Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Mental Health Care is Impossible

I started a post about our backpacking trip. Somehow I ran out of time and never wrote a word.... but stuck a few pictures on the blog. Well, it was a 26 mile, 4 day backpack trip up and down mountains and over snowfields and was incredible. Hoping I can finish the post soon.

I am trying desperately to get mental health care for this kiddo. Thanks to Obama we cannot go to Children's Hospital Mental Health Clinic. We live in the wrong county. Nice. We live in a small town with little available. My one option is to driver her to Seattle and take her to the Children's Hospital ER and have her admitted. They cannot turn us away.  Or I can go through the hoops of trying to get her admitted here and wait for an opening or a bed. Or I can continue to sit by the phone and hope someone finds the time to call me back. It's rough.


We've come to the conclusion that Missy is bipolar - and by we, I mean a person who works in adult mental health care, and some nodding by the pediatrician and by all the research I have been doing. She is now off the medication as it made her bipolar issues go crazy. Crazy, crazy.  We knew it could happen if she was bipolar. We were watching for the signs. She went into manic mode. She had pressured speech, hyper sexuality, hoarding food, craving carbs, stealing money, lying, eating out of the trash can, etc...( there was a HUGE hyperfocus on food).  Then she came off the meds and back to screaming and depression. She started throwing stuff and she nearly jumped from a 2 story window (had to put an alarm on her bedroom window). Most of her actions are for attention, but sometimes there's a look in her eye that tells me there's more to this. I am scared. She is out of control. I am doing my level best to get help.  Our little town has so little to offer. Our pediatrician is slow or afraid of mental illness. Getting psychiatric help is not easy let me tell you. I can't even get her in to see a psychiatrist!!! And I know that there is ONE in town.  Next time she does something crazy I am calling 911 or the crisis line. It's the only way someone is going to hear me. 

 James is at Young Disciple Camp. Vanessa is working there along with her fiancĂ©, Brianna and Christina are in Vermont and headed to Nova Scotia to put on the teen program for camp meeting. Steve is working super long hours... like leaves before I wake up and home after 10...  I am trying to get Missy into Camp Korey which is a camp for special needs kids. They usually need the applications in before the end of April, but I didn't know about it until two weeks ago. She is in no way able to go to regular camp and is absolutely devastated that she can't go to YD. So, I called anyway and they had one spot left. I jumped through the hoops including going to the doctor for a physical and catching her up on immunizations and everything and now we wait. It's a free camp, not on the weekend, and serves vegetarian food for those who request it. It is on an organic herb and veggie market farm and has a whole medical staff to deal with her special needs.


All my efforts at finding respite care or more babysitting has failed. It doesn't matter that we are paying. No one is interested. My friends from church, Teresa and Cindy - also adoptive moms, and I all have our birthdays back to back. We decided to go out together to eat without kids. Oh my. I did not anticipate how hard it would be to get a sitter for ONE kiddo. It's a regular caregiver day so I assumed, but no, he was not able to be here that day and it looked like I would not be able to find a anyone. I looked around for a few days and finally found a lady from church willing to watch Missy, BUT then the caregiver agency came up with a new caregiver. Also, next Tuesday Vanessa and I planned to go wedding dress shopping in Spokane after I picked her up from being a counselor. The caregiver canceled again!! I resigned myself to taking the twins wedding dress shopping, but you can only imagine how that would go. A friend called today and offered to take the kids, and then the agency called has found me a caregiver... after some discussion the agency is looking for yet another caregiver. Between the three people we should be able to shop worry free. :-) 

James is loving camp and doing well. He finds Vanessa for hugs often. Her campers wanted to know what was up with that!! lol. Well, he's an adopted brother who has fear of abandonment... He needs assurance all the time. Son-in-law-to-be said James came to him quite perturbed that they played taps 30 minutes late one night. James wanted him to find the culprits and correct the issue. :-) That would be our little inflexible child... Ha!



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey there, only reading your post now.... had no idea things were that intense!!! I will pray extra and more specific for you. Praying that you can find the help yiu need!!! I had to smile about James being inflexible though.... sounds so like him!!! Love you, antionette

Annie said...

I have to say that I thank Obama care for making it possible for my former foster son (who still lives with us) to get health care. Otherwise he would be without any resources.

That said, we lost our other son to suicide simply because there WAS NO HELP. If he'd been a foster child, we could have accessed something through medicaid but because we "have insurance" (regardless of the fact that it does not cover mental health care) we were turned away, and turned away and turned away.

However, for our daughter we discovered that the Federal Government does have a program where we were able to get her declared disabled, for the purposes of letting her access Community Mental Health, where to my surprise we got amazing therapy. She was dumped out at age 18, but the two years we had helped immeasurably.

I wish you luck.