When the doctor tells you that your child has a disorder with no known cause or cure, and there’s not much they can do to help, you walk out of their office for the last time.
Then you embark upon a lifetime journey of doctors and medicines and treatments and therapies, not all of them approved, not all of them legal, not all of them sensical, few of them helpful.
Even the prescribed medicines are a crap shoot. Some work well for a while then start to do the opposite. Some have side effects that are worse than what they are supposed to be treating.
All the while there’s blood work, endless bloodwork to make sure that what you are giving her isn’t making her anemic, diabetic, toxic.
Brie has been on special vitamins, she has undergone heavy-metals chelation, B12 injections administered in her butt by yours truly, hyperbaric oxygen therapy. She has had CBD, hemp, essential oil treatment,a diet free of gluten and casein. She has tried countless medicines to manage her bipolarness, her moods, her anxiety, her insomnia, her constipation, her nocturnal enurisis. Gabapentin, risperidone, mirtazapine, depakote, clonidine, trazadone, seroquel. There’s many more.
Any autism mom will tell you they have spent countless hours in the doctor’s office. Trying to find doctors who will listen. Trying to find a treatment that will help. A medicine that will relieve one symptom without creating others.
At this point, Bree is on a relatively low number of meds. She takes a pill to help her moods, one to help her sleep, a new one to try to control her compulsions. I give her vitamins to make up for her unhealthy, carb-filled diet. Some melatonin also for her sleep. An allergy pill. Sometimes something to help with constipation. And a birth control pill to regulate her menstruation.
They help. Some days. Other days no amount of drugs will keep her calm.
And I don’t blame her. All these thoughts, feelings, sensations, aches and pains going on inside her body, and she can’t tell me about any of them. So I watch her like a hawk and try to figure out what is ailing her, if anything, and what I can give/do to make it better.
Sometimes, something’s not right and we’ve got to change things around. Last week, a high blood-test reading led the doctor to recommend we wean her off the mood pill she’s been on for 13 years. So we gave that a try and, let’s just say, it didn’t go well is an understatement. So now we have her back on her regular dosage, and we have to add a pill. But the new pill may interact with another pill so I have to keep a close eye on Bree.
All the while, I am thinking that maybe, just maybe, this pill will be the one that does that trick. That erases her meltdowns, that gets her to stop hitting herself and me. That gets her to speak. That’s right, I never give up hope. Because nobody knows what causes it or how to cure it. Which means nobody knows what can help it or make it go away.
Dozens of times I convinced myself that I had figured it all out and found the therapy, the medicine that was going to make her whole. I let myself get my hopes up, and was disappointed.
There’s been studies about stem-cell transplants. The other day my brother-in-law forwarded me an article about fecal transplants. Yes, fecal. But as strange as it sounds, it makes a lot of sense for those with autism because stomach issues are super-common in our kids
The search never ends. Just when you feel like you have almost reached the Wizard, the path changes and you find yourself miles away. You start to wonder if there is a Wizard. But you never stop. You can’t. 
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