As I shared earlier, Gavin had an appointment today with Dr.Reynolds, his psychiatrist for over an decade.
The trip to this appointment was incredibly difficult for Gavin because his bladder issues were ramped up and causing him a great deal of distress. Thankfully he made it without *incident*..
His appointment went as well as it could, considering why we were there. We were there to both follow up on meds and discuss Gavin's current status.
I'm going to try and make this short and sweet. We talked about how Gavin's delusions and hallucinations are as strong as ever. There isn't a significant difference between his status while on 600mg of Clozapine and what it is now while on 800mg of Clozapine per day.
This is a scary thing for many reasons but the most prominent being that his medicine is not as effective anymore.
It's because of this that we have decided it best to drop him back down to 600mg of Clozapine per day. At this point in time, the higher dose doesn't make enough of a difference to justify what it's putting his body through.
As a result of this change, Gavin can safely go back to bloodwork once a month. He's happy about that and so are we.
This is where things get more challenging for us.
We've been instructed to limit Gavin's excitement as much as humanly possible because this causes him to decompensate. This means anything that can get him wound up, upset or really excited. It doesn't matter if it's excitement over opening his birthday presents or being upset that he dropped a Lego creation on the floor.
Good excitement or bad excitement, it all has the same impact on his emotional stability and it's not good.
This is especially important in light of his medication no longer working as well as it used to.
What does this mean? That's a pretty good question but I could best describe this a pretty hardcore sensory diet. The idea being to limit stimuli that can cause him to sorta emotionally rev-up for any reason.
We've had to do this before with him when he was younger and it wasn't easy. At the time, Emmett wasn't born and Elliott was just a baby. That made it a little easier because Elliott was too young to notice and you know, Emmett wasn't around to raise Hell like he is today.
During this period of time, we had to avoid lots of things and not everyone understood why.
It was really hard to help people understand that while Gavin was having fun, the excitement would lead to him decompensating and that's not a good thing. Not even a little.
Lizze and I have the distinct honor of deciding how to adjust our lives in a way that provides Gavin with what he needs or rather doesn't need and do so without negatively impacting the other boys.
This is going to present us with challenges and difficult decisions, especially with the holidays beginning next week.
Over the next day or so, we're going to have to figure some of this shit out and formulate some kind of plan.
This may mean we do holidays at home and just have people stop over a little at a time. This sorta limits things and allows for a better environment for Mr. Gavin to exist, while still being able to see family over the holidays.
Either way, we're going to have to readjust our lives to better ensure his best interests are being met as much as possible.
