Do I Help My Abusive Mother ~ Dr. John Delony

Robert (0:00)

So my seven-year-old daughter is very much ADHD. What does that mean? What does that mean?

Oh, she has trouble concentrating in class some days, and is pretty much at 300 miles an hour, 26 hours of the day. She is always constantly going, but during school time, she has trouble with sitting, she wants to stand all the time, then she'll sit and be walking around the classroom. And so it does disrupt the classroom pretty regularly.

John Delony (0:36)

Have you had her tested?

Robert (0:38)

We have had her tested. We tested her at five, and they were unable to complete the test because she couldn't concentrate long enough.

John Delony (0:47)

Okay. She's seven now?

Robert (0:53)

So, she's seven now.

John Delony (0:54)

Okay. Don't do anything until you get her re-evaluated.

Robert (0:58)

Okay.

John Delony (0:58)

Okay. And here, my first flag is, not always, but often ADHD is expressed in young girls through what I would call a neutral shutting down.

And she's expressing this in a way that's typical of young boys. All that comes in a bell curve of some sort, so that doesn't mean anything other than there may be something else going on here.

Robert (1:25)

Yeah. And she has, she does have a rare food allergy.

John Delony (1:30)

Okay.

Robert (1:30)

That started at birth.

John Delony (1:34)

What's the allergy?

Robert (1:34)

With, it's called F-Pi's.

John Delony (1:37)

Okay.

Robert (1:39)

Have you heard of that one?

John Delony (1:40)

I have not. What is it?

Robert (1:42)

It is food protein induced endocolitis syndrome.

John Delony (1:45)

Okay.

Robert (1:46)

Hers is actually the protein, the protein chains in the food that she's allergic to. Once it hits the gut, the gut thinks that she has an infection.

John Delony (1:56)

Okay.

Robert (1:56)

And it can turn into septus. And so she has had a lot of, I mean, her first nine months, we had almost 80 doctor appointments in the first nine months.

John Delony (2:06)

Wow. Wow.

Okay.

Robert (2:09)

And it dropped down to about 60 for the next calendar year, basically. So it's been a very long struggle. First 18 months were bottle feed only every two hours.

John Delony (2:23)

60 appointments. That means you're going once or twice a week.

Robert (2:28)

Yeah. She was not on the growth chart until she hit six months old.

She hit one percent at six months old.

John Delony (2:41)

So do you have like a care network liaison, a social worker, somebody that's leading the charge on... Because this sounds like a complex matrix of things, from diet to nutrition to physical health.

Robert (2:55)

Yeah, she does actually have a specialist, and we have gotten lucky at about five years old. She has almost cleared all the foods that she was allergic to.

John Delony (3:07)

Wonderful.

Robert (3:09)

She's outgrown all of it. There's still a couple of them that we haven't tried, but they are minor foods that aren't really used all the time.

John Delony (3:18)

Okay, so that's great news.

Robert (3:22)

Yeah, and now she's 97th percentile in height and weight.

John Delony (3:25)

Wonderful. Great, great news, man. That's awesome.

I have a, an allergy is too light. I have a rage inside of me. Let me put it that way. I get angry only because part of my job for 20 years was dealing with ADA 504 kids with accommodations.

Robert (3:49)

Right.

John Delony (3:50)

Who were somehow challenged in a traditional learning environment.

And the folks that went through and got kids the right testing, the right support that sometimes include pharmacological intervention. I'm not against medicine. I've taken anxiety medicine, saved my life. I'm not opposed to it. What I am opposed to is teachers, administrators, or parents looking at a cluster of symptoms, Googling it, self-diagnosing, and then chasing down some doctor somewhere, and you'll find one that will write you a script for it.

Robert (4:32)

Right. Yeah, and luckily, we've been working with our pediatrician, and at two years old, we started having the conversation with our pediatrician about it, because we're kind of seeing the signs then.

And she said, hold off until she's five, and then have her tested at five. But we also found out at five that she has, they called it, primitive reflexes hadn't released when she was five. And so she did two years of occupational therapy, and she finally met all of her goals for that.

John Delony (5:06)

Excellent. And so part of me wonders what two more years of occupational therapy would do.

Part of me wonders, is her outburst because she's in an unsafe classroom. Where kids are picking on her because she's a little bit different, or the teacher doesn't know how to handle it. Part of me wonders if there's additional allergies that are expressing themselves in different ways as she gets old. Like you see what I'm saying? So there's a lot of questions I would have before I just jumped to. And let me also be compassionate. I have sat with these families, I've sat with kids, K-5 and I've sat with high school kids and I've sat with university students who, because they have behavioral outbursts in classrooms, they're ostracized socially, and every day is just a failure factory.