Now that the seders are over, I can get back to writing more frequently. I will post about our seders tomorrow, but today I want to concentrate on Avi and ADHD.
School has been a nightmare. He is basically doing nothing but coloring in his Hebrew class and in English he seems to stay with the class some of the time, but the rest he just tunes out. It is likely that next year we will move him to our local public school rather than the Jewish Day school, but until then it will be a battle.
Avi had started on 10 mg of Focalin initially, and we he was quickly moved to 10 mg of Adderall. That seemed to work for a while, but he started to get worse. In the early part of the day he seems to be ok, but by afternoon forget it.
So we moved him to 20 mg of Adderall, and he stayed on that for a few weeks, but then we started to see different behavior. He became withdrawn and moody. We felt that the 20 mg was too much. So now he is taking 15 mg. Until we get the new perscription, I am actually opening up the capsules and “eyeballing” 3/4 and then putting that back in the capsule. It takes a few days until we see results and this is school vacation week, so we may not really get results until he is on this dosage for a few days. We are hopeful.
One side effect has been loss of appetite, but hopefully with the lower dose, he will start eating more. That is the problem with these medicines. It is all trial and error. The hope is that eventually you will fine the right dosage and that he will be able to function a bit better.
Thats all for now. I hope to have better news to report as we move forward.
Phil, have you thought that it may be the actual drug he’s on? I’ve heard (though similar) they can all produce different effects. We saw similar results with Ritalin and Metadate (that Abby’s currently on), but the Metadate is better for us b/c it’s longer lasting. Good luck and keep up the good work. He seems like a sweet kid – you just haven’t quite gotten the meds figured out yet. We were blessed that it only took us 2 tries – I’ve heard of people switching 4-5 times before they find “the one”.
🙂 Laura
Thanks for the encouragement. We are thinking that it could be the meds and we are going to wait one more week before we try something new.
Hello! I saw your blog listed on ADDitude Magazine website. Just wanted to let you know I was looking around a bit. I too have an ADHD son. He is eleven and was diagnosed at the age of six. Stop by my blog if you get a chance: http://www.adhdguide.blogspot.com. Take care!
hang in there, phil. this must be so hard. i wish i had anything pertinent to add, but this is something i know so very little about. i just hope that someone can help!