Thanks to those who sent good thoughts and prayers in response to my "note to schizophrenia". Please know that my primary emotions in writing that were anger (ANGER!) and frustration at schizophrenia, my ever elusive nemesis... and how much is has taken (stolen) from M and from our family as a whole.
Since the onset of M's sz, back when he was just a small child, our lives have been a series of battles against his symptoms... a never ending war waged to keep M alive and healthy, and to preserve as much of his quality of life as possible.
Sometimes anger helps fuel the fight...
I saw M's pdoc last night and we decided to increase one of M's meds. Before the appointment I'd gone back through my notes for the past few months... looking at new symptoms, M's connection to reality, daily functioning, etc. and it was plain that the past two months have brought a definite worsening in terms of symptoms, connectedness, and functioning. So even though I'm always very reluctant to increase anything... what must be, must be, I suppose.
Our "new" pdoc (he's treated M for about the past year) is a good guy... but seriously quirky... and conversation, at least in my experience, is not his forte. I was pleasantly surprised last night though, that despite kind of an awkward start... the appointment went well, and we seemed to be on the same page.
With M so unstable, school time has gotten more complicated. I never know from day to day, if me telling him it's time to do school is going to set him off or not...
But despite the tension around school, R made me laugh out loud yesterday during spelling...
We've been doing Sequential Spelling this year, so basically each of the kids has a spelling test each day. I'm not going to try to explain the program... it sounds weird but both kids like it and seem to be learning to spell more complex words.
Because of the daily test format, both kids are used to spelling whatever words or short phrases I dictate to them from that day's lesson. I watch them write, and if a word is misspelled they fix it right away, then write it several more times to practice it correctly.
The last word on R's test yesterday was "prettier" and I watched as she spelled "p-r-e-t-t-e-r" , and I said "drat", because she'd left out the "i" and up until then she hadn't misspelled a single word...
Without missing a beat, she carefully wrote "d-r-a-t"...
She's such a concrete thinker, if I say it during a spelling test, it must be a spelling word...
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