Almost like holding off on scratching an itch. She would bottle it all up during school and after school she would let loose for hours. Her eyebrow-scrunching tic developed into a throat-clearing tic, which then over time developed into a screeching/yelping tic. If she tapped something 3 times with one hand she had to follow with the other hand. If she touched something with her right hand, she had to touch it with her left. She began to exhibit OCD behavior as well. Basic decision-making skills were tormenting for her. She wanted to make the decision but couldn’t. If she was forced to make a decision as simple as what shirt she wanted to wear that day, she would rage and scream, ‘I don’t know!!!’ At the same time, she didn’t want anyone else telling her what to do. She would escalate from frustrated to angry and then to enraged within seconds with no ability to diffuse. It was extremely difficult for her to make simple decisions. She had a difficult time processing logic, so math became a struggle. It was sloppy and she would switch letters. Endless possibilities where something bad would happen to her father or myself and she would end up alone. She worried about fires, robbers, storms. She was terrified that something was going to happen to her while she slept. She loved school! She had always been a straight-A student and now, suddenly, she was terrified of going. She would cry and get very anxious when she had to go to school. Courtesy of Jennifer WallĪs I was trying to determine why her behavior had changed, new issues kept popping up overnight. For her to revert to some of these very uncharacteristic behaviors really worried me. Addi had always been very mature for her age. Now this probably seems like common childhood behavior at times, but my instincts knew better. If things weren’t exactly how she thought they should be, she’d have meltdowns nothing but time could bring her out of. She would argue over the smallest things and she would refuse to listen to us. My once happy, lighthearted daughter was becoming belligerent, rude, and obstinate. Her attitude changed practically overnight. She had been completely potty trained since she was 2 with no accidents – so this definitely got my attention. She said she didn’t know she had to go to the bathroom and it would just happen without her realizing it. Fast forward a few weeks and she began to wet the bed, pee in her pants while at school, have night terrors, and sleepwalk. The sniffling went away in a little bit of time but was soon replaced with eyebrow scrunching. I didn’t think much of it at the time and I thought it was likely a habit that would eventually stop if I didn’t bring attention to it.

After she had recovered from it, I noticed a month later that she was making a sniffing noise. Turns out, however, that her immune system didn’t react appropriately to the pathogens she was exposed to. She had her bouts of occasional strep throat and ear infections that resulted in tubes being put in, but nothing a round of antibiotics couldn’t cure. Nonetheless, this was the pivotal moment that set our daughter on the path we have been carefully navigating ever since.Īddi was 8 years old at the time and I had always taken pride in the fact that she was never sickly. It had actually been working up to this moment for a long time, maybe for a few years or even since her birth.

Unequal pupil size in newborn