Doctor Appointment, Concerns

We saw the pediatrician yesterday. In summary:


• M&M has flat feet. We're going to get her some shoes with better arch support, and hopefully that will help her leg pain.



• She got 3 shots and didn't even cry--what a brave girl!



• The doctor looked at the girls' "spots" and diagnosed them as probable flea bites. He said that, especially in households that don't have pets, it's easy to pick one up outside and then it will gravitate to the "sweetest" body in the house and go to town biting it up. The bites didn't cause the kids much discomfort and are rapidly healing.



• Dr. B also recommended that we give the girls a calcium supplement and take them off dairy products for a while to see if that helps with the stomach pain and soft stools. We have tried this in the past and weren't sure how much (or if) it helped, but Dr. B said we probably didn't try it long enough. He said that with dairy we really need to have them completely off it for at least 6 weeks to be able to tell whether there's a real difference or not. So we're going to try that.



• Dr. B did feel that the level of AJs meltdowns and other behavior was something that requires some kind of professional help/evaluation/intervention/whatever. We've found a lovely Christian psychologist/counselor who does play therapy and teaches the parents how to do it with the kids. Hopefully that will help.

What's been going on with AJ is something I haven't really blogged. I've tried many times, but I always end up writing and rewriting the post and then just deleting it or leaving it in draft form, unposted. I finally spent several days on this version and then had DH check it before posting. It's sometimes hard to figure out exactly how (or whether) to post about things like this.

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Some of it is behavior we've seen at varying levels since AJ was very small, and some of it is either new or a significant escalation from before. Her meltdowns are rather extreme, frequent and long-lasting for her age. The triggers are almost always seemingly minor, often the same issue repeated for weeks or months at a time.

In the past it's been things like extreme anxiety over using the bathroom--being afraid of the toilet flushing, worry about feeling the need to go, anxiety about having an accident (even though we've always been very low-key and reassuring about such things) to the point that she was awake crying about it until as late as 1 or 2 a.m. every night for weeks.

Sometimes it's something like our making a transition from one place or activity to another too quickly, or AJ getting upset at the way M&M colors. (AJ is extremely disturbed, for example, that M&M doesn't put feet on her people and often colors things a different color than they are in real life--to the point that she has had extended periods of lying awake at night worrying about it or even hiding under the furniture crying about it.)

She'll cry and scream inconsolably for 30 minutes at a time day after day because she thinks M&M is swinging higher than her on the swingset, but she can bump her head hard enough to raise an immediate lump and hardly blink. (I used to call her my "rubber baby" because she'd just bounce off the furniture unfazed, or even laugh when she got hurt.)

Sometimes she has 5 or 10 meltdowns a day, and other times she can go several days with only a few minor kerfuffles. When she was a toddler her episodes were so intense that she would literally pass out cold, or look like she was having a seizure (the EEG was normal and the doctor said they were just "fits").

We're still at this time trying to figure out what's normal and what's not, and what to just take in stride vs. what to actually be concerned about. We've gone back and forth on this, wondering where exactly the line should be drawn. We don't want to overreact or to brush off something significant, but it's just fuzzy enough that we're never sure.

There have always been things about her that have made us go, "Hmmm, that's odd . . . I wonder . . . ?" Some of it really seems to come and go, or will be really noticeable for a while and then will seem to get better.

There are things like the meltdowns, and then the other things like the extreme anxiety/worry, the constant interest in lining up and sorting things, the insistence on things being just-so, the slight deficiency in social skills, the slower development of skills like smiling and interacting as an infant, the somewhat unusual pattern of learning to talk and then the regression in speech and other skills around a year old, etc.

But she is so good with language and so many other things that we always end up shrugging our shoulders and saying, "No . . . there couldn't be anything wrong. Of course not. How silly to worry."

Her doctors, when we've asked about various concerns through the years, have always said things like, "But look how well she's interacting with me right now . . . it's nothing to worry about/she'll grow out of it/she'll catch up."

Often she interacts quite normally, but other times (especially in certain situations) she'll struggle quite a bit in social interactions, or exhibit a lack of eye contact, facial expression and responsiveness startling and persistent enough that family, friends, acquaintances and a Sunday School teacher have mentioned it. We even had her hearing checked 6 months or a year ago because she so frequently seems lost in her own world and doesn't seem to hear when we try to get her attention.

She is talented in so many areas--reading, math, music, logic (although sarcasm is completely lost on her :) ), general intelligence. She's an extremely bright child. She reads ravenously and talks like a book. She ruminates deeply and talks about things that many kids her age wouldn't even think to be interested in. She cares deeply about other people and loves to help. Even when she seems to not care about interacting, she may be very upset for days after a gathering because the other kids didn't play with her (even if she didn't ask them to play or try to join in their play).

An escalation of her behavior and some new things she started saying a few weeks ago finally bumped us into "This is not normal . . . something is wrong here" mode. The pediatricians and counselors we've talked to are saying that her meltdowns and the things she's doing and saying are not typical 6-year-old behavior and should be looked at further, so that's what we're doing right now.

We are seeing a possible link between her worst periods and her consumption of dairy products and/or artificial colors and flavors, so the 6 weeks off dairy should be helpful in discovering whether that's a factor or not. It also seems to be worse when her blood sugar gets low.

We know that Baby E's interactions, behavior and sensory processing abilities are hugely impacted by what she eats. Since AJ's worst periods seem to happen after social gatherings and when she is eating more dairy and junk food, we're hoping that the no-milk trial will help. We tried taking her off dairy a couple of years ago when she was having horrible anxiety and anger issues right after Baby E was born. It did seem to help when we tried it briefly, but we weren't sure and didn't see a clear difference with minimal exposures, so we gradually added moderate amounts back in (although we still didn't use it nearly as much as we used to).

It's rather difficult to know what to say about it at this point, at least until we get a better idea of what's going on. We don't know whether it's primarily an organic/neurological issue; her response (as Dr. B thinks likely) to the stress and unpredictability of the last couple of years with health issues, etc. disrupting our family life; just something that goes along with being an extremely bright child with a perfectionist/anxiety-prone/analytical personality; or what. We're certainly trying lots of different things and praying about it a lot.

Suffice it to say that if we can get some help figuring out how to get a handle on this and some good tools for helping her cope better, things will be a lot less stressful and more enjoyable for everyone in the house.