I am so proud of her for sticking with it. I know there have been many times when she has wanted to just pack it all in, days that have been so damn hard for her to face, days when I have wanted to cry for her but having said that, there have also been some awesome days!
Sensory-wise she has coped pretty well, over the years she has developed her own set of coping skills. Anxiety-wise and OCD-wise things have been tough.
We didn't know what challenges, if any, we were going to be faced with. Note I said, WE not SHE, we're in this thing together, it's a team effort and always will be!
Unfortunately her Anxiety reached peak levels, and Anxiety's best friend, OCD, likes to come and play too on days like this. The Anxiety/OCD combo is so bad that she can't handle me going home whilst she's at College, the stress of worrying about me driving home is too much for her to cope with. So what do I do? I sit in the car and wait, that's what I do! My priority right now is to help her settle into College and if this is the only way we can do it, then that's how it is.
Her stress over my welfare comes from several things. Firstly, my health. Over the last few years I have spontaneously found myself rushed to hospital and during my stays have invariably ended up much worse, due to my intolerance of medications, what is supposed to make you feel better tends to work the opposite way with me. Plus we have had quite a few near misses in the car, where it seems I am invisible or something, so many cars just pulling out in front of us! Add into that, an incident, when I was taking her dad to an appointment and she didn't hear me say I was staying, instead of coming home and picking him up later, plus my forgetting to turn my phone on... when we returned she was in a terrible state, her brain had gone over so many scenarios, all of them bad, that since then she hasn't let me out of her sight. I guess you could say, I am her obsession right now.
She is having counselling at College, a step forwards as up until now, B wouldn't entertain the idea, but she has realised that this current situation is not healthy for either of us. It seems she has gone through what is equivalent to a terror event/PTSD. I know it sounds crazy, but when you remember that she is primarily Sensory Defensive, (her nervous system is on high alert most of the time) and the OCD behaviour, it makes sense. To your average person this would have simply been a stressful one-off, for her, it's HUGE.
I've always referred to the obsessive stuff as obsessive compulsive BEHAVIOUR as we've always believed it was just that, behaviour, as opposed to Disorder but it looks likely that somewhere along the way, she has indeed fallen into full blown OCD. We are now waiting on a formal Assessment and will see where that leads us...
But back to College... she has shown such an incredible inner strength to keep going. Her course is challenging, well for anyone with a Spectrum it would be, it's a Carousel course, so they keep swapping to something else every 6 weeks or so and the timetable is never the same two weeks running, sometimes she can be done for the day by lunchtime! But she has managed it!
The College staff have been excellent, very supportive and in fact some of her tutors have children themselves who suffer from OCD, Anxiety and/or being on the Spectrum, so they know only too well how difficult life can be from first-hand experience. This is actually a good thing, as B feels they 'get it'.
And to put the icing on the cake, she's getting Merits in most of her Tasks... I mean, look at this wall she built last week...
Till next time
B's Mum
