Square one

As in, we're back to it, apparently.

Our beloved Dr. H, the boy's psychologist who is also Doctor #1 in the scenario below, dropped our insurance in December, thus leaving the boy without a therapist. Fortunately he has MOSTLY been okay, apart from some weirdness at the end of December/beginning of January (in the form of violent ticcing), so there's no huge hurry to find him another. But, you know, it needs to be done.

Doctor #2, the child psychiatrist it took 6+ months to get the girl in to see, has dropped our insurance as of this month. This is fairly devastating because we REALLY liked him, and so did the girl. There are precious few child psychiatrists in this town, and fewer of those are taking new patients, and fewer of those have waiting lists less than a year long, it seems. And now, EVEN FEWER of them are on our insurance plan, which apparently all doctors everywhere HATE, but we have no choice because it's the only one offered by DH's employer. I think perhaps a letter to his human resources department is in order.

Anyway, the upshot is that now we have no one other than the pediatrician who can prescribe meds for the girl if/when she needs them.

DH and I had a long talk about Doctor #3, another child psychologist who was set to test the girl, and realized that neither of us really liked him much at all. Or rather, he did not inspire confidence in us. Many of the comments he made during our initial visit led us to believe that he does not really keep himself up to date on the current literature, and there's no way that can NOT affect his testing of the girl. So we canceled it.

So.

The goal is to find a therapist sometime in the next couple of months (i.e., before school is out for this year) for BOTH kids and get started on some behavioral therapy. The boy still has the occasional perseveration issue, and the girl needs to get mastery over her wildly swinging emotions if at all possible. A secondary goal is to find someone to test the girl before school starts up again in August. We still don't know what it is that she even HAS. It would be nice to pin that down so we can start targeting it instead of taking this scattershot approach to helping her that we've been taking so far. We are looking for the full battery of tests, including learning disorders, so we need that info before she starts school.

SO FAR, she has been on a mostly even keel since winter break. She's having a good school year and I hear less and less every day about kids being mean to her. And the boy has been doing really well, also. His weekly meetings with the school counselor help with that a lot, and we are having a meeting after spring break with both his current counselor AND the new one he will have when he switches schools next year. Of course, over the summer he won't be seeing either of them, which is why we want to find a therapist before then.

In essence, we are taking a little bit of a breather before we launch into the therapist search YET AGAIN.

It's hard to look beyond that right now.

Car trouble

Imagine you have a car that you absolutely love. It's completely unique -- no one else has one exactly like it and you can't believe it's really yours. You feel so lucky to have it.

Imagine, however, that the car is making a weird noise that you know it's not supposed to be making. It sounds absolutely horrible, like it's going to fall apart, and the longer you have the car, the worse the noise gets.

So suppose you take the car to a mechanic. But when he tries to take a look at the car, he can't get it to make the noise. You try to describe the noise to him, but he can't really tell what's wrong with it from your description and nothing is showing up on the diagnostics.

But the car is still making the noise, and you're getting more and more worried about it, so you try to take it to another mechanic. However, you're having a hard time finding a mechanic that actually works on that type of car. The ones who do have a waiting list several months long. Meanwhile the noise is getting worse, and you're hoping the car doesn't just up and die before you can get someone to take a look at it. You try reading books about cars and all the different things that can go wrong with them, but you're not a mechanic so you really have no idea what to do to fix it.

When you FINALLY get the car to another mechanic, he can't get it to make the noise either. So you go through the long process of getting the car in to yet ANOTHER mechanic, and this one ALSO can't get the car to make the noise. Every person to whom you try to describe the noise has a different idea of what might be wrong with the car, but nobody knows how to fix it. Meanwhile, the noise is just getting worse and you're worried sick about your car.

That car is the girl child. Yeah, that's right -- I just compared my daughter to a car. It's the best analogy I can think of for what we're going through over here.

We have been to three doctors so far. Doctor #1, a child psychologist, told us she met the diagnostic criteria for pediatric bipolar disorder and that we might want to consider medication. Doctor #2, a child psychiatrist with a 6+ month waiting list, isn't convinced she really is bipolar and doesn't recommend medication at this time. He thinks she might have an anxiety disorder along with something called cognitive distortion. Dr. #2 referred us to Doctor #3, another child psychologist who is going to test her but who thinks she might just be depressed because he says he has never seen a child her age who was actually bipolar. This concerns Doctor #2, who by the way might be dropping our insurance plan like IMMEDIATELY, which would mean we would have to find ANOTHER Doctor #2 and possibly another Doctor #3 to do the testing. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Meanwhile, the girl child is still WHATEVER she is. She's actually been on a fairly even keel lately, but she goes through definite cycles so the chances of her being in crisis again at some point are pretty damn good. The puberty clock is ticking, and I worry that if we don't get her diagnosed and get some sort of therapy or treatment plan going before those hormones hit, she is going to end up in the hospital with a social worker and God knows what else.

So that's what's been going on over here, pretty much. In case you were wondering.