tammyjh
New Member
I've posted before in the past but have trouble sticking with posting.
I'm Tammy and my difficult child is my oldest daughter, Abigail who is 14. When she was a baby, she had a seizure disorder that didn't respond to medications so she had a surgery in which the two halves of her brain were disconnected from each other and a lot of her right hemisphere was removed (temporal lobe, and quite a bit of her parietal and frontal lobes). On the whole, she does fairly well but due to surgery, she has a lot of symptoms similar to Asperger's and ADHD. She's very immature but articulates very well so she seems to function on a higher level than what she actually does. She has a full scale IQ of 72 with the verbal being higher than the performance. The predominant problem is and always has been the mood. In the last year, she's had 3 hospital stays...one being a developmental disorder unit and the mood keeps deteriorating. Her hospital stays were due to depression and she was caught trying to cut herself with scissors on the bus last year. It seems the depression is under control but her irritibility is not. We've always known that it would probably escalate to physical aggression, which it has. Her frustration tolerance is very low and she can become irate over what most people consider little things. Getting her to take a shower can be an all out battle. Things that are non negotiables are the hardest. She cannot stay home alone because she tried to run away from home one day last year and continues to threaten to try. We live in Maine and her dad lives in PA....she was going to walk to PA....and she actually believed it was doable. We've had crisis involved some and we've seen lots of dr.'s/specialists/psychiatrists/psychologists/counselors, etc..over the years. We've recently had her working with therapists at neuro rehab but thats not proving to help with much more than the PT and Occupational Therapist (OT) that she recieved at school. The ST was going to work with her on understand nonverbal communication skills and thats needed too but the biggest issue is the mood and no one seems to really want to dig in to that one. She's one that acts one way at home and another at appts. so its really hard for people to understand that we are not exaggerating when we discuss her behavior. Another thing thats hard for others to get is that she "wants" to go to the hospital and once she gets there, she's happy. So, being happy at the hospital means she's stable(to them)so they want to discharge her asap.
Anyway, its getting long and I'm sure confusing so I'll stop here for now. The bottom line is that I have a child who has little control over her moods and litte control over what she does when she's in her moods. We keep hearing how she's been given more coping skills but the problem isn't in the coping skills, its in her ability to access them and actually use them when she needs to....she can't. So, thats all for now. Thanks if you've gotten to the bottom of this and understood any of it.lol
I'm Tammy and my difficult child is my oldest daughter, Abigail who is 14. When she was a baby, she had a seizure disorder that didn't respond to medications so she had a surgery in which the two halves of her brain were disconnected from each other and a lot of her right hemisphere was removed (temporal lobe, and quite a bit of her parietal and frontal lobes). On the whole, she does fairly well but due to surgery, she has a lot of symptoms similar to Asperger's and ADHD. She's very immature but articulates very well so she seems to function on a higher level than what she actually does. She has a full scale IQ of 72 with the verbal being higher than the performance. The predominant problem is and always has been the mood. In the last year, she's had 3 hospital stays...one being a developmental disorder unit and the mood keeps deteriorating. Her hospital stays were due to depression and she was caught trying to cut herself with scissors on the bus last year. It seems the depression is under control but her irritibility is not. We've always known that it would probably escalate to physical aggression, which it has. Her frustration tolerance is very low and she can become irate over what most people consider little things. Getting her to take a shower can be an all out battle. Things that are non negotiables are the hardest. She cannot stay home alone because she tried to run away from home one day last year and continues to threaten to try. We live in Maine and her dad lives in PA....she was going to walk to PA....and she actually believed it was doable. We've had crisis involved some and we've seen lots of dr.'s/specialists/psychiatrists/psychologists/counselors, etc..over the years. We've recently had her working with therapists at neuro rehab but thats not proving to help with much more than the PT and Occupational Therapist (OT) that she recieved at school. The ST was going to work with her on understand nonverbal communication skills and thats needed too but the biggest issue is the mood and no one seems to really want to dig in to that one. She's one that acts one way at home and another at appts. so its really hard for people to understand that we are not exaggerating when we discuss her behavior. Another thing thats hard for others to get is that she "wants" to go to the hospital and once she gets there, she's happy. So, being happy at the hospital means she's stable(to them)so they want to discharge her asap.
Anyway, its getting long and I'm sure confusing so I'll stop here for now. The bottom line is that I have a child who has little control over her moods and litte control over what she does when she's in her moods. We keep hearing how she's been given more coping skills but the problem isn't in the coping skills, its in her ability to access them and actually use them when she needs to....she can't. So, thats all for now. Thanks if you've gotten to the bottom of this and understood any of it.lol