When things changed

now a bright 5 year old, we had enrolled our girl in preschool.

The year started off amazing, she was doing so well, learning, laughing, playing! Doing all the things a preschooler should be doing.

And then one morning, she woke up completely different.

When I say different. I mean she was no longer present.

I remember brushing her hair, and finding a bald spot. And then another.. and another

I went into her room and I had found handfuls of hair that she had pulled out of her head. My beautiful baby girl was pulling her hair out, and it wasn’t a little bit, it was a lot.

Within that same day, she started having fits of rage. Not the normal tantrums but absolute rage.I remember she was becoming almost catatonic. She would start lining up her toys but unresponsive to anything else around. And if one of the boys happened to move something she was working on during these episodes she became violent. She was hurting herself, her brothers, and at one point she stabbed me with a pen, yes my 5 year old took a pen and shoved it into the skin of my back because the pen wasn’t working. I remember that night I texted her pediatrician out of fear. How was I so afraid of my child, afraid that if she could stab me, what was she capable of doing to her brothers. She had already choked our two year old what else was going to happen.

I remember I felt scared, ashamed, alone. This world is so PC when it comes to mental health, let alone mental health of a child. I didn’t know who to turn to, who I could confide in without judgment. What did I do wrong? Was I a bad parent? Was this because she was a preemie? Did I do something wrong in my pregnancy?

The guilt and shame to this day is something that has never left.

I remember during these episodes of rage, it was almost an out of body experience for her. Her eyes became dilated and empty, and when I say empty, when you looked into her eyes it was as if nothing existed. These rages lasted anywhere from 5 minutes to hours. Kicking, screaming, growling, uncontrolled and unwarranted.

After the pen incident I had texted her pediatrician and he told me to get her to our children’s hospital immediately. Now at this point in our life we were also dealing with some other things.

Remember a few paragraphs before I felt I couldn’t talk to anyone. Well, I say this lightly but some family members who thought they knew what was happening made some pretty horrific assumptions and allegations and had anonymously threatened to call childrens services on me for abuse and neglect. At the time I had no idea who had made these threats. And, sadly these people had a lot of my family members believing these allegations. So, not only did I have the stress of finding out what the heck was happening with my child and managing all of the things going on. I had allegations of neglect, and abuse, because of assumptions based on what they saw for a brief moment. But that will be another blog post.

I remember sitting in the ER with her. And we finally got evaluated by the psych team. I was so scared they were going to take my daughter away from me. I couldn’t explain why this was happening. I had no answers. I was pleading for help and to know why this was happening. The seemingly had no more answers than I did. All we could do was schedule an appointment that was 3-6 months away and that was for an urgent appointment (if this doesn’t tell you the crisis for pediatric mental health I don’t know what does)

So we waited and waited. Meanwhile she was getting worse. Her pediatrician was doing the best he could to manage her symptoms but even he was at a loss. We explored private psychiatrists, everything. With no answers and more bottles of medication.

During this time, she had also developed tremors, her cognitive skills diminished, she had pulled her hair out to the scalp, she became fixated on how clothes fit and the type of fabric she was wearing. She could no longer withstand loud noises, or being in a public setting without become so over stimulated she melted down.

Still no answers. We were evaluated for autism, sensory processing disorder, oppositional defiant disorder , and then they finally wanted to diagnose her with Bi-Polar disorder

But my child wasn’t crazy