The objective of the meds was to keep Micah from becoming violent, right? Well, at least to make him reasonable enough to realize that being violent won't fix problems. Micah has become increasingly reasonable and pretty self-regulating as far as his temper goes, so we decided (along with his doctor) that we could give the decrease in meds every 2 weeks until there started to be problems, then we would stop the decrease and let him stay there a while.
After 6 weeks, we stopped completely.
This is not to say that we haven't had problems, but Micah has worked through all of them. He can be reasoned with still, which makes all the difference in the world. You see, before it was his first thought to throw something or hit or kick someone. He would do this before we knew he was mad at all. It made us completely unable to work with him. The meds mostly slowed down the anger to help him learn how to deal with it. We were able to teach him strategies for effectively communicating his problems without violence.
If you've seen Micah lately, you probably have noticed a difference in his behavior. He is louder and he gets angry faster. It's the medicine out of his system. It seems like a huge step back. I'm here to tell you that it's a giant step forward that has been years in the making.
Lately Tony and I have noticed a few things clearing up in Micah's speech. Fluency is much better. He is correctly using personal pronouns without scripting. He is coming up with more sentences on his own instead of his normal echolalia. He has come up with new ideas that didn't come from something he saw on TV or a video game. It's not that he wasn't doing these things at all before, but it's happening a lot more often. Micah has also been mimicking other's behavior more, as if he is more aware of his surroundings.
Anyway, all these things come with a price. His stimming (self stimulatory behavior: flapping, "ee's", jumping constantly) has increased dramatically. He gets louder faster. He has hit again.
Here's the thing that makes me think that it's all a success today: he was arguing with his sister and getting very angry. The argument ended but he was still mad and he didn't get his way all the way. He turned away and said to himself "breathe" and took his "5 big breaths" and calmed himself. There were no prompts. He just did it himself.
I don't think he would have been able to do that before the medicine. I don't think I could have taught him how to calm himself down without it. We needed that to help him learn.
Now, I know that he is still having a hard time and he is disruptive and not as reasonable as he was on the medicine. Unless you knew him 4 years ago, you probably would see this as a huge step back. I know better. I know Micah. He's going to be difficult for a while. He's going to have a hard time dealing with the world around him for a little while. The thing to remember is that Micah is able to make the choice to obey now. It's not his first choice much. He still fights with his ODD. The fact of the matter is that he is fighting it. We who surround him just need to support him while he is fighting.
Go Micah!
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