Adjustment Period

Monster Man has been going through a bit of an adjustment period.  About three weeks ago, he started taking Clonidine to help control some of his tics.  The hope is that by controlling the severity of his tics, we might be able to control some of the excess stress that builds up and leads to a rage episode, resulting in better control of his rage.  We were told that it would take over two weeks before we start seeing results.  So far, we're not sure if the results we're seeing are an improvement or not.  Some of his tics have seemed to decrease, but others seem to have increased.  He also seems a little more 'jumpy'.  His anxiety level is higher, but we're not sure if that is related to the Clonidine or not.

This past Saturday, we left for a camping trip to the mountains.  Sometimes, he seemed much better than he previously would have.  In the past, he's been very nervous going over the mountain roads, afraid he'd fall off.  He didn't seem to have those fears this time.  However, he was jumping a little more at noises he heard; was very sensitive emotionally, sure we were yelling at him if we got onto him even the slightest bit (calmly, even) for misbehaving; and he started ticcing uncontrollably one night while we were out to eat - worse than we've ever seen him tic.  He had gotten upset because he was ticcing a little and noticed someone was watching him.  The stress from being stared at caused him to start ticcing 100 times worse.  I took him outside the restaurant, where I held him in my arms while he cried until he was able to calm down enough to get back in the restaurant and take his anxiety medication (Hydroxyz HCL).  A few minutes later, he was happily drawing again.  Seeing him struggle like that was so hard on both me and my husband.

We haven't seen any further episodes like he had that night, but we're keeping an eye out to see if he has any other signs of worsening.  We're also keeping our eye out for signs of improvement.  We're really hoping that this medication will help improve Monster Man's symptoms.  He'll be heading for some therapy soon, too (I wanted to hold off until we know how the medication is helping him so that we can include that information in what we talk to the next doctor about), and we're hoping we might start seeing more signs of our happy-go-lucky little boy again.