Hello everyone. It has been a while since my last update on my difficult child and since husband and I just got back from a visit with her I thought I would catch you up.
difficult child is currently in a halfway house which is owned by the IOP she is attending. After a complete and total relapse, she took an overdose of pills and spent a week in a p-hospital. After much calling around dealing with insurance coverage issues, husband found the current IOP and it has been a godsend. Sometimes I pinch myself because I can't believe what great care she is getting and how much the therapists that she is working with care about her. The best part is that thanks to Obamacare, the IOP is covered at 100%!
She has had a couple of relapses since she has been there and instead of kicking her out, they have dealt with the relapses as part of the recovery process. Her last relapse came after her hospital stay due to a gall bladder attack. After she got out, she was found using the pain medications and snorting xanax. They decided that she needed to get off of all benzos (which I have been saying all along but doctors including p-docs that know her addiction history kept giving it to her). In the meantime, she had problems with the gall bladder again and she was put back into the hospital for more tests and they ended up doing the surgery to remove her gall bladder.
Someone from the IOP picked her up from the hospital where she had surgery and took her straight to detox (which IOP arranged and got insurance to pay for). difficult child spent 11 days in detox coming off the benzos. She said it was hell. She has now been off them since July 7th and is going to therapy five hours a day Monday - Friday.
Her therapist went with her to a new p-doctor that the therapist really likes (one of the conditions for letting difficult child stay in the program after her relapse was that she has to take sober support with her whenever she goes to a doctor). He told difficult child that since she is an addict, she can never take benzos again. So he started her on a different anxiety medicine called Luvox which is not addictive. It is often prescribed for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and social anxiety disorder. I don't know why no one has tried it with difficult child before. It does seem to be helping her with her anxiety.
After she gets the okay from her doctor to go to work, she is expected to have a job in one month. Her therapist wrote up a contract that said we would only pay half of her rent (which is thankfully only $75 a week) starting one month after she is cleared to work whether she has a job or not. Then the contract states that we stop paying two months after she is cleared for work whether she is working or not.
difficult child was appropriate for the most part when we saw her and grateful for the things we did for her. She is working the program and told me some things that she had never told me before. It turns out that she had overdosed one other time on heroin and the @#$$ that gave it to her left her laying in the bathtub since he had a warrant out for his arrest and didn't want to get caught. Someone else that was there did CPR and brought her around.
It was good to see her but I found myself falling right back into the old patterns. It is much harder to set and keep boundaries when I am with her than when I am in another state.
So we are home now and school starts in less than a week.
~Kathy
difficult child is currently in a halfway house which is owned by the IOP she is attending. After a complete and total relapse, she took an overdose of pills and spent a week in a p-hospital. After much calling around dealing with insurance coverage issues, husband found the current IOP and it has been a godsend. Sometimes I pinch myself because I can't believe what great care she is getting and how much the therapists that she is working with care about her. The best part is that thanks to Obamacare, the IOP is covered at 100%!
She has had a couple of relapses since she has been there and instead of kicking her out, they have dealt with the relapses as part of the recovery process. Her last relapse came after her hospital stay due to a gall bladder attack. After she got out, she was found using the pain medications and snorting xanax. They decided that she needed to get off of all benzos (which I have been saying all along but doctors including p-docs that know her addiction history kept giving it to her). In the meantime, she had problems with the gall bladder again and she was put back into the hospital for more tests and they ended up doing the surgery to remove her gall bladder.
Someone from the IOP picked her up from the hospital where she had surgery and took her straight to detox (which IOP arranged and got insurance to pay for). difficult child spent 11 days in detox coming off the benzos. She said it was hell. She has now been off them since July 7th and is going to therapy five hours a day Monday - Friday.
Her therapist went with her to a new p-doctor that the therapist really likes (one of the conditions for letting difficult child stay in the program after her relapse was that she has to take sober support with her whenever she goes to a doctor). He told difficult child that since she is an addict, she can never take benzos again. So he started her on a different anxiety medicine called Luvox which is not addictive. It is often prescribed for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and social anxiety disorder. I don't know why no one has tried it with difficult child before. It does seem to be helping her with her anxiety.
After she gets the okay from her doctor to go to work, she is expected to have a job in one month. Her therapist wrote up a contract that said we would only pay half of her rent (which is thankfully only $75 a week) starting one month after she is cleared to work whether she has a job or not. Then the contract states that we stop paying two months after she is cleared for work whether she is working or not.
difficult child was appropriate for the most part when we saw her and grateful for the things we did for her. She is working the program and told me some things that she had never told me before. It turns out that she had overdosed one other time on heroin and the @#$$ that gave it to her left her laying in the bathtub since he had a warrant out for his arrest and didn't want to get caught. Someone else that was there did CPR and brought her around.
It was good to see her but I found myself falling right back into the old patterns. It is much harder to set and keep boundaries when I am with her than when I am in another state.
So we are home now and school starts in less than a week.
~Kathy
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