The Never Normal

Yesterday we found out that Jonah was accepted into Tradewinds – but they don’t have any openings until at least June.  We’re glad he’s been accepted and are going to tour Springbrook on the 9th, which was my favorite place (on paper, anyway)…then we will visit The Center for Discovery (the farthest away from our town) later this month. 

Jonah has just gone back to school after a week’s vacation – it was tough on Andy, the vacation, and I tried to help a little each day though it was not much help, considering I work full time.  Andy was stuck with the aggressions and the endless requests, the poops and the thousand baths a day and the attempts to get Jonah to eat healty foods, the cleaning and the playing and the getting him to bed. 

Yesterday, right out the box Jonah had 4 aggressions at school and one on the way home on the bus.  He’s been swatting a lot again lately while saying the word “swat,” something he’d stopped doing for a while.  We got the dosage of Risperdal lowered again and quit using the Klonopin – it’s this constant guessing game of drug combinations. 

It reminds me of that movie Awakenings.  From Wikipedia:  

It tells the true story of British neurologist Oliver Sacks, fictionalized as American Malcolm Sayer and portrayed by Robin Williams who, in 1969, discovers beneficial effects of the then-new drug L-Dopa. He administered it to catatonic patients who survived the 1917–28 epidemic of encephalitis lethargica. Leonard Lowe (played by Robert De Niro) and the rest of the patients were awakened after decades of catatonic state and have to deal with a new life in a new time.

The problem is, the drug didn’t work consistently and the patients began regressing back into their lethargia.  The Robin Williams character desperately tries all different combinations of the drug he’s using, first less of it, then more of it, and all the while his patients are slipping away, eventually back into their catatonic states.

Working with Jonah’s meds has the same flavor of frustation.

Yet, in the midst of the frustration and aggression, Jonah still has all his smiles:

And I do so love the smiles!

I’m doing a lot of freelance writing lately, so my posts may be few and far between for a month or so…but I’ll try to keep you all posted on everything that’s going on.  Happy March!