My daughter has been on Daytrana 15mg for several months. For us it has been a miracle drug. But we find it takes about 2 hours for it to work on her.
The 2 hour lag time was fine last year in public school as her classes actually started after 9am. This year in Middle School classes start before 8 am and because of some extra school activities she often needs to be there by 7:30 am.
We saw immediately that we were having problems with early morning classes. Starting 3rd period (about 9:30) she is an honor roll high performing achiever.
But in before school activities, homeroom and periods 1 and 2 it is like she is not on medicine. You know the story late for classes (lots of detention), unfocused, no progress, talks too much, uncooperative .....
We started putting the patch on her at 5 am ... but always managed to wake her up. So now she was groggy and irritable which did not improve anything.
My dr suggested we add 10 mg of Focalin when we put on the patch. We are going back to putting on the patch about 6:45 am.
My dr said it takes 30 min for the focalin to kick in and it will work 2-3 hours.
Anyone taking focalin and daytrana at the same time? I would love to hear how it is working.
I am concerned that when both meds are in her system she will be foggy and out of it.
debby-nj, that is our next plan for my daughter if Strattera doesnt work for us. We will use Ritalin not Focalin as we didnt like Focalin in the past. We did it with Ritalin LA and short acting methyphedinate, but the RLA starts working quicker than the Daytrana and she had too much. I think it'll work great for you. I can wake my daughter at 5:00 and give her a pill or put on patch and she easily goes back to sleep, but putting Daytrana on at 5:00 it's still not early enough as she gets up by 6:00 and then we lose the evening.We tried giving my son a 2.5 mg. of regular Ritalin but I can't report results because it was with the bad batch of Daytrana. 10mg. seems like a lot if she only takes 15 the rest of the day. Ritalin comes in 2.5 and 5 mg. pills - even chewables if that's an issue for you. I'd start small and work it from there.