Having spent a good portion of my life as one of those organic hippy types in LA, putting my young son on powerful medications was a very difficult decision. I was so torn. Finally, I asked my friend Gerald Coles what he thought. He told me that what mattered was the quality of Marcus's life. Was his disability negatively impacting his quality of life? If so, then medication may help. That answered my question. The quality of his life was definitely impacted negatively. By kindergarten, he was being suspended from school (totally illegally by the way), bullied, and, in the end, isolated from his peers in a converted closet with a paraprofessional. This process will be another episode, but suffice it to say now that he was being damaged.
We started with clonidine as a way to deal with tics. But, tics are the least of his problems. It's the OCD that most affects his life. The first anti-anxiety med worked for a while but then increased his aggression. That was a big mistake because aggression was already a huge deal. The day the museum called the police and paramedics because he lost it (huge tantrum that included destroying the manager's office and peeing on his chair) was the last day he was on that med. He's been on increasingly higher doses of Zoloft since.
Unfortunately, things got much worse as he got older until our amazing Tourette's doctor, Jonathan Mink (a hero), was stumped. The story of how we ended up in the child psych ward at Johns Hopkins will be another entry, but we left there a month later with Marcus on the some of the scariest and most powerful medications yet. He now takes clonidine, Zoloft, Haldol, and lithium. No drugs for ADHD since he's the same "bounce off the wall" kid on or off Ritalin.
All this to say the medication decision is difficult and ongoing. As he grows (at thirteen he is six feet, 225) and develops, dosages change. Behavior and emotion change as well. Some medications stop working or work badly and need to be changed.
Change. That one word pretty much covers life with Marcus. Plus change, good or bad, is bad to Marcus. Yet change in inevitable. You get the idea.
We started with clonidine as a way to deal with tics. But, tics are the least of his problems. It's the OCD that most affects his life. The first anti-anxiety med worked for a while but then increased his aggression. That was a big mistake because aggression was already a huge deal. The day the museum called the police and paramedics because he lost it (huge tantrum that included destroying the manager's office and peeing on his chair) was the last day he was on that med. He's been on increasingly higher doses of Zoloft since.
Unfortunately, things got much worse as he got older until our amazing Tourette's doctor, Jonathan Mink (a hero), was stumped. The story of how we ended up in the child psych ward at Johns Hopkins will be another entry, but we left there a month later with Marcus on the some of the scariest and most powerful medications yet. He now takes clonidine, Zoloft, Haldol, and lithium. No drugs for ADHD since he's the same "bounce off the wall" kid on or off Ritalin.
All this to say the medication decision is difficult and ongoing. As he grows (at thirteen he is six feet, 225) and develops, dosages change. Behavior and emotion change as well. Some medications stop working or work badly and need to be changed.
Change. That one word pretty much covers life with Marcus. Plus change, good or bad, is bad to Marcus. Yet change in inevitable. You get the idea.
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