Medicine Change

A few weeks ago, I accidentally gave Blake one of Drew's Vyvanse capsules in place of his Focalin. His aide and some of his therapists told me that he had a great day. I decided to experiment (I know, bad!) and gave him another of Drew's Vyvanses the next day. Again, they said he had a great day.

Eric was not happy that I did this. And truly, I understand. I was not altogether comfortable with it myself. However, it seemed that the Vyvanse worked better than the Focalin. I emailed Dr. Berry-Kravis and fessed up what I had done. She didn't even scold me for giving him Drew's medication. She said if the Vyvanse seemed to be working, there was no reason we couldn't switch. So she mailed us a prescription for it.

Today he started his first (legitimate) dose of Vyvanse. Some things I noticed:

He ate fine before his medicine kicked in, but hasn't had an appetite since then. This morning, he acted almost zombie-like and wanted to lay down and cover up a lot. He kept wanting me to squeeze him between a pillow and his beanbag chair and wanted to be held a lot.

Around lunchtime, he started to liven up, though he didn't eat his grilled cheese.

About an hour later, he brought me a deck of letter cards and wanted to play. We went through the whole deck and he told me what each letter was, what sound it made and what the picture was. There were upper and lowercase letters in the deck, so he matched all the uppercase letters with their lowecase counterparts and put them in a pile. I was pretty impressed.

Then he decided he was hungry. He got out a hot dog from the fridge and went onto the back porch with it. When he came back in, I asked him where the hot dog was, and he said, "In my belly!" And he ate another one. And now he's eating popcorn, so I guess the side effect of loss of appetite has worn off.

We'll probably give the med a week to get regulated before we make any real judgements on how well it works for him.