Backtracking to my previous entry.
Our family is all too familiar with neurology gone sideways.
We have family members on the autism spectrum. God knows how many times we’ve dealt with depression and panic attacks. We’ve got ADD and ADHD. One of my great uncles was institutionalized with schizophrenia back in the 1960s. We’ve dealt with multiple varieties of epilepsy, some life-threatening. I personally have an unexplained hole in my brain, discovered about 20 years ago while looking for something else.
And so on.
You get the idea.
I haven’t shared a lot of this with anyone, certainly not to this extent. It’s not because I’m ashamed of it, or because of societal mental-health stigmas (which are just stupid imho). It’s more a case of it being so prevalent, we deal with it as a normal part of life. I don’t mean we ignore it: I mean we all know what to do, how to deal with it, etc. It’s our “normal.”
Last week, however, our six-year-old grandson became too much even for us to handle, His episodes have grown progressively worse — more violent and more frequent. He has an obsession with death and with blood. My poor daughter is exhausted and frightened that either he’ll hurt himself, he’ll hurt someone else, or she’ll hurt him while trying to control him when he’s gone berzerk. It got bad enough we called 911.
A few specialists later, we have a diagnosis of bipolar disease. And while we obviously aren’t happy the little guy has such a life-impacting syndrome, we all breathed a sigh of relief to finally know what we’re dealing with — and to have a plan of action to deal with it.
On a less dramatic score, I’m mighty grateful my daughter is able to help out. There are some nights after work I’m too exhausted and/or in too much pain to function. My daughter has taken over most of the cooking and a lot of the cleaning.
Obviously she can’t do much when the little guy’s having an episode, but during his calm periods she can and does do her share of what needs to be done. Now he’s on meds and we’re seeing improvement, she’s stepping up more – and so is the little guy! For dinner tonight, we had French bread pizza he assembled. He enjoyed it, his mom was happy to let him help, and the end result was wonderful.
Big win, all around.
I’m glad you got a diagnosis and there is medication to help. I hope he continues to improve. The pizza sounded delicious and I bet he was proud to have helped.
He was very proud to have helped – and did a terrific job.