DD15 came home from RTC for her first home visit for Thanksgiving. It was smooth sailing and things could not have gone better!
She was calm and pleasant and handled the stress and noise of having 15 people for Thanksgiving like a pro. She did go to her room and lay down towards the end of the day for an hour or so, but that is an appropriate way to get out of the chaos and noise when it is getting overwhelming. After everyone left, she came out of her room and we put the Yule tree up, a tradition for us. The biggest thing we noticed, is how she handled her little nephew who's 4. He lives with us, and usually he causes her a great deal of stress, she typically has NO patience with him and even normal things like him talking gets on her nerves. The only time she got aggravated was while we were shopping and he was acting out, I was aggravated too.
In other news, she has been diagnosed with Bipolar. It has been talked about a lot for a long time, the dx has been tossed around for a couple years but since she has not had full-blown mania, they didn't give her the dx. I see hypomania in her though. And I have told them and told them that. I am glad that others are seeing it because maybe she needs a mood stabilizer. I've been pushing for med changes because she has been on Zoloft for almost 2 years and it seems to do nothing for her AND I question it because SSRI's can increase suicidality in adolescents and I can't prove it has done this but it doesn't seem to make her any better and she is very VERY suicidal. She says suicide is always there in the back of her mind like a back-up plan, every day, it just changes in intensity and how much she thinks about it.
She is talking a lot more since being in RTC. We had a phone meeting with med management that lasted for almost 90 minutes and she talked very openly about her cutting, suicidal thoughts, drug and alcohol abuse and high-risk sexual behaviors. I also heard some difficult things about her perceptions of things. She says she doesn't matter in the family. Which to everyone else is SO shocking because she has always been my baby and her sisters were always jealous of her and said she was my favorite. I also am finding out it really had an impact on her how much I used to work. I was a Medical Assistant for a group of Pediatricians and I worked 12 hour shifts 3-4 days a week, I didn't get home until about 8 at night. And that was as a single mom trying to support my kids and stay off welfare. But DD sees it that I was never home for her. Her older sisters babysat her and she told us that her sister would go take a nap and just sit her in front of the tv and tell her not to go outside. That makes me really sad. It's strange how perceptions of the same thing can be so different. One of my daughters gave a speech at 8th grade graduation and made a bunch of people (especially me) cry by thanking her mom for working so hard, and working long hours to take care of her. But she was older, she understood better. I guess DD felt abandoned by me. Then when I got done work due to health problems, a whole bunch of stuff happened with her oldest sister and I was so busy putting out fires there that she still felt neglected. She said that is why she started cutting.
So, overall things are going really well. I thought it would be nice to post a positive update for everyone. We have a lot of work ahead of us and we are still in the woods but I believe we are on track.
