Moms of Boys

In my blog post in May, I mentioned that my teenage son was having trouble with anxiety. Unfortunately, those problems continue. I cannot begin to tell you all the ups and downs we have been on with this anxiety roller coaster since last fall, but suffice to say that it is hell. It is hell to see my healthy, handsome, smart, athletic, friendly son say that he doesn't have any hope. It is hell to think everything is going okay again and before you can turn around, it's going bad once more.  I can never take a breath and relax because I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak, for the next thing to happen, the next trigger to start him on a downward spiral. Right now, he's doing okay, and I finally decided to write a little something about this. There is so much in me that I need to get out, but I will settle for expressing just a little of it because I don't have the time to write it all down. I haven't written in a while. Hell, I'm surprised I remembered my password to get on this blog. Yes, it's written down somewhere on this desk, but I don't have the energy or time to look for it. 

This will be lengthy so thanks for letting me get all this out. For years David, my son who recently turned 17, was a bit of a worrier. He was a good student but had trouble finishing tests; he was a slow worker who second guessed himself sometimes, and his focusing was not ideal. I worked a lot one-on-one with him at home. David had speech therapy from the age of 3 that continued into second grade and then he went to a reading comprehension specialist. I had him tested several times, and yes there were some ADD (not ADHD but the inattentive type) tendencies, but doctors would say as long as he was happy and doing well in school, then they wouldn't recomment an ADD med until we absolutley thought it was needed. So we struggled through elementary school and middle school. During middle school, he played baseball and basketball and was very good at both; sports had always been his outlet, his source of self-esteem.  He made honor roll grades, but again, he had to work hard at it, staying up late as well as going back to finish tests. His room was always a mess, and he just couldn't seem to get organized at home. I'd clean it up, but I didn't want to be an enabler -- yet I knew he was struggling and wanted to help. I could almost sense it wasn't that he didn't want to clean the room; it was that he couldn't, just didn't have it in him to get that focused.

Also in middle school David started having indigestion. He carried a roll of Tums with him at school, to games, and at sleepovers. His pediatrician said it might be some mild anxiety. Then there was the time when some West Virginia coalminers were trapped in a mine, and news coverage was 24-7. David was mesmerized by the story and followed it until the reporters announced that searchers had finally gotten to the coal miners and that all of them were alive. Euphoria! David was happy, too. He went to bed with a smile on his face. I continued to watch, and I'll never forget Anderson Cooper's face -- how it literally fell-  when he got the news on-air that there had been some misinformation and that all the coal miners except one were found dead. I dreaded telling David that the next morning, but I wanted it to be me to tell him and not the TV. For several nights after that, David couldn't sleep. He'd come get me from my room, and I'd lie down beside him and scratch his back. He said he felt like he was in the caves with the coal miners. I thought his raction to this was extremely sensitive. I was glad that he was showing empathy, but he was taking this overboard. Looking back on this, it was one of the first signs of anxiety. 

Fast forward to his junior year in high school, October of 2010. He'd had some other mild anxiety issues (mainly some OCD habits) but nothing really bad or debilitating. Still good grades, but still going back to finish tests.  All the time. After school, before school, before practice. It was crazy. The SAT was looming, and the almighty GPA was really important that year. David came to me and said that he thought it might be time to try an ADD med to help him focus; he'd known of friends of his who had successfully taken an ADD med.  So we went to a psychiatrist to make sure we got an official diagnosis before getting the med. I told the doctor that he'd had some anxiety over the years, but he didn't seem to think that was too important. Long story short -- David started an ADD drug and did great on it for 3 days -- but then depression quickly set in. Obsessive thoughts set in quickly. Thoughts of hopelessness and even worse. The psychatrist was out of town, and unbelievably his office of 10+ doctors said they couldn't talk to me because David was not their patient. Are you kidding me?  I was livid. Turned to our pediatrician and also had him evaluated at Duke. Got him off the ADD drug and onto Lexapro, an anti-anxiety med. During all of this, I remember taking my youngest son, Jason, trick or treating, and there was a group of teenage boys being silly, going around to everyone's house singing Christmas carols. They were laughing and cutting up, teasing each other. And tears stung my eyes because I wondered if my teenage son would ever be happy again. How I wished he could be out there singing and laughing. I ached so much inside it was like the tentacles of an octupus were strangling my heart. 

Well, we got past that and the medicine seemed to help him a lot through mid-March. He had some anxiety a bit a few mornings and went into school late. Then he got better. Then in April we went to Washington, DC on spring break since David and Jason both love history (Billy didn't go because he was in college). We visited a lot of sites and came back home in time for David to play with in a tournament with his high school baseball team. He played very well in the tourament and made the all-tournament team, but the anxiety returned. He told me it had started while visiting the Arlington Cemetary in DC when he saw all those graves and thought about all those lives. David struggled through the next few weeks, but it wasn't easy. He actually took himself out of two baseball games because he couldn't focus on the game because of repeated thoughts running through his mind. Sometimes just stupid thoughts but they wouldn't stop. He started going to a psychologist for cognitive behavioral therapy, which he'd tried before, but decided to try again. This psychologist said he thought David had been misdiagnosed as ADD, and the syptoms he thought were ADD were actually anxiety symptoms. The two things can be hard to differentiate. We'd stopped going to the psychiatrist who first 'diagnosed' David as ADD because he never got in touch with me when I'd called saying David was having problems. Went to another one. Increased the Lexapro. 

A day later, David crashed. He slept all day (a Sunday) and couldn't go to school Monday or most of Tuesday. He lay in a fetal position in the floor while I made phone calls and searched for info in the Internet.  The psychiatrist said he probably had too much seratonin, the chemical in the brain that the med increases. So he came off the Lexapro.  Did well for aboaut 3 and a half or 4 weeks. Crashed again, saying there was no hope. Had him work with his 2 local doctors as well as with doctors at the UNC Children's Hospital. Put him on Prozac in early July. Recently increased the dosage, which we will have to monitor. SATs and GPAs don't seem to matter so much any more. But his senior year is before him, and I don't want his goals and dreams to suffer because of this. 

So please keep David in your thoughts and prayers as this school year begins soon. I need your prayers too as I find myself almost incapable of focusing on anything except David's problems. It breaks my heart. And there is some 'mother guilt' involved too; I wish we'd never ever tried that damn ADD medication. My husband and the doctors say the anxiety would have manifested itself anyway by some other trigger, but still . . . what if he'd never taken it?  FYI - I've also been corresponding with the prinicipal about why high school English classes focus on literature that is so depressing and dark. Last year David read at least 2 works at school that had either suicides or suicide attempts in them. Why don't we have more uplifting, inspiring literature for teens to read at this fragile stage in their lives?? I'll be working to change this.

And let me leave my fellow moms of boys with one story. There is a sporting goods store where we live that is in the basement of an old strip mall. When you enter, one flight of steps takes you down to the store and the other flight of stairs takes you up to a spa complete with massages and facials, etc. There were so many times over the past five years or so when I'd go get baseball stuff for David at that sporting goods store, and I'd look longingly at that flight of stairs up to the spa, and I'd think, "Some day I'm going to come here and go to the spa instead of buying damn baseball stuff."  I thought that so many times. 

But there was a day in May right after David got off the Lexapro and he was gearing up to play Legion baseball for the summer. He asked me to go buy him a batting helmet at this sporting goods store. When I walked in, I saw the two flights of stairs - one going up to the spa, which I gave a glance and smiled. I was so glad to be going down to that sporting goods store and buying a helmet because my boy felt like playing baseball again.