Baby Boy is back in the hospital. This time it was a much less eventful admissions process. His medications stopped working. We had an appointment with the psychiatrist a week ago this past Friday and some adjustments were made to his medications as the visual and auditory hallucinations were occurring again. During that appointment, I mentioned to the doctor the study I had came across that had been done in Finland that shows a link that prenatal fetal hypoxia might somehow trigger the gene for schizophrenoform disorders at an early onset. As an example, Baby Boy has early onset schizoaffective disorder while the usual age of onset for the disorder is either early 20’s or even later in life. The doctor recalled reading about the same study and asked his nurse to pull his MRI films so he could take another look at them and see if there was evidence of prenatal fetal hypoxia damage to his brain suffered at the time that I was pregnant with Baby Boy and nearly miscarried at 4 1/2 months. Sure enough he found. So there is some credence to the studies findings. As I said, he made some adjustments to his medications and we gave it 10 days.

Yesterday, I had to call the doctor and let him know that the changes had not helped Baby Boys symptoms and in fact things were actually becoming worse for him. He asked us to bring him in for an emergency appointment. He tweaked his medications a bit more and added a benzo to use as needed for when he has violent outbursts. He slept through the night for the first time in over two months. We thought perhaps we were going to have the start of a good day for a change. He woke up at his usual 06:00, helped me make oatmeal and biscuits and get Boy #1 motivated and out the door to school. At 07:00 the mood swing started, the violent and delusional boy was in full gear and before I could stop him he had climbed up on Boy #2’s bed and was giving him all he had because he was convinced he had stollen something of his that didn’t even exist in the first place. Okay. Time for the benzo. Thirty minutes after taking it he calmed down, another 15 minutes he was in full paradoxical reaction to the benzo and having to be put into a theraputic restraint.

We finally got him calmed down and called the doctor. He said it was time to call the insurance company and the hospital and get him admitted for a full on medicinal evaluation and changes. The time has come for the big guns aka the old standards. In the last two years he has been tried on nearly every atypical anti psychotic mediciation approved for use in children. They work for up 2 months, sometimes 4 if we’re lucky before his liver learns to metabolize them quickly and they no longer work.

I hate this. Watching my child be wracked and tormented by a neurological mental illness is sometimes more than I can bear. He’s now in the hospital, 2 hours away from home. I just pray that the attending doctor will work closely with his local doctor and that they can quickly find a med combo that will help him.

Prayers, kind thoughts… they’re appreciated. Thanks for reading.