Not really—people here have recommended this over and over, and this antibiotic is notorious for GI issues. I’m feeling fine now and will likely back down on my dose.

Most people I know with MCAS are on Allegra 180 (I can take up to four per day). Zyrtec does nothing but make me sleepy. Claritin is not potent enough.

Some of my ancestral line is documented well (no slaves mentioned, but it was in a book where that would be selected against in sharing information), but I haven’t stopped to trace my exact path in a long time, and the book documenting them starts with a specific couple and fans out in time toward me, so lots of lines are documented parallel to my own. Since my ancestors fought in wars with the Pequot (IIRC) in “King Phillip’s” war (IIRC), I assume my ancestors were tangled up in plenty of not pretty stuff that might include this. I read somewhere a few years ago that many native men were shipped to the Caribbean as slaves as a punishment after King Phillip’s war (again if I have the right name for the conflict). They have descendants there to do this day. It’s possible my ancestors were involved in such things. Many New England families owned slaves—Sojourner Truth was enslaved by a Dutch family in NY, if I remember right. One section of my family is from the South, which was news to me about a decade ago. Supposedly from an illegitimate descendant of either Lewis or Clark of expedition fame (have not seen this information, but a relative who does genealogy dug it up), so I would guess that the answer is yes to enslavers as ancestors. One section of the family came from England in the 1800s, and they could have been enslavers, but I think that ancestor was super poor. The rest of mine are from Poland in the late 1900s. DH found out he is descended from a close relative of a notorious Southern general who was a notorious slaver. That was a surprise. Almost assuredly a yes for his ancestry. DH also has a fairly recent ancestor from OK/TX area that said not to look into family history based on his own personal actions before leaving for CA in a hurry—the imagination runs wild. I’ve seen enough Finding Your Roots that I hope if someone arrived on our porch or calls us someday with tales of enslavement and/or shared ancestry, I won’t respond with total shock.

Is part of the calming that you need an absence of patterns as well as colors? I noticed that your options are all plain. I would decide what the most colorful/patterned thing in the room is going to be and work backwards from there to your calming linens, curtains, etc. since everything goes with white walls. If you have multi-colored artwork or something with a pattern to it even if it’s just mixed tones of the same color, I would make stuff go around that object. If you are using solid colors everywhere, I would look for textured curtains or textured items for the bed. I have trouble matching plain with plain, so having something that adds color or texture or pattern sparks inspiration for me regardless of whether it’s loud or muted, neutral or a predetermined set of limited colors.

Mostly only because this conversation has felt like when a man tells a woman to calm down because nothing is happening. 😉 Otherwise, I would’ve given it a drive by comment. I do think if you had the sheer volume* of healthcare interactions we do, you might see plenty to comment on as well and see how one constant aspect of punitive hoop jumping is too much to ask. As healthcare becomes more concentrated into large systems, doctors are increasingly willing to accept paint by number medicine as a trade off for having a lot of administration taken off their plates. There are pros and cons to that. Also, DH lives in this system, and he thinks it’s a big deal as well. We seldom agree on much, so it’s notable when we do. It’s not like I am extrapolating from only one POV. *It’s taken more than a year, multiple providers of the same kind in four different offices, multiple specialists, insurance people, office people, and multiple calls to Family Relations at our hospital to get my son scheduled for a ROUTINE procedure, all because healthcare people didn’t want to do their jobs. We did our due diligence and got nowhere. It was a nightmare! The person scheduled to do this procedure is not qualified at all to weigh in at all on my kid’s overall health, and his idiotic money-grubbing hubris created a paperwork nightmare. (Think: a non-MD podiatrist trying to bully you into having your kid’s foot broken when you go in for an ingrown toenail. Your kid already sees an orthopedic surgeon who said the foot does not need to be broken and repaired. Except what’s going on is not feet.) It’s ridiculous that patients who are paying for the service (and/or the insurance premiums) are perpetually expected to be more proactive than the people who are getting paid LOTS of money. We would not accept such poor treatment anywhere but healthcare. So it is a big deal in our household when a monthly medication task ends up taking up to a whole day per PERSON each month.

The bank says six months with this card should set him up, but I will consider this! We’ve also considered putting his name on the cable bill or something like that.

