Adventurous Nights

It is 4:30 in the morning. J. has been dealing with either legitimate hallucinations or an over active imaginations. It all started, I guess about the time we upped him to 2mg of Intuniv, about a week ago. J. rushed into our room one morning and expressed concern over the snake in the window. So J., his mom, and I all went to the window in J.’s room to see the snake. J. would not enter his room and was genuinely frightened. He was pointing to the snake in the upper left corner of the window. I asked him he can see it right now and if so what is it doing. He said it was crawling around and it will bite me if I get closer. You could hear the ever increasing fear in his voice. We explained that he is just imagining it and it is not real. So he finally admitted that the snake was not real but you could tell he was just saying it. He did admit that he had a bad dream, so I think it was more or less dream related.

However, after countless nights of no sleep and the ever increasing cries and screaming coming from down the hall in J.’s room, it has been frustrating to say the least and even though J. knows that it is not real but too him at the time it “they come alive.”

We performed an experiment the other night. We decided, or someone forgot, to give J. the clonidine. There were no hallucinations that night. Could have been a fluke. In any case, we decided to not give him the clonidine again the next night. No problems except the occasional waking. The funny thing is, we only know J. wakes up in the middle of the night because when we go to bed, our door is closed, but when I wake up in the middle of the night and look at the door, or in the morning, it is wide open.

We have been thinking about all this quite a bit. The hallucinations did not start until J. went on the 2mg Intuniv and the clonidine, which is the same type of drug. So we think the hallucinations started simply due to the fact J. was getting too much of the same thing. Not giving J. the clonidine, he has resulted in J. acting more like himself. However, he was a bit more hyper. However, this could very well have been due to the weather lately with all the rain and not being able to burn off that extra energy outside or on the playground at school. Time will tell.

So for now, it appears as though the night time adventures have subsided.

-Dad2ADHD