Medication Changes?? NO DEAL!!!

One of our guys is currently going through a change in his psychotropic medications. The makers of one of the drugs decided that it wasn't making them enough money so they were stopping manufacturing. Immediately. (I sooo feel like that should be against the law, but anyway...)


He is now completely off of the medication and on what will maybe be his maintenance dosage of the new med. He is struggling. And thus, so are we.

I think he wants to be good, I really do. But the voices in his head are telling him differently. So, he wants to hit people, kick people, tear up the van and beat the wall. So far he is doing relatively well controlling himself. But you know it's there. You can see it in his eyes. So we try to redirect him as much as possible.

On Friday he was ready to go to his skills workshop about 3 hours before he was scheduled to go. That's all he wanted to do and there was going to be no changing his mind. TV? No, go to work. Puzzles? No, go to work. Baking?? No, go to work. There was nothing else he wanted to do and he was getting really upset that we weren't leaving. So we turned on the television. Soon we realized that Hogan's Heroes isn't nearly interactive enough and we needed something else. Surfing through the channels, we came across Deal or No Deal. And had you been in our house you would have seen quite a sight.

You might have even thought we were actually on the show if you didn't know better. As he sat in his chair and perseverated on going to work, I sat on the couch next to him and shouted, "No Deal!!!" and "Low number Howie!" and "Keep it on the left" and "That's okay, that's okay, big numbers still there!!"

This went on for an hour. And I was a little bit hoarse when it was all said and done. But me yelling like a crazy person for an hour and getting excited for the low number reveals and sad for the high number reveals got his attention. He even raised his own hands to the sky a couple of times and hollered out a big ol' "No Deal" every now and then.

So yes, it was crazy. But sometimes crazy is all that works.