« Under my skin | Home | Can’t get no satisfaction »
Within my heart are memories
By Me | August 5, 2005
Gino and I went to see David this evening. He still doesn’t seem to want much of anything except to come home.
Well, that’s not entirely true. He asked for pictures of us all. And he said when he comes home, he wants a chocolate milkshake and an evening of Diablo II with all of us.
The doctors are changing his meds and right now he’s in an in-between stage, where they are weaning him off the one medication (risperdol) while slowly easing him into another (clonodine, I think). The one dose is down so low that it’s not doing anything anymore. The other dose is also below the point at which it is therapeutically useful. The result is that we’re seeing what David would be like if he were not on any meds at all.
I’ll tell you, it’s a very, very scary picture. Almost like he wasn’t there.
We found him sitting at a table in the lounge with a half-played game of Monopoly in front of him. He and another patient had been interrupted in the game and David was waiting for him to return to it after visiting hours. He sat and rocked. He worked his jaw repeatedly, as if he were chewing something. Sometimes, he responded to what we were saying to him but he was basically pretty quiet.
When you watch his eyes, it’s pretty clear that he is seeing all kinds of things (and maybe hearing things, too) that aren’t really there. There were little things. I watched him remove a hair from the table in front of him, watching it very, very carefully, and I wondered what it was that he saw. He spent several minutes pushing a “Get out of jail free” card under the game board and pulling it back out again, back and forth, back and forth. Again, I wondered what he saw as he stared at it.
Gino said to me as we drove home that David must be scared out of his mind, and he was right. As the meds wear off, his “enemies” — the people he sees and hears who tell him terrible things and try to convince him to kill himself — are getting stronger. Just the fact that the hallucinations are getting worse must be terrifying for him.
Everybody keeps telling him that he will only be there until the doctors get him stabilized on the new meds and those hallucinations will stop. He only sees them getting worse and so, I guess, he probably does feel like the doctors won’t be able to do what they say. If he has to wait for them to finish doing something they can’t do then, he must think, he’ll be stuck there forever.
My poor baby.
Evidently, the new med can have some pretty serious side-effects. There is a danger of dramatically lowering the white blood cell count, so that by law patients are required to have blood work done weekly for the first six months. David is scheduled for blood work on Monday and then, if everything is still okay, they’ll hike the dose again and David may start feeling some relief.
His 18th birthday is next Friday, the 12th, and we’re all hoping and praying that he’ll be home by then. For my part, I think I’d just like him not to be so very frightened and sad anymore. I want so badly to give him some comfort and I can’t. That’s really the hard part.
Topics: Special Needs |
3 Responses to “Within my heart are memories”
-
Archives
August 6th, 2005 at 12:24 am
I’ll add my prayers to yours, Dawn…
August 6th, 2005 at 11:26 am
I hope he’s feeling a little better today than he was the last time you saw him…
My heart bleeds for you!
August 6th, 2005 at 2:02 pm
wow, i can’t believe how strong some people are. i hope all is well for him. did the doctors say when he would be completly on the new meds? how do they think it will affect him? will he be doing alot better? keep us posted.