Look! A squirrel!!
Life with what has recently been dubbed, AuDHD or Autism with ADHD has been quite absurd if you ask me. Yes, I am distracted by pretty much anything that flits into my mind when I am not in a hyperfocus, however when it is something I really want to focus on, I am able to. That being said, my diagnosis of ADHD at 35 came with some trials of meds that work for others with ADHD.
My doctor informed me that most adults only really reduce the symptoms with stimulants. My aversion to anything that can be addictive or put me out of my own state of mind led to attempting non stimulant meds. Apparently, there is this phenomenon called paradoxical effects. Yeah, that is me in a nutshell, I guess (I’m odd). Instead of calming me and allowing me to focus, I would take it, have a super-fast pumping heart for ten minutes that made me feel as if I was having a heart attack and then sleep for ten hours straight. I stayed on it for about two months with no change (thank god my work understood that I was dealing with a new medication).
That one was not for me obviously, as I do work for a living and have to be functional as a parent as well. The next was stimulants when she realized that most were going to react in this way and I have what she calls genetically low blood pressure (average is 98/56). The stimulants seemed to help focus me for the most part, aside from going down a rabbit hole the entire time that it was active. Yes, this might be good for some that do the same thing for most of the day, but for me, I did many different things for my job at the time and when this happened, I would have several things to do with baseline needs, yet only get one done with intense accuracy. It was a conundrum that ultimately had me refusing to fill the meds again.
Yes, at times, I wish I had that little helper to make me focus on a task, but on the flip side, just as the non-stimulant made me sleep all day, stimulants were just as anti-function as the other. I couldn’t pull myself out of the focus that was chemically forced onto me. In the end I decided that medication just wasn’t going to help in a way that I expected. So I just stick with around fifteen alarms a day as well as three calendars. It also helps that I went back to driving motorcoaches for a living so me constantly roaming mind can do so by checking all my mirrors when my eyes get bored.
My daughter also has symptoms of ADHD on top of Autism, but I wont do meds until she knows her body enough to tell me the differences and we have struck out on all of the skills that can be used to learn to control it. Being in a place as an adult and thinking back to my childhood, I thank everything that I was never put on meds that would put me into a trance like that. As it is, I was being punished for hyper focusing on anything that wasn’t what my parents wanted me to do. I can only imagine the repercussions should I have been medicated on top of it, without the voice to say, “hey, this is because of the meds.”
It is different for every parent, I know this. Sometimes there are other reasons for certain medications to be given to a child. I am in no way saying I am anti-medication. For us, it’s a coin toss as to whether something will work or not work and since my daughter is verbal, only she will know how her body feels, so if there is something that needs to be addressed, we will address it when the time comes. For now, though, it’s skills we are working on to maintain and attain progress on the things we both are constantly working on.
