From the beginning

I’m Kelly. I am 30 yrs old. At 12 yrs old I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression. At 23 yrs old I was diagnosed with manic-depressive disorder, better known as, Bipolar II disorder. All those years, I wasn’t really going crazy I was already there. I am married and have two children, Ben who is 7 yrs old, and Cece who is 9 yrs old.

I am writing this blog to help me deal with my son’s conditions and if I can help anyone else, that would be great. This may be heard to read at times but this is what I live through and how I feel. If anyone is offended I am sorry but the truth is ugly sometimes. Living with it also sucks. We take things minute by minute because day by day is too much time for things to change. Anyone who knows anything about Bipolar disorder will agree. Minute by minute it is…

Ben was a very happy, calm baby. Until he was 9 months old that is. At 9 months old he got up and ran across the room. Literally ran did not walk did not stop to pass go. HE RAN, After his older sister to be exact. He never even really crawled. He did a military crawl for a month or so but never on his hands and knees. He never really had a 1^st step he had many…..

Ben struggled with sitting still and getting into everything. He was very aggressive and seemed to love it when he hurt someone. If ignored he would go and get something BIGGER and heavier to hit you with until you screamed “Ouch”.

Pain didn’t seem to bother him/ He had burned his hands on the stove and would go right back to trying to touch the stove. We had many visits to the ER with him, so many that the doctors knew us. That is not always a good thing. LOL. I was worried about taking him to the ER so often. I was worried that they would call CYS on us like we were abusing our child. Luckily we had the paper trail behind us saying he was diagnosed with ADHD and ODD but even know the worry is still there. I hate that my child hurts himself. I hate that there is nothing I can do to help him stop it.

At 2 yrs 9 months, we took him to the local children’s hospital’s child development unit. There we were told 2 things:

1.) He couldn’t be screened or tested for autism because he wouldn’t cooperate. (duh that’s why we were there) and

2.) He was too young to be officially diagnosed with ADHD so we got a dx’ed with pre-ADHD.

At 4 yrs old he was officially dx’ed with ADHD and ODD. We were referred to our local universities psychology center. We worked with them they didn’t seem to help. I mean he couldn’t sit still long enough to listen to us so how could they help/ We were against medicating him, but after dealing with his impulsive behavior for so long we caved in. We decided to try Adderall.

Too be continued