Team Shimmy: 7/9/17

We were at Camp Taylor (a cardiac family camp) this weekend and being around so many other "heart" families brought the cardiac stuff to the forefront of my mind in a way it hasn't been in a while. While we were at camp, I decided to re-read our last blog post and realized it's been almost a year since our last post! It made me smile, actually, because it's a marker of how medically stable Simon has been. Around here no news is good news.

That said, there's a lot to catch up on...

My (Jaime) depression finally got to a point where I decided, after much kicking, screaming and trying every other possible avenue, to try an SSRI. The first drug I tried was Zoloft and I am not kidding when I say that literally the next day I felt like I was seeing the sun and hearing the birds for the first time in close to a decade. I assumed that must have been a placebo effect because I've always heard that SSRIs take weeks to get up to dose, but have since learned that it was a real, true response of my brain to finally getting what it needed. I joked that my brain was like Pac Man gobbling up the SSRI hungrily. Nom nom nom. My therapist told me that Zoloft is now prescribed for women who have very severe PMS for 5 days a month and that it works that quickly and effectively. Who knew?

I developed a weird rash after less than 2 weeks, so they made me taper off and wait for the rash to go away until I could try something new. That tapering process was mindblowingly informative. After a few days off Zoloft, every day that passed brought a deeper layer of fog that left me feeling tired in a profound way that left me unenthused about everything. Like, everything just seemed like it was going to take more effort than it was worth, even things I usually like. I realized that that was how I had felt for YEARS but had just gotten used to it. Holy crap, wake up call.

Since finding a new med that works (and bonus, no side effects for me!) I've realized that the last 5-8 years have been like walking around with a raw abrasion. You know that feeling when you have a big new scrape and anything hits it (water, air, clothing, a table) sends shockwaves through your whole system that make you catch your breath and your head spin? Life was kinda like that for me. I'd just catch my breath from the latest bump, no matter how small, and the next thing would hit and my whole system would just start up on red alert.

My therapist had the best analogy- when you break an arm and you put a cast on it, the cast isn't healing your arm. It's creating an environment for your arm to heal, but your body is doing the actual healing. That was the most helpful thing for me because I have such a stubborn "I'm fine, I can suck it up, I can do it myself" attitude. What I heard her say was that trying meds might give my brain an opportunity to rest enough so that all the other hard work I'm doing to keep myself healthy (therapy, exercise, eating well, meditation, etc) has a better shot of actually getting in and helping. Going on meds has been like putting a bandage over it so the raw places can scab over. Almost every day I say to Laura cheerily "I'm so glad I'm on an SSRI" and she just smiles at me knowingly as she'd been trying to convince me to face my fears about this for the last few years.

I think one of the other things that tipped me towards deciding to try an SSRI was seeing statistics about the PTSD/anxiety/depression rates of parents of kids who have severe medical trauma and very similar data for parents of kids who have developmental/behavioral challenges. I did the math on us and realized that what we face on a day to day level is so absurd that it's almost inhuman to expect someone to manage it with the "self-care" most people use with success. I also checked around and realized that almost every single parent I know of a kid with severe special needs is getting some sort of medical support for depression/anxiety. I like to think of myself as SO special, but...apparently not so much.

Life feels so much more manageable. The fears of judgement (from myself and others) seem so silly knowing what I know on the other side. A good friend who has a very similar personality went on an SSRI about a decade ago and when I was picking her brain, one thing she said most that stuck with me was "when I finally tried meds, I realized how much energy I had spent just trying to keep my head above water. It wasn't until I could rest that I realized how hard I'd been working and how little energy it left me for all the other great things in life". Exactly.

In other news, in January we completed a neuropsych assessment for Simon to investigate ADHD (with an AMAZING provider!) and Simon received his third diagnosis- Inattentive ADHD. After much discussion and thought and great conversations with our pediatrician, we decided to try meds. Holy smokes. His behavior and grades went up a whole level almost immediately. For the first time ever, after Spring Break, he didn't wake up every morning asking "no school today"? He was actually almost in tears that school was ENDING. After trying them on weekends and for events a few times we decided they're a great tool for school but not for other stuff. Again, sometimes meds can be awesome. Not such a popular stance in lefty lesbo circles, but it's true.

One other thing I learned this weekend at heart camp, related to autism, oddly, kinda blew me away. David, one of Simon's nurses from his PICU stay 8+ years ago was working at camp. We were strolling down memory lane about lots of sad and funny stuff and at one point I said, "do you remember how when he was intubated he just chewed up Versed like it was candy?". (His dose of the sedative would wear off WAY faster than normal, leading to some creative thinking about ways to keep him sedated). David casually said, "Oh yeah, kids with autism metabolize those kinds of drugs really differently. We always have a really hard time trying to figure out how to keep them sedated".

I just sort of stood there and stared at him. He was telling me Simon was autistic even as a baby. That news sort of rocked my foundation. Simon is so quirky and doesn't fit neatly into a lot of the diagnostic stuff around autism so I've always sort of thought (for no real reason I can come up with) that he's not actually autistic but has autistic-like behaviors that largely stem from the trauma and interruption in development. Big whoop. Makes no difference on the ground and I don't think I have stigma stuff about autism, so why my brain has held onto this illogical origin story of his quirks and delays, I don't know. There is new genetic data showing it's a genetically coded trait (like schizophrenia or other brain function differences) that can be there but inactive unless a trigger turns those pathways on. Maybe heart disease-related trauma was the trigger. Maybe he would have developed autism anyway. Who knows. Mostly the whole thing really made me look at the thoughts I have about the origin story of his autism and why my brain even thinks it matters.

I also had the clever thought of, "Oh goody! If hospitals see infants who metabolize Versed and similar drugs differently they can let the parents know that's a marker of autism so they can be vigilant about screening". I quickly realized that if a kid is needing Versed, the last thing the parents need is one more thing to worry about and that that was probably a horrible idea. Duh.

Onto Laura:

Last September Laura started a Hospital Chaplaincy program and has found her calling. She absolutely adores it and is now seriously thinking about doing a distance rabbinical school program. She's been doing such an amazing job at her work that she received an award from the training hospital for her excellence. I'm so proud I could just cry. She graduates this August and will be on her way to becoming a Board Certified Chaplain! Then we figure out the job thing. Whatever. She found her life's work for this next decade at least. How many people do you know that can say that?

The last update is that a week ago, Laura had somewhat emergent rotator cuff surgery for a mysterious and pretty severe tear of her right shoulder. The surgery went well but the whole thing sucks. She's looking at a long road of pain and PT as she gets it back in shape. It was an interesting test of the SSRI as she's had 2 other surgeries since Simon was born and both times the whole thing sent me over the edge. This time I just rolled with it and was appropriately stressed/anxious. Better for everyone!

The short version is: Simon is medically stable, getting the developmental supports he need and is as quirky and hilarious as ever. Laura is finding her bliss professionally and dealing with some hard body stuff. I'm finally able to enjoy life thanks to a much overdue and needed pharmaceutical assist and figuring out how to slow down, be gentle and enjoy some of the simpler things in life.

Life, for now, is pretty good.