Surprise, it’s a girl!

To focus on the ADHD and parenting aspects of my sometimes fictionalized life, I have left out my oldest daughter until now. She is 24 years old. Her story has become relevant to what I am doing and with her permission, I share some of her story with details changed or omitted to protect her identity.

Her background information: She is very smart but very disorganized. In high school, she would complete all of her assignments and then lose them in her locker or backpack. She was capable of AP class work, but her teachers wouldn’t recommend her for them because of the disorganization. She specifically wanted to go to a small college away from home. She found the perfect school across the country and did well in her first semester. Then the train went off the rails.

There are benefits to going to a small school in a small town, but good healthcare is not one of them. The one and only primary care doctor diagnosed her with bipolar disorder. She went through multiple medication changes and seemed to be rapidly cycling through depression and mania. The nearest specialist was 2 hours away and she felt like she didn’t need additional help.

Around this same time, she met and eventually married a fellow student. It was not a Hallmark movie relationship. He was a typical Jekyll and Hyde master manipulator. Long story short, it finally progressed to where she needed to come home and obtain a divorce.

Enter Mama Bear. Mama Bear set her up with specialists in mental health. She went through more medication changes and bouts with deep depression that eventually required in-patient care. Her diagnosis list started to look like alphabet soup. It became apparent to me that she needed thorough testing to determine which diagnosis of the ABCs soup was driving the bus.

Enter The Affinity Center. After testing (Tier F I believe) with Dr. Brittany Barber, we had an answer. No to bipolar and yes for medication resistant depression and moderate to severe ADHD, high on impulsivity. There were other things mentioned but the important thing was that she was misdiagnosed and now she knows what she is dealing with. It also means all of her doctors and specialists know what they are dealing with as well.

Just to be clear, she has received good healthcare since arriving in Cincinnati. She continues to see her original providers but now she is armed with the testing data. And like all illnesses, treating the symptoms is not nearly as important as identifying the causes.

 My mental health motto continues to be:

Knowledge is power - and you can’t treat what you don’t know or acknowledge.