Up and down, and up and down, and round and round. This has bee life recently with Oksana. Last I posted I had realized that I had made a mistake in her meds and she was not getting the amount she was supposed to. Can you imagine my relief when I realized what a simple fix it would be for the behaviors I had been seeing to disappear? She had been on the same dose of her mood stabilizer for 8 months and had experienced great stability. When I realized our mistake I knew that going back up to her normal dose would bring that stability back.
I was wrong.
We went back to her normal dose on a Monday night after realizing our mistake. While we waited for things to get better I watched them get worse....or maybe it was the same but just felt worse. Her behaviors were disturbing. Without hashing it all out here I will say that things had escalated to the point that her therapist became extremely concerned. For the first time ever we had to put a baby gate in front of her door while she slept because we needed to hear if she tried to get up since we couldn't trust what she would do. At this point the biggest fear is what we will see when puberty hits and she is bigger and stronger. Right now I can handle her physically, but she is rather tall and it won't be long before she is taller than me. Her therapist had us put a safety plan in place so that when we need it we have it. For example, we had to consider how to keep the kids safe. We now have a code word and when we say it the boys know that means that they are to take Anya downstairs and not come back up until we say they can.
We did another increase of her mood stabilizer on Tuesday evening and by Friday we had a different child. She is happy, playful, and she can handle correction without becoming violent. I hope this is the beginning of a good stretch of stability again.
We are still learning and still very early in the life of a family living with mental illness. I'm learning that this is the roller coaster with no end. I'm also learning to truly enjoy the stability and to understand that the behaviors that come with instability are not a reflection of who Oksana is but rather the influence of her illness. That has really helped us to love her through some rough behaviors and not take offense to what she says or does. That is easier said than done but we are learning!
4 comments:
You might want to look into seeing if there is a NAMI Basics class in your area. If is for families with children with mental illness.
Cassandra, we did Basics back in the spring and it was AWESOME! Thanks for making sure I knew about it :).
How are Clayton and Evan handling all this? Maybe you could talk about that sometime? If you think that is invading their privacy then maybe you could talk about it as "a friend's kids"? I think knowing how siblings adjust to mental illness in the family would be helpful.
Rosedel that will be my next blog. Thank you for the suggestion!
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