to be made constantly, our teachings sometimes shifting like desert sands, whether we agree with them or not. And we live with the anxiety and doubt that surely ensues.

Photo Hunt Saturday--Bright

Another week has passed, and I've finally realized what my problem is. Full-time, 24/7 care and supervision of a 13-year-old bipolar, attention-deficit, hyperactive, oppositional defiant, anxiety-riddled boy is truly exhausting. I feel sucked dry of all wit, happiness, empathy and creativity. This is a dangerous thing, I realize, since those are all of my best characteristics. When I get some wit and/or energy back, you can be certain I'll be writing again. I'll post photography to fill in the blank words.

While searching for photos for this week's Photo Hunt theme (Bright), I couldn't decide whether to post a photo of Eldest, who was bright enough to graduate and be accepted to UT Austin a year early,

or a photo of the bright night lights of Austin, Texas,

or a photo of our toothbrushes, made of recycled yogurt cups, which I think is quite a bright idea,

or a photo of a bright morning sun as it first engulfs the branches of a tree,

or a photo of the same bright sun, sinking slowly into the horizon.

Since I couldn't decide, I used 'em all! Which one is your favorite?

Catching up...

It's Memorial Day, people. Today's post will have nothing to do with Memorial Day, or even anything terribly deep and meaningful. Please read last year's Memorial Day post for deep and meaningful; it's one of my favorite posts ever.

I spent the weekend at a Westin Resort with six of my girlfriends, getting spa treatments and mani/pedis; drinking wine, and vodka and grapefruit, and Midori sours; making some beautiful and creative jewelry; getting in touch with our inner authors; and generally letting our proverbial hair down without the company of husbands or children. Since I did that, I seem to be unwilling or unable to really get back into the swing of "real life," thus the short post. Today, I'm chillin'. Well, at least until Youngest wakes up and it's time to climb on the Bipolar Pony and ride.

Manic Monday--Bipolar Teenage Decision Making 101

Scientists have discovered that two pathways exist in the human brain to the final destination of a decision. One is the limbic system, which controls emotional decision-making, along with other "gut reaction" activities, like the fight-or-flight response; the other, the parietal and frontal cortices, which are in charge of planning and rational decision making, among other things.

In the above mentioned study, normally-functioning people were found to have both pathways, and that even they were torn (as shown by brain activity via MRI) between a choice involving some sort of immediate gratification and one involving a more logical one which would provide an even greater reward after a short waiting period (in the study, somewhere between a month and six weeks). Using my admittedly limited scientific knowledge and my slightly more efficient common sense, I've come up with a reason for Youngest's inability to make even the easiest of "right" or "good" decisions, if not a way to combat my extreme anger and frustration regarding those decisions.

I posit that, because a bipolar person's limbic system activity is often elevated and his/her fronal lobe regional activity is suppressed/delayed/otherwise fucked up, this makes their ability to make rational decisions very, very difficult, to say the least. Further, as Youngest is only just now reaching some semblance of adolescence, the cerebral fibers in his frontal lobe are still not finished developing. So, in layman's terms, his brain's road to a crappy decision is wider and well-paved, while the road to a good decision is a one-lane dirt country lane.

Last night, one such decision-making session played itself out in a fashion equally fascinating and frustrating. For a couple of weeks now, Youngest's best friend (BF) at school and Youngest have been planning for Youngest to go home with BF after their early release day this upcoming Friday. It's a bigger deal than most trips to a friend's house, because BF lives an hour away, so these trips are pretty infrequent. As personal hygiene is currently low decision on the totem pole, we've been using this trip to BF's to encourage showers. His decision to take a shower or not on school nights will directly be tied to his ability to go to BF's; more, if he chooses to miss a shower, he will have to explain his decision to BF all on his own. Until last night, he'd been doing fine. (I suspect his not having to shower on the weekend further lowered his motivation to actually get back up on that horse.)

Despite my trying to get him to shower earlier than usual, to combat the particular situation that occurred, and despite the fact that he was happily awake up until the very point of decision-making, he decided he was "too sleepy" to take his shower. He was not too sleepy to argue with me in huge, convoluted circles, mind you, but four fucking minutes in the shower was too much to ask. We tried every bit of logic and every bit of emotional impetus imaginable, but nothing was budging him. His limbic system just wanted to lay in that bed and not do a damn thing if it wasn't fun. His frontal lobe was on the picket line... "Hell no! I won't go!" Eventually, I sat on his bed and told him that since he couldn't seem to make this decision, and that BF was that important to me if not to him, I would sit and talk enough that he wouldn't be able to sleep anyway. After letting us know exactly how much he hated us for trying to sabotage his friendship with BF (WTF?!!? Delusional, table for one!), he took his shower. He spewed vitriol for about 10-15 more minutes before passing out mid-sentence. Ahhh, the fun-filled roller-coaster ride of bipolar disorder.

