ADD, school and other un-fun stuff | ADHD Information

Lizzy,

You absolutely did NOT put me to sleep.  I asked the qsuestion because I am hoping to find the med that will produce similar results for me.  Adderall sounds like exactly what I need.  My MD gave me a choice between that and wellbutrin but I tool the latter since it would bring the fewest side effects.  I cannot wait to get back in to see him and ask for adderall.

Thanks again

AddLatina

I am still worred about the understanding of the speach, and my spelling is horible! I mean really bad, I am so so happy for access to spell checker.

I like typing well enough, do so on a daily basis, I am maybe in the 40-45 wpm range. Might be more, but I can't sustain speeds like that all day, hands get to hurting after a time.

Actually I want to go back to take business management - I have no idea if this is something I can do, but I need it for what I do want to do, and that is start my own business (non-profit) teaching consumers about credit (my real passion). Actually what I want is new territory, it is not going to be the same as the credit bureau job I have which is dedicated 1st and formost to reselling credit products to businesses, I want something that just deals with the consumer side - and since nothing I know of exists, I want to make something new.

I would also love to advance my learning of finances, for this area, to not just only look and help people improve credit but also finances - since them two things run together. Also personally I would like to make smarter chioces in my finances as well.... I guess that is a pretty tall order trying to take that all on.

 

hey lizzy! its so great to hear how well you're doing and with a low incidence of side effects..

i've personally never had an issue with reading b/c i'm an avid reader. i'm totally motivated by reading and have been since i was very young..my disorder has affected me reading wise when it concerns things i just don't want to read about, predictably, so its easy for me to get around b/c i love the 'topics' in school ..i finally settled on anthropology b/c after years of indecision..when i reviewed the requirements for undergrad i realized it was everything i've ever been interested in and so therefore i would most likely have the highest chance of being able to get through it and be highly engaged..philosophy, psychology, archeology, anatomy, sociology, political science and just plain hard science are my faves..and this major is so entirely juicily comprised of so many different strains of science ..

anyway good for you! i agree with the adderall being able to supply the want to get up and go and finish things..i find myself really cleaning up my kitchen and stuff..things that i found almost impossible to do. ..but i do prefer things around my house to be scrupulously clean..so it was a total nightmare for me b/c i would be demoralized by my inability to keep it together to wash my dishes + the oven and range+ mop the floor+ the pans etc.

i would just do part of the job. it pissed my husband off so much ..it was awful..i just could not finish stuff. it was so overwhelming i cannot how many times my chest was knotted up in anxiety b/c i knew i was going to have to wrestle with myself to make myself do things and it was soooooo hard as you guys know. made me miserable..now my house is SO CLEAN. i freaking love it.

so anyway guys

i know that the other thread about 'you know you have adhd' blahblah you guys said it was getting negative and i'm sorry about that..i just have a problem with phrases like 'overdiagnose' or "crutch" etc...them are fightin' words as far as i am concerned.

and  my posts were actually a MILDER me..if you can believe it.

LOL i actually restrained myself from writing a book on here in protest.

so mea culpa ppl

i'm usually a  very positive person

sumi

I defaulted back in the 90's on a student loan, soon after I submitted papers claiming disability and they wrote the debt off - I had called some years back and they said in order to go back to school I had to pay the remaining balance.

Well I am looking into it now, have no idea what 10 years worth of interest would be on 0 bill, but everywhere I call tells me that they don't know what the balance is - that it is gone - permently discharged since 3 years passed without my disability status changing.

But I lost my disability when I got married, when I tell them that I am no longer on disability they get mad saying that it is not right my balance is stuck in discharged status. But no one as of yet has told me how to fix this.

Another person did tell me though that I can get Federal Aid since default was just on State Aid, and go back to school with no problem, just that the one school might not let me back in.

I live in a very small town, would have to drive an hour any given direction to locate another college, I just got an application from collegezone.com to complete, but I have to pull some financial information together that I am lost on right now. Something about needing W2 forms, mortgage and savings account. With my filing system - oh boy LOL I have to do some digging, or make some calls to get what this form is asking for.

I am hispanic and female, so I knew there are loans and grants out there just for that area, I think anyways. Right now, I am grasping at straws to get my leg back in the door, I don't even know yet if I can find classes to meet my schedule with work.

Before when I tried college (auto mechanics) the school just did not have any one that could toutor me on that subject, so hopefully this time I can find help since I will look to computer skills, business skills, and english areas... to advance now.

 

Has anyone done a search yet for financial aid for college such as grants and scholorships. I have heard there are tons out there that people just don't bother going after because they are small. You can put many together to end up with close to a free education.

