loss of concentration, esp reading

[MarylandMama]

DD has been improving over the summer and the lower stress of being out of school has helped. She did a month of antibiotics and steroids and it was a miserable month--she got so much worse during that time--but seemed to really make some big strides on the other side of it. We have our follow-up with Dr. Latimer on Tuesday and I have no idea or expectations about how that is going to go. I'm wary of going back down the rabbit hole of worsening symptoms if there are more treatments to do and wary of being told that further treatments are more of a risk than are warranted for her.

 

Her OCD has improved a good deal and she is back to spending most of her free time talking about non-OCD things and has cut the confessing behavior down to almost nothing. I am concerned about what is left of the obsessional issues and I'm working with her doing exposures for them.

 

My big concern now is about her reading. This kid was the most avid reader I had ever seen before all this. She'll be going into 4th grade and last year was tested at reading at a late high school level. She read several good size books a week, reading at the table, in the car, whenever. All that changed this summer. She didn't read anything at all for about 6 weeks and just recently she's been reading shorter things--mostly non-fiction books where each section is only a couple of pages. She picked up a couple of fiction books but only read a little bit. She can't articulate why this is happening but she knows it's because something is harder now. I know that ADHD symptoms can pop up with PANDAS kids but I'm not sure what to do with this right now. Is this something that indicates more systemic medical treatment or do folks end up treating the attention issues separately? Anyone else see this with reading?

[Plum99]

My daughter is too young to be able to give any helpful information. She's only three. I'm curious what others have to say about this though, and what the explanation might be. Besides her motor skill dramatically improving as soon as an infection was somewhat treated, the other thing I noticed happened right away was she started spelling out words with alphabet magnets on the refrigerator, writing her name, then other letters, and then communication started getting better. She's so young that I can't get an explanation about any of this, and I am so interested. At first I thought she stopped doing a lot of things because she was unhappy. Once she started coming back to life I thought a lot of things had to do with fine motor skills. But lately language has really been something I've been trying to figure out, as far as why it went away, was she in pain, distracted, does she remember how she felt?

[Pandacubmomma]

Our child(a bit younger at age 71/2) loses ground with reading when he is in a flare. I am learning to seize the moments when he is well. He reads effortlessly and I see progress during "normal periods." During the flares it is hard to know if I should push him to read as it seems so difficult for him and there is much complaint of exhaustion and emotional resistance. As he is younger and was never as far ahead with reading as your child, it is deeply upsetting to watch him progress and go backwards when he has a flare. It amounts to him being below grade level in reading, though he has high verbal intelligence, loves to read when feeling well and a history of being read to extensively.