Manic Monday--Book Review

I've just finished reading Manic: A Memoir by Terri Cheney. I read a lot of books about Bipolar Disorder, some specifically about Childhood Bipolar Disorder, some just about Bipolar Disorder in general. This is the first memoir I've read written by someone who has suffered from the disorder for many years.

Ms. Cheney made a very important decision when writing her memoir, a decision that perfected it, in my opinion. She chose to write the book episodically rather than chronologically, preferring to give readers a realistic sense of the disconnectedness one feels when swinging from Mania to Depression and back again. Each chapter covers a different episode in her life, some manic, some hypomanic, some depressed.

The book is filled with gorgeous writing that transports me into Cheney's experience. She writes so viscerally, and with a sense of humor that belies her devastating experiences. Here is a woman who has learned to laugh rather than to cry. A couple of the many passages that I have marked:

"Terribly, terribly happy was quickly dissolving into not so terribly comfortable. How absolutely marvelous. How thrilling. Probably nobody but a manic-depressive can understand that putting on the brakes is sometimes far more exhilarating than winning the race."

...

"I was probably manic, I realized. It added up: None of the other people on safari had started bawling at the sight of two cheetahs humping. Nobody else kept standing up in the jeep and making sweeping pronouncements like, "Surely this is how God meant the world to be." And nobody else was spending all night camped out in a deck chair, expecting the stars to speak to them. But recognition of mania is one thing. Doing something about it is something else altogether."

Reading Cheney's memoir was greatly agitating for me, forcing me to move forward in time twenty years, when Youngest will be well into adulthood. It gave me a glimpse of what an adult suffering from bipolar thinks and feels and how they function (or don't function, in some cases). It didn't go so far as to give me great hope, since there were at least three suicide attempts in the 242 pages, but it makes me feel more prepared, anyway. It performed well under my personal opinion of this loathsome disease: "Have no expectations, and prepare for anything."

Pet Peeve #27

What I'm about to say is probably going to seem horrible to some, outrageous to others, but that's okay with me.

I am sick of hearing about "autism this" and "autism that" and how terrible autism is and how it is such a devastating illness with no cause and no cure and blah, blah, blah... Yeah, I get it. People with autism lead a spectacularly different life. But let's get something straight. I would trade my son's diagnoses for autism any day. It would take me about a millisecond to make that particular decision. Oddly enough, I think a lot of parents of autistics don't want pity; it's the autism fundraisers proclaiming what a blight this illness is upon the lives of beautiful children that get me.

Before you jump on the mommyblogger "she's bashing autism" bandwagon, take a minute to listen. I have no problem with the idea that living with autism is uncomfortable, strange, and confusing. But until your autistic son is specifically NOT invited to a family reunion because of his autism, don't cry to me about how devastating this autism thing is. Until you've actually contemplated the legality of future mandatory sterilization for your 12-year-old because the thought of him procreating scares the hell out of you, don't whine about how watching your autistic child struggle with making friends makes you want to cry. Until your autistic child cuts himself to see how it would feel, or tries to jump out his second-story bedroom window in a delusional manic rage, I don't want to hear about how terribly frightening autism statistics are. Autism, my friends, is like Bipolar Lite. All the quirky character flaws, none of the terrifying mood fluctuations. Count your autistic blessings. Count them one by one.

Social awkwardness? On the Bipolar menu, you get that plus a side order of frontal lobe impairment, which causes my child to actually act out or loudly voice his inappropriate thoughts.

Lack of or delay in spoken language? If your other option was a barrage of hate-filled vitriol possibly lasting for hours, then a tsunami of sorrow washing through, choking every word with despair and self-loathing, would you take that instead?

Little or no eye contact? I'd wet myself with relief if my child couldn't look me in the eyes when he tells me things I know for certain are not true, because it would mean he knew they weren't true, too. As it is, he is truly convinced of his own brand of reality, and it almost never matches the reality of the people around him. And he'll look you in the eye and tell you all of it, because it is his reality as his brain has processed it.

So, while I understand the discomfort and confusion surrounding parents of kids with autism, I don't feel sorry for them. Maybe I'm too busy feeling sorry for myself some days.