I have seriously considered going after a degree through an internet college. I haven't checked any out yet but some are advertised as doing it at your own pace. Once I decide whether or not I have the drive to force myself to do the work, I may go for it. Maybe I can hyperfocus and get through some of the classes really fast?!!! 

Oh, for the self confidence I see in so many people. I just wish some of it would rub off on me!

 

i totally relate to you barb! i loved all of my 'english' type classes. unfortunately i never got past the composition II course which means i'm blocked from taking any of the classes i would passionately love..i couldn't pass comp II b/c i dropped it 3 times and it was b/c i didn't meet the deadlines on the papers i had to turn in. i would obsess and do a million drafts on a simple two paged essay...it totally sucked. i drank wine. maybe that will do it. i smoked weed. maybe that will do it. then i just would start sobbing b/c i couldn't write the paper that my instructor mandated! he put me aside one day in the hallway and said "you would be a great fiction writer my dear. but we are in a COMPOSITION class. and HERE you need to write for a specific audience." i was flabbergasted..i thought i had written everything so well..and it is my forte..language..i dropped immediately b/c i thought he was such a jerk.

i dropped out of school shortly after that. if you've read any of my other posts you'll know the full deal on that and how i discovered i have adhd. i was miserable. deppressed to the max couldn't get out of bed and i was lost...school was my whole thing...i couldn't even contemplate where my life would end up without pursuing higher education...i'm restarting this fall. i'm registered for 6 hours. i'm on meds so i think i'll finally be able to swing it. fortunately for me..my work pays my tuition no strings attached as far as gpa or what type of school or subject...and my husband is going make it so i can quit working in a year or two. that is my dream that i would be able to go to school without juggling work and my son...he will be in kindergarten then..and i know i'm lucky to be able to do this in the near future. i've decided i will have a second child then..and have my mother in law watch my infant about twice a week while i pursue finishing my undergrad...i can have my cake and eat it by being able to stay at home with my baby. its my ultimate goal. i agree with you about not even caring if you use your degree.

i've always felt that i would return now at 29..i feel like i'm finally going to get ahead in school. i'm dinged like we all are by my former school issues...i have borderline anxiety attacks when i get on campus..i have to seriously tell myself over and over and over again "its not a big deal" "i think i can i think i can i think i can" etc. b/c i feel like running and bolting out of there.

i can participate in class , i can take the tests typically and ace them in any class. but i cannot : get to class on time. remember what chapters i need to read etc. do my homework. and i skip classes b/c i overslept..lost my keys ...or whatever it is that is so important to do school. its total chaos. thank god for meds.

wish me luck guys! and the same to you..

there is always a way if there is a will

so even if you think you can't...further investigation should lend you an option...

sincerely

sumi

 

Have any of you thought about taking internet courses at home? I have always steered away from that - bad feeling that I would not be able to wing it on my own kind of thing.

Always have to fight to understand my studies, in highschool I was in special education classes, and struggled to study harder, 3 years was all D's & F's finally my last year I made the honor roll, but they did not want to give it to me since I had to take Accounting twice just to understand it. Nice that a few teachers fought for me to get this none the less.

My job is about looking up laws, and I am totally lost - have to read legal documents 3 or more times before it starts to sink in, there just is nothing that I can find to connect all the references in one spot, nightmare.

But with our income we live pay check to pay check so if I advance education, I have to continue working as well.

actually nightstar you might want to investigate financial aid. i'm investigating that myself...i'm trying to see if for instance you and i are technically listed with 'disability' status by our schools if we could therefore benefit from grants or monies for students like us.

my friend (not adhd) is in school right now and she gave me the skinny..so generally you can have and are qualified to have financial aid if you go to school for six hours a semester..that is usually two classes...so what i'm saying is..you could go easy on yourself take up to two classes per semester making your way through..get yourself some extra help via the tutors for free or whatnot on your campus and be able to get by..does that make sense?

i'll give you guys any info if i find that there are other resources for our people to go to school...

legal documents are all in 'legalese' so i totally understand why you would have issues reading that stuff! when i married i tried to change my name legally..my first name being vestigial and i backed out of it b/c i didn't want to pay the expense of a lawyer to do such a relatively simple thing such as submitting a petition to the court..yet the county clerk led me to a room full of state law books , pointed me in the direction..vaguely told me which one migh have the info in it...i looked in the book and instantly felt vastly overwhelmed. although i have great comphensive reading skills and an excellent vocab..it doesn't compensate having never been exposed to legal document language...

sumi

oh by the way..

this semester i'm enrolled in a traditional class that meets twice a week after work...philosopy/logic..

