It's Official! One Less Thing to be Quizzical About

[quizzical]

Thanks to all for the words of encouragement that finally got me through the door of the doctor’s office.

I am now officially diagnosed with ADD and I start a trial of meds tomorrow.

Relief – yes. Numbness – yes. A certain disbelief – yes, although that’s mostly about how well the appointment went, and also the confirmation from the doctor that my overactive imagination wasn’t somehow just making all this up.

Haven’t even told the hubby yet, because he’s in an all-day meeting.

It is absolutely pouring rain outside, which is sort of cool. It matches, somehow. It’s a nice rain, a summer rain, a big, heavy rain.

Yesterday in church the main message of the sermon – and this is not some way-out fringe sort of church – was “Everything’s gonna be all right.”

And I think that might just be true.

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[Anonymous]

I don’t know what to say other than wish you all the best! I was pretty relieved when the ADD psychiatrist said I was a textbook case. i don’t want to be, but if that’s what I am, I yam what I yam.

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[Anonymous]

Congrats, quizzical. Good luck on the meds.

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[Anonymous]

something less to crowd your mind!!! yay! My doc told me to stop the am I or aren’t I game. Now that that is behind you, time to move forward . pills + organizational skill/habit building= success! (or tis the master plan).

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[Anonymous]

Phew! What a relief all that questioning and self-doubt is over. Now you have your answer and can get on with your life. The wondering and worrying is the worst bit, I reckon (and I have two more months of it!!). I hope the medication you are given works well for you, without playing the try-every-different-medication-under-the-sun-at-varying-doses game. Good luck

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[quizzical]

I cried in the doctor’s office, but only a little, and it was definitely a load-off-my-mind sort of crying. I’d already had my big cry twice: reading that Delivered from Distraction checklist back when all this began, and then sitting in the auditorium during the ADD road show with Dr. Jain, Rick, and Patrick back in June.

By the time I sat down with the doctor I’d worked myself into a total pretzel – months in the making! with all the DO-I-OR-DON’T-I I’d been carrying around; you folks have been there, I know! Reminds me of the old daisy-petal-pulling cartoons: He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me…

And for every minute of my wondering aloud here, multiply that by ten for all the wondering aloud at home. Poor hubby; here’s a typical opening: “So, here’s another example of the ADD that I don’t have; I left my purse at home again!”

God bless him, though, because he’s the only one in my family who took this seriously, who kept after me to go see somebody. “If you don’t have ADD, you’re no worse off. And if you do have it, you can do something about it.” Contrast that to my mother’s opinion: “You don’t have ADD, you have three kids!”

And then multiply that number of conversations again by a hundred for all the unspoken obsession, the tape looping over and over in my head…..

WHEW.

Yesterday evening, after I’d finally had a chance to tell him the news, my hubby came home from a grocery store errand with a little bouquet of flowers for me.

“Happy flowers” he called them. And, damn, did they make me happy. To show my thanks I completely cleaned off the mess on the kitchen table so they’d look nice sitting there.

They’re daisies.

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[Anonymous]

Your husband, is what they call a keeper, Quizzical!

Congratulations sounds so trite, but in the case of a good diagnosis, so true. I tell my family all the time that the best thing that could have happened to me was finding out that it was actually ‘all in my head.’ ADHD doesn’t ‘define’ me, but man, did it bring a clarity to my life that I was DESPERATELY searching for. The previous 3 decades was like a years long house fire, now I can rebuild.

I’m so happy that you have a diagnosis and hope that this leads to even more positive steps for you from here on out.

Hip hip Hooray!!!

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[quizzical]

Thanks, Steffie, KrazyKat, sugargremlin, pete-puma, and nodopamine! (Did I get everybody?)

KrazyKat, I hope your on-pins-and-needles phase passes as smoothly as it can! Hang in there!

Steffie, you are right about my husband; he’s amazing. I’m betting he’s a bit relieved as well, as in, maybe now he won’t have to do it all by himself!

Yesterday on the meds was…interesting. As in, is this really the lowest dose? Got lots done and felt really positive about it. The best example: There’s an extra chair by the kitchen table that has had a big pile of books and papers on it since mid-June; the last day of school, to be precise. Yesterday morning I started going through the stack and putting things away, and in the middle of the pile were a couple of writing journals my sons had been doing at school.

Now, normally, when I see something like this, I’d have started reading it, and then started beating myself up for not being more attentive to the kids’ schoolwork all year long….or maybe just felt guilty about how long the thing had been sitting there…or whatever. But I’d have been caught up in my own head and then I’d have quit the project.

But this time, I just grabbed my sons for a cuddle on the couch, and we lay under a blanket and read the journals together, and I complimented them on their great writing – because it really was pretty awesome overall – and we talked about the great word choices in the poems (“Teal is a narrow lake”), we talked about the memories evoked by the stories (“I remember all those crabs on the beach, too!”), we went over the details (“What’s this word here? ‘Quit’? Is that the word you meant?”) and just basically did all that sort of involved-parent schoolwork stuff that I normally hand over to my husband. We had an absolutely lovely time cuddling and reading –

And then, when we were done with the journals, I actually put them away, and went back and KEPT WORKING ON THE PILE TILL IT WAS DONE!

To me that was the most amazing part: that I was able to interrupt a task for a few minutes, and then, return to it and see it through to completion.

Here’s hoping there’s more of that to come!

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[Bibliophile]

@Quizzical congratulations on seeing a difference. It is always nice to hear how positive treatment can be for people. The meds sound like they are helping with your working memory and impulsiveness. I was curious. Are you suffering from any comorbidities? So many of us here have loads of other issues on top of the ADHD.

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[quizzical]

@librarianchef – Thanks! I’m not currently diagnosed with comorbidities, but in high school I had a major depressive episode for a good portion of the school year, and I wonder to this day if it was the antidepressant meds, or just graduating and moving on to college, that got me out of that one.

Since then I’ve had my ups and downs, though none as severe as the high school one. My current view is that a lot of it is probably tied quite directly to the ADD; I recall Patricia Quinn mentioning in her Women and ADD video on this site that a lot of ADD women are dysthymic – that chronic, low-grade sort of depression – because of the constant feeling of not living up to one’s potential. I would say that definitely describes me over the years. Lots of long funks revolving around What-Do-I-Want-To-Do-With-My-Life.

Since I hit my forties, PMS-type mood swings have become a huge issue for me. I’ll just be sitting there, minding my own business, when….DESPAIR. Or a hair-trigger anger shouting explosion at the kids. I don’t know if mood issues related to PMS count as a comorbidity or not, but that’s definitely making things a challenge for me. And, yes, my ADD symptoms are decidedly worse the week before my period. Right before I got my ADD diagnosis I went on meds for the PMS, and they seemed to help. The nice thing is I only have to take the PMS med when the symptoms are bothering me, rather than all day, every day.

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