Shampoo Bottles...Living with OCD

One of the more frustrating issues of dealing with PWS is the OCD (Obsessive - Compulsive disorder) issues that we deal with.

There was a lively discussion on my facebook page this week about an article that I wrote about a recent episode on Mystery Diagnosis. The show featured a young man with PWS, but they only focused on the food issues... they made this person out to only have issues with food and spoke nothing of the behaviors that plague people with PWS.

While the food issues are tough to deal with, they aren't the main issue I deal with here with 3 kids with PWS... but.... OCD....??? My God some days I feel like I'm losing my mind with the little things they do... here is a perfect example...

A few weeks ago, I bought new shampoo and conditioner. They were both big bottles and with the other bottles already in the shower, there wasn't room on the shelf to put the new bottles so I put them on the edge of the tub behind the shower curtain. Last week when I cleaned,I threw out empty bottles and there was room on the shelf for the new bottles. One would think that this isn't a big deal... but I have noticed every morning when I take my shower that the bottles are back on the edge of the tub behind the curtain... I usually knock them over opening the curtain and they fall on the floor or into the tub...not a big deal... I pick them up, put the on the shelf and continue my shower. This afternoon when Ben came home from school I sent him to put his back-pack in his room and heard a noise from down the hall... I looked and sure enough... he stopped off in the bathroom to check on shampoo bottle placement!!!! He still had his backpack on from school and he was switching the shampoo bottles in the freekin' tub already! I asked him what on earth he was doing and he burst into tears and yelled at me that they weren't where the belonged and stomped off to his room. All was not right in his world because the shampoo bottles weren't in the proper place in the tub. It got me wondering if he has been thinking about it all day long? Probably.

We have note-books full of baseball stats... Notebooks. Full. I'm not kidding... and baseball season has barely started... David is a Redsox fan.... Ben Yankees... Its going to be a looooong season. The fights have already started.. "Redsox suck"... "No Yankees Suck" .... "No Redsox suck"... You get the picture. There is always somebody gloating about a win and willing an ready to rub a loss in the other guys face and there is always somebody with an attitude because their team lost ... usually because the other team cheated. sigh...

So, while food issues can be controled with a strict diet and a keyless entry lock on my kitchen door... there is not diet or lock for OCD... and it runs rampant in my house on a daily basis. The shampo bottles and the baseball addiction are just 2 examples... The non-stop NEED to ask the same question 100 million times gets old pretty quickly. Most of the time we laugh at the quirky things these guys do... but it does wear on you after awhile.