and then i'm taking my comp II via the long distance program.

i figured , this way i can just barrel through it. i after all did take the curriculum already THREE Times..so

i just need to meet deadlines and i should be fine..especially since i'm going to be able to just type my papers up online and hit submit..since i am practically a computer junkie already it will be easy....

sumi

Hey Night star, i know where your comming from. as you might have guessed, i'm also a Hispanic female. Before i was diaganosed with ADD, i went to school for Health ins. billing & coding. The coding came easy for me because i love medical terminolgy even though there are #'s involved. But some of the other courses i had to take where WAY beyond my comprehention. I recorded my lessions, & played them whenever i could. I was also working a full time job. I knew i wasn't stupid, but i coulden't figure out why i had to work so hard. i felt so alone! With alot of very hard work, & support from my S/O, i managed to graduate with honors, but in the fast paced work place, i failed misserabley!

As far as internet courses go, i don't think i could do that either. I need to be able to ask LOTS of questions & i would panic if i came acrossed a problem. I wish you lots of luck getting your foot back in the door & sucess when you do

I'm in school now... at 24 I finally fingured out what I want to do with my life... I just finished my LPN and am taking my boards test soon... then I'm going on to get my RN

School was a struggle but MUCH easier on medication! I enjoyed my classes and actually learned from reading my books! I'm taking a bunch of science classes next year, hope I can keep up my GPA ( I have a 3.3 I think, whick is a huge accomplishment)!

lizzy38156.4511921296

I heard there was decent pay in that, I went to a class that talked about traning once for Medical Transcript, but decided that it would cost too much for the training.

Plus I did not count on my ability to understand tapes of doctors recordings to properly decode or what ever. Some of them don't talk very comprehendable english.

Least that was the area I had check up on... unless you have an easier way with this.

 

The pay is good, but Med. Trans. is difficult for people w/o ADD. Where i went to school, some of the Med. Trans. students had the same courses as we did. We only had to type 35wpm, where they had to be at 60+! and even the teaachers told us the tapes are sometimes hard to understand & getting all the spelling correct is very important. At least as a coder, we could look the terms up. Being away from it so long, i must take refresher courses & become certified. unless i want to start in the billing dept. I suck at math big time!

Maybe you should look into billing & coding. I forget how much it was, but if you can get financial aid chech into it. If you get certified, you won't have to much billing. If there wasn't so much going on in my life than, i might not have put it off. now i need to"play catch up".NOT FUN!

Lizzy,

Could you please remind us all what meds you are taking?  Never mind.  I just checked past posts and found that you are taking Adderall.  I am curious about the effects of the meds.  Could you elaborate on your ability to comprehend the text, please?  For example, do you still find yourself wandering off in the middle of a paragraph?  I tend to get very sleepy when I am trying to read.  Do you?  If so, has the med helped with that?

ChiefB38157.9173611111

Chief-

Yep, I'm taking Adderall XR 25mg qd.  The effects are that it gives me a mild rapid heart rate, went from 70 resting rate to 110 resting rate but I have absolutely no other effects than a dry mouth. Mentally I feel such a difference... it like night and day!  It's not that I have more energy, I just feel more "up to" doing things. Like before I was on meds, reading a chapter for homework was extreemly daunting and I was so overwhelmed by the simple task of opening my book that I never did. Reading made me tired too, for every hour of homework that I did I would have to nap for about 30 minutes. It was just that exhausting to force my mind to stay on task, although I never understood why, I figured I was just stupid. My mind would wander off on some random tangent while I was reading and although my eyes were still going through the action of reading my mind was no longer there so I could read a whole page and get to the end and not know what I just read!  So I was VERY frustrated, VERY often.  I see now that it wasn't my inability to comprehend, it was that I couldn't focus for long enough to get through a page without intense concentration. I suspect that's why you get sleepy too. BUT! on Adderall, I finally "get" it! The first time I sat down to do homework when on medication I did homework for 4 hours and didn't even notice the time had passed!!! My jaw dropped to the floor when I looked at the clock! My check book has been balanced for 6 months straight, I graduated with honors, my memory has improved, I just feel more in controll over myself. The biggest thing is that I feel like what I put into something is FINALLY equal to what I get back! I only have to read something once now... that's a big change! So to make a short story long... Adderall has saved my life. I knew I was smart... I just couldn't get it together enough to learn... well, I've got it together now! LOOK OUT WORLD!  Does that help? A bit long winded as usual but I can't even begin to describe the difference it's made in my life! OH, those "senoir moments" that I used to have (where you can't remember the name of a common object) they are MUCH less freequent! Testing does not cause such anxiety because I retain the information so much better and have a better recall. Hope i didn't put you to sleep reading my novel!!!