We’re still in the prep phase, but this seemingly straightforward statement is a whole rabbit hole for kids with language issues who appear to be relatively neurotypical and on the ball. Just a heads-up for anyone listening in with that mix of not fun stuff!!! @royspeed, I love this post. It’s so true from my older son, though he didn’t go on to college (but it applies on the job too!). He actually has language issues too, but they show up differently. With my second who has quirky language issues—the first chunk of the post set him up to not believed when we get to the part about insisting on understanding. Participating and building up those relationships makes adults use shorthand with him, consider him really with it, and because he either doesn’t know he’s taking things too literally or rigidly, or because my kid is struggling with something that is “too dumb to be a real question for such a smart kid,” he is left high and dry. It’s quite tragic and has created utter drama for us all year with DE classes. Again, awesome advice. If you find that these things go sideways with your particular kid, I just want you to know that you are not alone!!! We are in the process of finding out how to have this kind of a disability accommodated, and we’re finding (so far) that it’s not really acknowledged or supported except with paid programs and coaching (very expensive) that might or might not even consider him a good fit.

I asked this very question when we got new but normal credit cards and was told not to do this, so this is good to know! Probably the person just didn’t want to get into nuance. We get more money back on our credit card points if we elect to put it toward our mortgage, and we sometimes have a planned major purchase that is unusually big (furnace, used car sorts of things). Wish I had known the banker was not correct…that’s a lot of points.

So it doesn’t show mid-statement payments, but you are also not penalized for spending and paying of mid-statement if there is something due at statement time that is paid off on time and not over 33%?

This is really helpful! I would not have thought of that.

Thanks for sharing this part again. I have heard NOTHiNG about metformin for a long time and have been wondering! I think this is important—also, if metformin is still a valid option, a positive test would help a person get an Rx from their doctor. 95% of the time, I think he comes to great conclusions with solid thinking. The rest, I feel like he thinks through things well and then jumps off a cliff at the last minute, taking that good thinking with him into the abyss, lol!

My young adult wants to know something, but calling the bank would entail a bunch of difficulty he doesn’t want to get into with a bank person (upselling, etc.). He has a secure credit card and knows that spending over a certain amount on it will delay his credit score moving upward. He would like to spend this percentage of his credit limit amount, pay it off, and then spend it again more than once per statement period. With online banking, he can pay it off multiple times per month immediately. Would spending but paying off this amount multiple times per statement period adversely affect his credit score? Will it help it? Part of the issue is that it is hard to find recurring expenses that fit the limit but don’t go over it. If he’s going to have to monitor it closely, he’d like to have the convenience of being able to spend and pay it off, and he is hoping that doing so might even be favorable. Thanks!

I literally just want an acknowledgement that when it comes to ADHD meds, the process is adversarial and discriminatory, and when providers do nothing but make it harder, it’s lazy. They should be advocating for their patients and helping to make things work. Also, people on opioids who need them and do the right thing are still often treated as drug seekers too, but I don’t have experience with that in my family. Heck, just acknowledging that ADHD runs in families and that this process is wash, rinse, repeat x multiple people in the family and is impossible to synchronize would be human. And then come up with human solutions. On being human: for example, if they have someone come in who has been on ADHD meds for years with lots of documentation, and they have additional hoops to add to this, I think a patient with an established diagnosis should get some consideration—“Let’s get that test scheduled before your next visit here, but we’re going to make sure you can stay on it in the meantime.” ANY humanity toward a patient vs. hard line, “we assume you are a criminal” behavior is appreciated. Advocating within the healthcare system for some kind of risk assessment that is INDIVIDUALIZED would be humanizing rather than paint by number healthcare. Recognizing that people of certain ages are at transition points in life where it’s hard to get consistent healthcare would be human—I can’t even begin to imagine what it will be like to get my neurodivergent kid with multiple rare diseases through this phase in a couple of years. Managing his diseases is already the equivalent of a part time job for me PLUS an after school job for him, and much of that is due to the incompetence of medical offices. Medical offices and professionals should not be held to a lower standard than their patients, and yet many are. Instead it’s putting everything on the patient to do a million new things all of a sudden out of nowhere. It’s bad enough that someone can use ADHD meds appropriately for YEARS, but if they happen to go on vacation at the wrong time, they have to go without meds because no one will fill them. And then going without meds is seen as suspicious. The actual behavior that is seen as suspicious is sometimes driven by the rules! And if they are surprise drug testing to see if you are taking them…what if you skipped meds on your days off work so that you had a buffer for shortages or a vacation? It’s very similar to how parents can inadvertently set their kids up to lie or be sneaky. No one treats patients with other conditions this way when they come to a new practice unless that provider really is just an a@@hole. I think it’s ridiculous that we put many systemic issues on individuals to change and others we ignore, and most of it is down to CYA vs. being a solution that is tailored to the actual problem.

