Adventures in Medication

When I say adventures boy do I mean adventures and then some! You think back to all the testing that has been done over the course of 6-7 months. All the pre-therapy session you went through just to get a diagnosis that no one in the psychiatric community wants to give a child. Bi-Polar Disorder. Pediatric Bi-Polar Disorder. Now that they swallowed that bombshell; what medication options are you looking for? Who knows? I certainly had no clue. Can we stabilize his mood swings? Flash forward to what first prescribed. Abilify. New to the market. Doesn't cause weight gain and different from any prescription for bi-polar disorder. One problem no solid clinical trials on children. So we give it a go. Within a month we changed the dosage and wham!, a full on manic episode in school no less. Back to the drawing board. Next up Risperdal. The nightmare from hell. We would deal with this nightmare for close to 2 years. The main problem was the weight gain. The medication causes weight gain and causes in increased appetite. The weight did not increase slowly at all, it increased very rapidly. He was your average 6 year old boy with a who wore 7/8 boys. Trying to control a child's weight proved to be difficult. By the end of a 6 month period my son was now wearing a size 32 men's (his older brother's clothing). He would be self conscious about his weigh. All the while I am arguing with his meds therapist that he needs to be switched to a different medication. The medication is working they said. But at what cost I asked. The more we talked about it the longer he stayed on the medication. He wasn't happy with himself. Finally, I switched offices and started to see a new meds therapist and I brought up my concerns to her and thankfully she agreed with me and couldn't understand why he was being kept on the Risperdal. She also agreed with me that 1) the medication itself caused weight gain (without the increased appetite) and 2) the medication increased the appetite. They were two separate side affects. {{It would be years later that we would hear all the warnings about Risperdal, being linked to weight gain and Gynecomastia}} Finally a voice of reason. Next up would be Trileptal. Along with Clonidine (to help with sleep, which later would be replaced with Melatonin tablets) and Vyvanse (to help slow the mind down, though he is not being diagnosed with ADHD). This medication would be the protocol for several years. The Trileptal would see several increases to help with the mood swings. There would be "breaks" in medication. I kept his therapist informed as to when he was stopping and the duration of each break. We were testing the waters because ultimately the goal was for him not to be on medication. No one ever said, hey this is an unrealistic goal you have. Not once. We would work on everything that needed to worked on in the short time that I gave it. I wanted things completed before he got to high school. {{{Foot Note: The goal was complete 2 years a head of schedule. It took work but we did make it.}}}