Just in case I ever wondered how much Oksana's meds were helping her I now have my answer. I can't for the life of me remember if I blogged about the problem with her meds so if I did at least this will be a reminder. When we finally got Oksana on a dose of Risperdal that really made a difference for her we also got a side effect....drooling. Massive, massive amounts of drooling. Her face was literally always wet. So much so that she had a rash all over her chin that we could not get rid of no matter what we did. We called the doctor and she put her on another medication that is supposed to help the drooling. It dried it up in 24 hours....and then shortly after she stopped urinating....a side effect of the new med that was supposed to take away side effects of the Risperdal. She was taken off immediately and backed off of her Risperdal to see if the drooling would at least decrease. They told me we would not be able to increase the Risperdal again and the next option was to move her to a different med. I was devastated because I knew the lower dose of Risperdal wasn't going to cut it. I can't begin to tell you how hard this was. For the first time in 3 years Oksana was functioning really well. Not perfect by any means but she was happy, she was learning, and she was growing emotionally and socially. It was awesome. Now we were being told that was going to be taken away. After a month or so I called them and told them that the drooling was better but it was most definitely not gone. I knew we were going to need to up her Risperdal again once school started so we needed to just do the transition now rather than doing it during school.
She is being transitioned from Risperdal to Seroquel. We are basically cutting back the Risperdal and upping the Seroquel until the Risperdal is gone at which point we will adjust the Seroquel until it is where it is working well for her. We started the transition 9 days ago with the first adjustment. Day one was very hard but days 2-6 were better. On day 7 we move forward again adjusting a little more. Oh my. She has been rude, impatient, obsessive, she can't handle the tiniest disappointment, and she is just all around obnoxious. We are supposed to stay at this level for 7 days before we take her off of the Risperdal completely and then they had better start upping that Seroquel fast!
1 comment:
Getting the right meds in the right dose can be a VERY exhausting process, both for parent AND the child. When I saw what my kids COULD do given the right meds...it was eye opening. Good luck. I'll be thinking about you.
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