I didn't know that I was ADD until my therapist suggested that my symptoms sounded like ADD.  I was seeing her for a passive aggessive personality disorder.  She said that my personality is not a disorder but that ADD is likely to manifest itself in the behaviors that I was complaining about.

What do I do to get through my classes with ADD?  Nothing really.  I just try my best and I sweat every test and term paper, knowing that the work would be much more fullfilling if I could only get focused.  Oddly enough, I am able to maintain a 3.7 GPA and my professors seem to like me a lot.  I think they like the fact that I participate in class discussions so fervently and I get everyone all riled up.  If I'm not talking, I find difficult to stay focused on the lecture.  I retain the material better when I engage the professor in a discussion because, at some point, I get around to repeating back to him or her, the point that they are trying to convey to me.

I retain very little of what I read, but if we can talk about it, it sticks.

I started out in college for Auto Mechanics but could not get any help with my studies for my area. Some classes I really liked and others kind of made me nervous, and others were just beyond my reach on comprehending.

It was not until I made it to second semester in Electronics that I was finally grasping 1st semester. I tried recording my teacher during class to help me, but I was having a hard time none the less.

In the end though, I scored good on the classes I had the worse time in, and failed on the others that I liked the best, it just threw me for a loop.

Plus I was working a job at the time that messed up my sleeping pattern, and I was young drinking and not keeping up with my meds (also Bi-Polar).

I lost my job, and everything else just went down with it, then through the insistance of family and my doctor they put me on disability. Terrible moodswings, at that time.

I want to go back to college, I am scared though that I will face the same problem getting into stuff that is just totally beyond me, I learn best with repetition, over and over and over, also hands on experience, to keep applying what I am learning. I am afraid I won't be able to get help to make it through.

I got through college classes by studying way longer than any of my classmates.  It sucked.  But it was what I had to do to get decent grades.  I mean probably 20 - 25 hours per week of homework per class.  Therefore, I was only taking 1 class a quarter.  Plus working full time and being a housewife, etc.  Not easy for sure.  Anybody else?? Any school folks out there 

I hate to admit it but I'm a college drop out. I would spend an entire semester not "getting" it, then would go through all my work from the beginning, check it, try to figure out exactly why it was that way, do it again, etc. I would cover the entire semester in less than a week just before the tests. It was only when it was all compressed together like that that any of it made sense! I had one professer who spent the entire semester going "does everyone here understand this, (then looking directly at me), do you understand this, are you sure? I would go "sure" and not have a clue! I blew his mind when I was barely making it all semester and then aced the final!  Fortunately for me, he had included a couple of bonus questions, one of which you could figure out if you really knew your stuff and one which was a guess as there wasn't enough information given to make an informed decision. He had added them at the last minute. I got the one right and the guess was wrong so he knew I hadn't cheated. If he hadn't put them in, I would have been screwed because he wouldn't have believed I knew the work.

If we had only known then that I had ADD, I would most likely have stayed. I had insurance which would have covered meds and made life somewhat easier. As it is, I got an A in my Eng Lit class for the semester for my insight into a section of a book the teacher himself had never understood, and is now teaching the way I interpreted it! He told me I could have never gone to class or done another assignment and that one thing would still have gotten me an A! If I had only known! It was the first class of the day and way across campus from where I had to park! I could have slept in more!

Anything to do with English was a gravy course and anything to do with math was a total nightmare! The ones I hated the most though were the ones I would have to read and memorize such as laws and case studies, etc. I barely made Cs in them and then only by last minute cramming, then rushing through the exam before I forgot!

I made the Dean's list the 2nd semester, but trying to work, raise a kid and do college work was too much! My dr had put me on meds for depression and seizures (he thought my ADD moments were petit mal seizures) and somehow the combo worked enough to get me through the year.

I want desperately to go back now. Once I get on meds and can actually think straight, I intend to. I want to show the people who think I'm lazy, irresponsible, uncaring, etc, you know all the "judgements", that I can do it! I don't even care if I never use the degree once I have it! I just have to prove to them and MOSTLY myself that I really can do it! Its not spite that makes me feel this way. I think its more of a self esteem issue. I need to get a label other than "loser" for myself and my kids.

Talk about "pressured speach"! I could have said, "yes, it was hard, too hard but I made it through one semester by busting my butt," then let it drop!

Hello my fellow ADDers, I have a question.

Inspired by posts from Chief and others, I was wondering how many of you are in school right now and what have your experiences been so far?

Are you in college? Trade school? Something else?

How do you handle your ADHD issues as they come up?

-Cheekydeeky