ADHD and Me

I had my appointment for monthly lab-work yesterday afternoon.  When they checked my blood pressure it was dangerously high, despite my blood pressure medication.  It was also very high the last 2 months at my doctor appointments and has been teetering on being scary-high when I check it at home. My freaked-out nurses checked my BP about 4 times before they let me leave and brainstormed with me about what could possibly be making my blood pressure shoot up.

One of my nurses suggested that perhaps my ADHD was part of the culprit. "You are just high strung" she said.

High strung?  What does that even mean and how does it apply to me?

Anyway, she suggested that at my appointment next week, I bring this up with my doctor and ask him if he would be willing to prescribe some sort of medication for ADHD to see if it helps.  I confess, that I have always suspected I had ADHD, but there is precious little information out there about the disorder, especially in adults and even more especially in women and girls.

I do remember struggling through elementary school, my mind often a million miles away any time a subject with which I struggled came up.  Math was a HUGE problem for me, starting in about third grade.  Instead of offering more help and finding ways to help me adapt an learn, my teacher (and my school's} philosophy seemed to be to paddle the crap out of me until I complied and learned the same way all the other kids did. It was a traumatic experience, to say the least.

Over the years, without any kind of treatment or medication, I have learned a lot of adaptive skills on my own, but I am still often forgetful and disorganized with a bad tendency to procrastinate when a task feels overwhelming to me.  I have frequently internalized all these things and felt as though they were actual character flaws in myself.

This evening I actually found, for the first time ever, an online inventory based on the DSM for ADHD in adults and guess what?  I scored a 6 out of 10.  I think if I had been tested as a child, before I had to spend so many years learning to adapt and overcome on my own without any kind of interventions, I would have probably scored a 10 our of 10.  It's kind of a relief to know that there are ways I can continue to adapt and learn how to better manage my life without medication, but at this point in my life, I admit I am curious to know how medication could help me.

If I had to describe most of my life in one word that word would be "overwhelmed".  As far back as I can remember, I have felt overwhelmed with things that seem so easily managed by other people.  I know that I have a way of getting on people's nerves with my ever-shifting interests and frequent inability to follow through after the toughest part of a task has been accomplished.  It seems like once I've gotten through the hardest part of a chore, I lose interest in it.  If it isn't challenging and completely absorbing my attention, I can't pay attention to it at all.

For example, it seems like a small thing, but I often do laundry, fold it, put it in a basket and then never put it away.  Seems like not such a big deal until you have six baskets of clothes to dig through every morning when you're trying to get ready for work.  So then, I run late because I get sidetracked looking for my grey tights or my black bra or a certain pair of socks.  I know that if I'd just put them away in the same place every time my life would be much simpler, but once they're washed and folded, I am on to other things and I forget about putting them away.  I have gotten much better about this over the last several months and at this moment I only have one very tiny basket of folded laundry sitting in my bedroom.  I am concentrating on putting everything away as soon as I bring it back from the laundry room.  This will last for a while, but as soon as other things start to catch up with me and I start feeling overwhelmed with keeping up with it all, the basket piles are likely to appear again.  I hate this about myself.

I do the same thing with piles of mail.  It's maddening. I can get it all organized and keep it that way for a while, but again, when the other pressures of life start bearing down on me, this is one of the things that overwhelms me to the point of avoidance and anxiety.  It seems like a lot of people have piles of papers and mail here and there, but when you have ADHD, those piles of paper often contain really important things that need to be dealt with.  The problem comes when you lose important things and then have to go through the hassle of replacing them or digging through piles and piles of mail to find them.  I know this is self-defeating, but if you could see inside my mind when I'm feeling overwhelmed, I'm almost sure you'd find piles of thoughts and baskets of anxiety all over the place.  My cluttered life is an outward representation of my cluttered mind and I am really tired of it.

My nurse suggested that my life-long insomnia might also stem from my ADHD racing thoughts and inability to be still long enough to fall asleep.  I have trouble just sitting back and relaxing without DOING something.  I can't just watch TV.  I have to watch TV and write or read or talk to someone.  I can't JUST listen to music, I have to listen to music and shower or clean or be driving at the same time.  I used to have trouble staying in one room long enough to clean it up, but I learned years ago to set a timer and make myself stay in one room cleaning until time was up.  Adaptations like this have brought me pretty far from the ADHD mess I used to be, but I realize I still have a ways to go.

This became even more clear to me today at work when I was counting up a small stack of one dollar bills for a bank deposit.  With music going, people talking, volunteers getting lunch set up and a stack of various forms, calendars and schedules on my desk, I ended up counting the money about seven times before I was able to fill out the deposit slip.  I eventually got up and closed my office door, which I am sure seemed rather rude and anti-social, but if I hadn't I would have never gotten that 58 bucks counted up correctly.  That's another problem with having ADHD as an adult--the need to shut people out so you can concentrate on what's in front of you can make you seem rather rude at times.  Socially, it also becomes a huge stumbling block when someone is talking to you and you are looking them square in the eye but have no idea what they're saying to you because your thoughts are racing a million miles a minute about all the things you need to get done next.  It isn't impossible for me to focus my attention on who is speaking to me most of the time, but when I'm feeling overwhelmed it is monumentally difficult to be attentive when someone launches into a long, complicated story.  I realized this about myself today twice, when in conversations with two different people, I found them looking back at me puzzled and confused at my inappropriate responses.

As far as my BP goes, I think it has improved today with my doctor's insistence that I increase my medication dosage.  I suppose I could just leave things as they are and keep scrambling for ways to adapt and overcome the way I have all my life, but I'm thinking maybe it wouldn't hurt to try something different and just see how it works.  Maybe there's a little pill out there somewhere that will be life-transforming for me, or maybe not, but I'll never know unless I give it a try.

Of all the things I have always suspected were wrong with me, this one has probably been the one I've paid the least attention to.  The more I learn about it though, the more I'm able to recognize the many ways it affects my life.  I guess I'm going to follow my nurse's advice and talk to my doc about ADHD next week.  We'll see what he says and go from there.

In the meantime I'm going to do some reading online with three browser windows open while I watch TV and talk to my kid.  I guess the ability to multi-task isn't such a bad thing, so maybe there's a blessing somewhere even in having ADHD as an adult.