The Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Sunny is down to 25% of the dosage of his old med.  Today, he's going off it completely.  It's also the first day of school.

New Year's Eve, he had a monster fit. It was probably one of the more unpleasant New Year's Eves I've ever had in my entire life.  But since then, now that the new med and the old med are working out of his system, he seems to have improved his outlook.  He isn't putting on his "pick a fight" face. He seems happier and less angry.

The other night, when he I told him we couldn't visit my cousin at the clinic until Wednesday, he burst into tears.  He really misses her and worries about her. But after we hugged him and comforted him, he stopped crying, instead of escalating to screaming.

Later that night, Guy and Sunny were playing Yahtzee together. Sunny was throwing around the dice too wildly and Guy warned him to stop.  On his last throw one die flew off into a corner of the room.  Guy told him to go look for it and explained (in a calm voice) that the consequence if he didn't find the die was that they wouldn't be able to play Yahtzee anymore.  Sunny complained a bit but kept looking for the die.  Eventually, they found it.

Later, Guy told me, "Something really weird is happening.  I was bracing myself because I thought I knew exactly what was going to happen.  Sunny would throw the rest of the dice at me and scream that I was ruining his day. Then you were going to have to step in, and hold him down, and he would try to bite and hit you while calling us "&%$#@ *^%$ ^&$#@!" until he got hoarse. Meanwhile I'd be down in the basement office pounding my head against the wall and threatening to kill myself.  But then... none of that happened. What's going on?"

We're both cautiously optimistic.  I think the old med had both a negative and positive effect on Sunny.  Perhaps the positive used to outweigh the negative, but now it's the other way around, so taking him off is going to be the best thing.  We've had a six-month honeymoon, then a year of intermittent raging.  Maybe we're ready to move to a new stage now?  Or, he might have gotten tired of being angry on his own.

The real test is how he does in school this week. Towards the end of the year, his behavior was getting worse. We had a special conference to discuss problems with pushing other kids, throwing, and one incident where he slapped a crayon out of his teacher's hands.  Whereas his angry, physical episodes had been only 1-2 a day at the beginning of the second grade, they'd increased to 3-4 by the end of the year.  That was one of the reasons we considered the disastrous med change in the first place.  But maybe he'll be able to manage his behavior the same, or better, with no meds at all.  I guess I'll find out soon.

We're also lowering our expectations for him a little bit in the area of being alone. We're not expecting him to play "alone" at all, even for 10-15 minutes. We switch off so that one of us is always doing something with him, or else letting him play chess and board games on the computer.  He'd prefer to play the more high stimulation games at places like Lego.com, but the chess game is a good compromise.  They don't wind him up and make him as agitated as the other games.