Great movie!!!

I tried to reframe the idea to get you to contextualize and to point out how different ADHD treatment is to most healthcare in terms of hoop jumping. You put an interesting spin on my attempt, and I believe that my clarifications caused side conversations that have been framed that way. I have said that your statement, unqualified, is problematic, and I have implied that it’s because taken to an extreme, that is what we would get. My only reason for commenting at all is to shine a spotlight on how discriminatory the process is, and the normally nuanced people on this board have basically said un-nuanced stuff all over the place. I just recontextualized that to make a point, and people then jumped on it like I am making unqualified black and white statements. This is one of the most bizarre conversations I’ve ever had on the forum.

A non-controlled substance per the general vibe of where I’ve been trying to go.

He does NOT approach the situation with the assumption that he’s starting from scratch, that other doctor’s are wrong, that patients are lying, or that he it’s typical to have to reverse someone else’s assessment. I have never disagreed with your statement completely; I have said it needs to be qualified. At no point in time have you tried to actually understand what I agree or don’t agree with except to gleefully proclaim I mean what you mean. You seem to disagree that people with ADHD have a higher bar to clear. Fine. Maybe state some situations where people are happy and stable in the care they receive for years who have to jump through extra hoops—hoops that characterize them as dishonest and their previous clinicians as potentially corrupt—in order to get their diabetes medications or their blood pressure meds.

That’s insulting. My husband had been catching errors in diagnosis and treatment since he was in training. A presumption that anyone seeking ADHD meds, is more likely than not to be seeking to use the meds nefariously is NOT that, especially if that person has a diagnosis or is moving from pediatric care to adult care. It’s discriminatory. None of the CYA scenarios assess the likelihood of abuse, they assume it from the get go and then rule it out.

This is the nuanced part that was missing. I do find it relatively arbitrary what doctors do and do not scrutinize, and I live in fear of what will happen when my medically complex teen “graduates” to adult medicine. The condition he has that has no consensus criteria for pediatric diagnoses could be a problem. A doctor might read that and think he/she needs to be rediagnosed as an adult (and antibodies wax and wane even in people with active disease). In reality, the reason that there is no consensus is that pediatric presentations are usually more severe in the long-term, so adult criteria excludes too many kids. I’m sorry you had a bad outcome from diversion. That stinks.

BTW, I do. I have a kid with a rare autoimmune condition that doesn’t have any set diagnostic criteria in pediatric populations. Fun times.

Nope, the bent of the thread. That’s not even remotely what he said. We both think your unqualified statement is what is bizarre. Your unqualified statement essentially leaves room for every doctor to question every diagnosis with no good reason except the doctor doesn’t have to take the word of another doctor. That’s all. My problem is with Techwife’s unqualified black and white statement, which is what I’ve said multiple times, like a broken record. I do think that doctors make mistakes and other doctors sort it out. I don’t think that equates to a blanket statement that doctors don’t have to accept what another doctor does. That would be totally inefficient, ineffective, and wasteful. To single out specific diagnoses for extra scrutiny from another provider is discriminatory unless there are extenuating circumstances, such as care plans not adding up, specific practices diagnosing enormous rates of xyz condition that is not in their domain, etc.

Not nearly so much in pediatrics, as numerous people in this thread can attest, and if we’re so sure people are abusing drugs, why aren’t we testing kids to be sure their parents aren’t selling their meds? It’s mind boggling to me that ridiculous rules are being defended so steadily. Don’t quote the rest: