Almost Eight Months on Meds

The last few months we've been kind of taking a break with working on different OCD issues with Devin.  After all that hard work, we just needed a break.  But, Devin had a doctor appointment on Monday, and she asked if we were ready to start our year of re-wiring.  At that point, I realized we still have a lot of work to do.  Most of the issues are petty little things that just annoy me, but there are some big issues that we need to deal with, so we decided to take the next three months to deal with everything and get to where we want to be before we begin the re-wiring. 

Let me take a moment to explain the re-wiring process.  When we are to where we need/want to be, the doctor will increase the dosage for a year to re-wire her brain.  After that, Devin is supposed to be able to come off the meds and not revert back to where we came from.  I'm still nervous about coming off the meds, but I'll just have faith.  We've come so far, and it's been such hard work, that I don't want to find ourselves back where we started.

This last week, Devin worked on two things.  The first thing was that she always insisted on absolutely no talking while she was putting on her shirt.  There is  more ritual to this, but I'll explain more below.  So the goal was that she put on her shirt even when I had music playing or when one of us was talking.  She has been putting her shirt on while I've been in the shower all week, so I'm not sure how this went, but she knows that she's not allowed to tell us to stop talking or to tell me to turn down my music anymore. 

The other thing was tying her bathrobe herself.  When I'm not home, she will do it herself, but when I am home, she makes me do it.  She didn't really wear her bathrobe much this week, but she knows that I'm not helping her anymore.  The inside tie will take a lot of practice, I think.  She did try it once and got very frustrated because it was harder.  We'll just keep working on that.

This week, she chose two more easy (petty) things.  First, she is not going to do her "shirt routine."  For the shirt routine, she bends over while she counts to an unknown (to me) number and pats where the tag would normally be, if I hadn't cut it off, that is.  Actually, most of her shirts have the tag just printed on, so this is obviously just a habit that started out as a SID bother.  Just because she was bothered by a tag before, she things it's always going to bother her, even if there is no tag. 

The other thing that she's going to work on is her eating habits.  Because of SID, she often eats things in layers.  I think that this has also become a habit, so we are going to stop doing certain things, like when she has peanut butter on a piece of toast, she has to use her finger to eat all the peanut butter first, and then eat the bread, usually only getting half way through by this time.  Or, when we eat pizza, she eats the cheese with her fingers, then she uses her finger to eat the sauce, and if we're lucky, then she'll eat the bread.  Our new goal is to use forks and spoons more, and fingers less.  When it's pizza or bread, she'll take a bite instead of using her fingers to lick off one layer at a time. 

Usually once we make the goal and she realizes she can't do certain things anymore, we've beat the habit.  But, there are some big things coming up-things that we've literally been working on for years, such as washing her own hands and wiping her own butt or talking to her school teacher or her primary teacher, that are going to be the hardest part of this whole thing.  I know the washing thing is sensory and OCD, but at this point, I think the no-talking-to-adults thing has become just a habit that we have to break.  This, if you can believe it, will be easier than trying to get her to wipe her own butt when she poops. 

Slow but steady!