The reason why I'm doing this is here. Part 1 of the Diagnosis story is here.

By Christmas when Amanda was 9, things were deteriorating again. The hardest thing I have found is explaining to the doctors how I know the medication needs adjusting. There's usually no bright moment. Life just becomes progressively more difficult. That's where we were then. I told the neurologist and she was reluctant to increase the medicine because the blood levels were fine. Of course, in hindsight, she was treating a different condition than I was living with. She recommended a psychologist. I didn't think it would help but my view was "fine, we'll do eveything they want because it's only through that process that we'll get the increased medication."

We trooped off to the psychologist who told me how some parents of ill children don't discipline enough. I had heard this before. I was unable to convince people that when things were good, discipline worked and that when things were bad, discipline was ineffective. It's difficult to punish or reward a child that isn't acknowledging that you're her mother. He set out a system. Sticker charts, rewards. We agreed. I was feeling desperate. I couldn't explain why but I felt like we were on the verge of a crisis and I was willing to comply with anything.

That night, I couldn't sleep. I paced all night, wondering how I'd gotten into a place where no one understood that stickers weren't doing the trick. I also prayed a lot, but that's another topic.

In the morning, Amanda woke up reenergized and told me she thought the new plan would work. If she thought about the reward, she could stop herself. She was sure of it.

That optimism lasted 5 hours. In the early afternoon, the school called. Something had upset her in science. She had gotten enraged and was throwing chairs and wrecking all the science projects. It took three teachers to wrestle that 9-year-old girl to the the ground. They needed me to come get her and come get her NOW.

In the principal's office, I told her I was mortified (probably the only time I've used the word seriously) and started to cry. She was wonderful and we talked out the issue. Rather than suspension, her record would show a medical problem and she was to stay out of school until it was resolved, just like a contagious disease.

Then I had to get Amanda, who was now running free, corraled and into the car. It took about 40 minutes. I got her, subdued but uncommunicative to my office. I called the neurologist and said we had to come in NOW.

At the neurologist's parking lot, she became violent again. Fortunately, she was close. I have trouble catching her but I've always been able to pick her up kicking and squirming and carry her. At the time, she weighed about 100 pounds.

I learned one thing later that I wish I had known then. Neurologists and Psychiatrists do not overlap as much as I had thought. They had never seen anything like Amanda in that office. Other patients in the waiting room left, some of them running. The receptionist tried to convince us to come back another time when she was calmer. I was insistant we see the doctor though. The doctor was the source of medication and I was pretty sure that's what we needed.

The neurologist was as horrified as the people in the outer office. In the examining room, Amanda lay under the examination table kicking it until we thought it would break. This manifestation was clearly NOT what the doctor thought she was treating.

The doctor wanted to hospitalize her. My husband thought maybe it was a good idea. Maybe it was but I could not make the leap from we needed a sticker chart to we needed to hospitalize my daughter for some indeterminate period of time. At least not in the allotted 30 seconds. The doctor went to locate hospitals. I started to cry. That shocked Amanda into some semblance of rationality. The doctor returned and was willing to consider other options.

We got heavyduty tranquilizers. It took us a couple of hours to find a pharmacy that had tranquilizers in cherry drinkable children's form. I had to promise to take Amanda to the hospital if she got worse. I ignored the instructions and held tightly to her hand in the pharmacy parking lots when she tried to throw herself in front of cars.

It's true that it's darkest before the dawn. After that day, after a week of tranquilizers, we found a psychiatrist who diagnosed her properly and kept her medicine well balanced since then. I don't think we've had a day since then that was as bad as most of our days before then.