Sunday, March 24, 2013

Weekend Update

Today Lily took the last quarter tablet of Tenex.  This week she'll go without completely, and possibly the week after that, just to see how she does.  She's still a little stuffy, but no longer warm.  She's been harder to get to sleep in the evenings in general, although I don't know whether to attribute that to the Tenex or being sick.  I suspect the Tenex.  

This was a really nice weekend.  

One accident all weekend, and I think it was possibly "preventable".  We gave her a nap because we felt like she was still fighting off whatever it was she had, and we didn't hear her wake up on the monitor.  Lily won't call out when she wakes up, so you almost have to "sense" it.  You hear the rustle of sheets or the change in breathing, a cough, or her cooing and you go to check and she's awake...this time we didn't hear her and she had an accident.  Apart from that?  Two days and nothing.  Awesome.  

horsey...she just hopped right on...
She was more "engaged" this weekend too.  More appropriately conversational, and more playful.  She rode me like I was a horse for godsake, and asked us to wipe the cheeto dust off her hands.  I had her carry her clothes hamper into her room, and when I gave her a bath, she ran her dirty clothes into her room and put them in the hamper for me.  

And now I look back up at the first paragraph and think...is this ALSO the lack of Tenex?  Because if I'm quick to point out the negatives of taking her off it, I want to also be open to the potential positives.  Is she more in tune with people OFF the medication?  I didn't notice as much of the heavy breathing or jaw clicking at bed time tonight.

She did do something again tonight that she did a couple nights ago:  she fell almost completely asleep, then started awake, and seemed very anxious.  She got agitated and started to whimper.  I tried a couple different things to put her back at ease, including asking her if she wanted me to leave (she said no this time).  Eventually she fell back asleep, but it was a more difficult process.  30-40 minutes to get her to sleep where once it was 5 tops.  On Tenex, she was her own happy little self until she hit the sheets, then within five minutes her eyes were shut and she was asleep.

As great as that is...the goal of the Tenex is not "sleeping pill"...so if she's "on" during the day interaction-wise, and it takes a little longer to get her to sleep...well, then that's a trade-off I think we'll take.

Tomorrow no Tenex at breakfast...or for the rest of the week for that matter.  Winter storm warning in effect...4-8"?  

3 comments:

  1. I wish the was a magic sleeping pill for our kids. Sigh. We just had that same snow maker dump 8 inches here. Another sigh.

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  2. I just went and backtracked all your tenex posts. We have our Lily on it, too (it's probably been a year now) - but our girl is not tiny like yours so she's on a higher dose.

    Anyway, my husband and I were just talking about meds over the weekend - we see improvements in Bird but there's still such a long way to go. Are the improvements simply because she's getting older and more "mature" like kids typically do (even though she's still behind her peers) or are the improvements due to continued use of meds? What would happen if we started taking her off the meds just to see if they're actually doing anything positive anymore? Maybe she would do even better without them - maybe they're keeping her in a "med induced fog" and we don't really notice anymore because we've been on them so long...

    The questions are endless...

    Our doctor always questions how Lily wakes up in the mornings - easily? groggily? dark circles under the eyes? Lily always seems to wake up rested and happy and active no matter what we're doing with the meds.

    The only really negative thing I know for sure I've ever seen with medication is when we increased her Straterra from 10 mg to 18 mg. She turned into this angry, defiant, belligerent, pissed off kid. It was so scary and was totally due to the increase, which we changed back to 10 mg after an incredibly long week and a half.

    I just looked back up at my incredibly long comment and wondered why I'm even telling you all this. I think I just needed to vent a little. I'm not anti-med but I wish there was some sure-fire way you could determine their positive/negative effectiveness without putting our little girls through the wringer. It's just hard to figure out sometimes...

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