Yesterday was NOT a Good Day!

Yesterday was not a good day for Elijah. As you may remember, I posted about him having some bad days in the last few weeks. He bit another student about two weeks ago and then again this past Wednesday. He spent a day in suspension at school on Thursday. Well, yesterday morning he was already in a mood before he got on the bus. He then went to school and basically spiraled out of control. I got a phone call around 8:30 letting me know what was happening and that he was not calming down. I was asked to come and get him.

Unfortunately I work 40 minutes from him and had driven another 20 minutes away to check on some students, so I was an hour away. The principal understood and told me that she would keep him "safe" until I got there. That told me a lot! I called in to work and told them I would be taking off for the day. I had to call someone else and see if we could reschedule an IEP meeting because I had no one else to send(I am a teacher of the deaf and Federal Law says a deaf ed. teacher has to be at a deaf student's IEP meeting, so they can't have it without me.). Everyone knows how dependable I am and thankfully I have never had to cancel on an IEP meeting for an emergency like this.

I finally start driving his way and on the way called the psychiatrist's office and got a 1:45 pm appointment for that afternoon. I got to the school around 10:00 and saw him in the conference room working with a teacher. The principal saw how upset I was and wanted to know what she could do to help me. We sat and talked for almost an hour so she could give me the whole story. I needed to know what had happened so we could talk to the doctor about it. She was very supportive and I explained that we would be going to the doctor.

Elijah and I got ready to leave and he was perfectly calm. He didn't even act like anything had happened. We came home and had lunch. We talked for a bit and I then I called a good friend to talk. I needed a good talk.

We went and saw the doctor who listened to everything. She said it may be puberty coming on which would require him to need more meds. We upped one of his meds by 0.5 mg and may up it more, if needed. We just have to wait and see.

I had noticed that he seemed to be a bit more agitated in the last week or so and there seemed to be more tics. I added the 0.5 mg today and hopefully we will see some improvement in the next week or so. It is hard to know how long it will take to see the effect of upping his meds and we may need to up it more. I think this is the hardest part of Tourette Syndrome. There are just no easy answers.

On another note, Elijah managed to get up on the stage today at the Regional Day School Program's Performance in front over 250 people and say his poem. He even bowed at the end! He can be such a sweetie, sometimes.