In Which Connor Is A Saddy Sadkin

Connor got his new wheelchair today!

Sadly, you will not be getting any pictures of it today, however.  This is because in addition to acquiring said wheelchair we also went up substantially on Connor's Lamictal today--the greatest jump so far-- and as a result he was not exactly in a picture-taking frame of mind.  The drug information on Lamictal mentions "irritability" and "mood changes" as potential side effects.  They failed, however, to warn me that Connor would turn into The Saddest Boy The World Has Ever Known.

Okay, I am totally not kidding about this either.  He was actually sent home from school today because all he wanted to do was sit in his aide's lap and cry.  Oh-- and throw up.  Nausea is another one of those glorious side effects.  Apparently Lamictal dose increases do not put Connor in a learning frame of mind.

So he came home from school at ten or so in the morning and I promptly put him down for a nap (drowsiness-- another side effect); he slept until a little before one in the afternoon, when he announced his lucid state by wailing into the monitor.  He calmed down a little bit while I was holding him, but lost it again when I told him it was time for him to go to speech therapy.  I called our speech therapist on the way there because we were fifteen minutes into our car ride and Connor was still sobbing like instead of going to speech therapy I had actually said we were going to have our eyeballs skewered with red hot pokers.  Julie, after listening to me talk over the little guy screaming in the backseat, wisely suggested we reschedule speech therapy for later in the week.

So we turned around and drove back to the house, where Connor took his second nap of the day.  I woke him up so we could go get his new wheelchair, and he spent most of the car ride there doing that little half-cry, half-whine thing that never fails to set my teeth on edge.  You know, where he'd cry for a second, and then glance up to see what my reaction was, and if I was looking at him immediately start crying much louder, but if I wasn't than he'd forget to cry for a few minutes until he realized he was supposed to be upset and start up again. 

When we got to the pharmacy, Connor informed the very nice man who was doing his fitting that he "hated him."  Then he announced that he didn't like his spiffy new wheelchair and wanted it to go away.  He signed "don't like" to every person we passed in the store for good measure.  Once our fitting was finished, the little guy actually forgot he was upset because he liked the additional height the new chair provides him in the car-- he was too busy looking out the front windshield to remember he was supposed to be crying.  But the second we got home he turned the waterworks back on, this time for Jeremy's benefit.  I put him down and he took his third nap of the day.  He perked up (of course) when he woke up and realized that his respite care worker was here to see him, and when I walked out the door for the adoption seminar we had tonight he was happily snuggled up to her as if absolutely nothing had been wrong for the entire day. 

The little stinker.

At any rate, I'm hoping that his body will adjust to this new dose quickly; I'd like my happy-go-lucky kid back instead of my current one who is doing a stunning imitation of Eeyore and Oscar the Grouch's love child.  Connor's able to hit notes when he's upset that make my teeth vibrate, and there are only so many hours of that I can erase by consuming massive amounts of chocolate.  I am also desperately hoping that today was indeed a result of the Lamictal increase and not because Connor is, say, getting sick again. 

Poor little guy.


~Jess