Skip to main content

Clonidine

(4ml prozac at 4pm and 1/4 pill of clonidine at 7:30pm)

Today has been an emotional day. Mike and I are trying to figure out if the clonidine is right for Ewen or not. Mike thinks that it isn't because Ewen tried to come home from school today because he was so tired and feeling bad. Then he refused to go to soccer because he said he was too tired to handle the conditioning part of practice. We were very worried and upset and Mike and I talked about taking Ewen off all his medication. Maybe he would be better if we did that?

But tonight while Mike was taking our youngest to gymnastics, I talked to Ewen on the trampoline and he said that the clonidine doesn't make him feel sad like the propranolol and the guanfacine did. He said it just makes him tired, not sad. I told him that he has to tell me if it starts to make him feel sad. It must not be that great though since he wanted to come home from school. Apparently he sat in the office for half an hour then went back to class.

Mike and I observe different things. Mike said that Ewen isn't connecting properly with his friends anymore except when it is over video games, and that he has been feeling bad since he started taking the clonidine. He said that he has been a jerk to him and doesn't want to do anything uncomfortable like when he was anxious all the time. I see that the tics have gone down and that Ewen is finally able to relax a bit and sit without his body going nuts.  I see that the medicine makes him tired because it has brought down his blood pressure and of course he doesn't want to put himself through soccer conditioning right now with competitive running.

Ewen told me on the trampoline that he likes how the clonidine makes him feel and that he wanted to keep taking it. So I guess we will keep giving it to him. He gets the tiniest amounts anyway.  I'm tired of worrying about it. If it makes him feel better then we will give it to him in small and hopefully safe doses. I read that the tiredness resolves itself in a week and a half. The thing I am watching out for is depression. I'm not letting my guard down with that and I made Ewen promise me that he would tell me if the medicine was making him sad.

I still wonder if we should wean him off everything but we are so frightened of him going back to how he was.

On a personal note, I was so worried this morning while he was at school, that I found I could't work or clean or focus on anything productive at all. It was awful. I decided to call my doctor and she called in a prescription for Effexor. So now I will be taking new meds too. The only reason I want to do it, is so that I can be a good parent through the face of all this stress. I'm tired of being paralyzed by fear and worry when I need to get things done. I also know how much better I feel when taking the Buspar and how much better my oldest daughter is doing on the Buspar so not all meds are bad. So I am inclined to keep Ewen on his medications because they are making him feel better. I just hope it is the right thing to do.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Spring Break 2017 Update

4ml Prozac, 500mg Zithromax 3x a week, 1.5 mg melatonin, less than a quarter of Clonidine Ewen is doing well. Right now he is vacuuming and mopping the whole house (all 850 square fee lol) To earn an hour of screen time playing Overwatch. We have had a few hiccups. He got in major trouble in school for hacking into the computer and writing silly things on a class web page. He said he didn't realize he would get a referral and get in so much trouble since he wasn't hurting anyone and would never bully. He also dropped his grades because he was too busy having fun with his friends. So Mike and I had a meeting with his teachers. He now has a 504 plan since he has had lots of absences.  We are paying close attention so that we can make sure he completes his assignments. Last month he was having trouble with tics (mostly huffing) and anxiety and so his pediatrician put his Zithromax up to 500 mg every day for a full week. That completely helped and was amazing to get him back

The Chair of the Pediatric ER Wrote Back!!!!!

Ms. ....... Thank you very much for bringing your son’s case and experience to our attention. First of all, I hope that Owen is still doing much better. I absolutely understand how devastating this could be in terms of a missed opportunity to appropriately diagnose. I have to say that in reading your email and updating my knowledge about the condition, I could see how it may be quite difficult to make a diagnosis accurately in an Emergency Department setting and I could see why things occurred in the manner in which they did. That said, I am very sorry that we let you and your family and your son down in this way. Our Pediatric Emergency Department are staffed by a group of very expert pediatric emergency medicine specialists trained in some of our nation’s leading teaching institutions who I was able to recruit here to ...........  to take care of our community. I know that the fact that we were not able to expeditiously diagnose your son’s condition caused a great deal of an

Good Day Good Summer - And My Oldest

(Just under 4ml prozac) Ewen has been doing fantastic. He has been hanging out with my sister and her family and talking and engaging with them. He has gone in the pool several times at his own will. He fell asleep on his own tonight and said that he felt rested and happy to fall asleep. I love that. His facial tics ( new nose twitch too) were in full form tonight. But he didn't huff. Maybe he traded the huffing for the nose twitch. My oldest (age 13) is going to a girls indie music camp this week. It is from 9am-5pm and on Monday when I picked her at 5pm up she started sobbing in the car and said she didn't know why. She said she loved it  but it was too long. I guess it was too much because she had to socialize for 8 hours (she has autism) and that was a bit much for her. Then she cried while trying to go to sleep at bed time and cried again at 4am. She was so depressed that I had to sit up with her at 4 and I got out her old baby books like Goodnight Gorilla and Goodnigh