LuLu is likely the most impulsive child I’ll ever meet. Watching her you can read nearly every though that flits through her brain, because she’s constantly reacting to them. In fact, I’m not sure how truly distracted or inattentive she is, if she can just keep these fleeting thoughts from running amok with her brain.

The hospital doc put LuLu on Clonidine. It is a medication we tried years ago and abandoned because of how incredibly drowsy it made her. The doctor, citing some research that says Clonidine helps lessen the symptoms of PTSD, believed this was the best med change we could make, off of Tenex (also a blood pressure medication) and on to Clonidine.

This switch was hard on LuLu’s body. She had a very difficult time because even the slightest dosage dropped her blood pressure significantly. Over the course of the 3+ weeks that she was in and out of the hospital, they tried to raise her dosage, but had to go up very slowly and monitor her pressure. Even yet, she’s on ˝ of the lowest dosage possible.

All the literature says that it takes 4-5 weeks for the effects of clonidine to be seen. What I have noticed is a brief hesitation in acting on her thoughts. It’s like she has a nanosecond before her impulsivity kicks in. And even when she starts to act, she’s been able to back away, stating that what she’s doing isn’t a good idea.

She’s also a bit easier to let go of her stuck thinking (OCD). There have been several times that I’ve steeled myself for a rage when I’ve told her “no” or that things will not be going as planned for her. Yet, she’s been able to accept that so much better.

According to the literature, Clonidine also helps with tics. Guess I should be watching more closely to see if her tic volume decreases at all.

Regardless, even if all the Clonidine does is give her a nanosecond longer to decide to not act on her impulse, it’s a step in the right direction.

A note about nanoseconds: I can’t use this term, which means one billionth of a second, without picturing Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (inventor of COBOL computer language). I heard her speak in the late 1980s and was a recipient of her “nanosecond” a piece of wire about a foot long. This wire represented the distance light travels in one nanosecond, which was Admiral Hopper’s way of representing how long it takes messages to travel to and from satellites.

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