Overcoming PANDAS Symptoms and Restoring Family Peace with Dr. Tom Moorcroft

As a parent coming in, we obviously were, like, upset. We lived almost in trauma for a couple years because of how Johnny was acting and behaving and it was really challenging as a family. So, because he sees this every day in his work, he almost normalized it for us. And I think that was really helpful. We felt so different from other families and from other families we didn't have to worry if their kid was gonna, you know, be set off at a store or we were going to have people over our house and Johnny was going to have an episode. Like, It was hard for us to kind of feel "normal" in our group of friends. But to go to someone who normalized it for us and said, like, "you know, this is going to be okay. Like, I can help you. I can do this for you." It was really great. Hi, my name is Adrianna Tuomi. I am from Manchester, Connecticut. So, my son Johnny, who is seven years old, at about, I would say, when he was, like, three years old we started seeing a change in his behaviors. It was, not so much an overnight shift but we started noticing that he had some OCD tendencies. His behavior started to go almost from 0 to 60. He would be verbally aggressive, he would be physically aggressive to his older brother, who is four years older than him. We just noticed some very odd behavior changes in him that we had not seen from birth up until about three. He had a lot, of strep infections - and when I say a lot it was several over the course of each year. I think he had 11 one year. We did not connect the two, we just were kinda like, 'okay he's sick, his behaviors are really off.' But we just dealt with it as a family for a good two or three years. He started to have also a lot of sensory issues. Like his clothes started bothering him. He was a little bit strange with food, no food restrictions, but definitely had some interesting eating patterns. So with all of these things happening, we're like, something is going on. So, I am a mental health professional. I'm a therapist. We worked with a therapist on his behaviors. I brought him to a doctor who prescribes psych medications. We started him on an anti-anxiety med because they thought maybe it was mental health-based. But even those providers were like, 'this is something more than that.' So then I kind of went down the route of Googling all the stuff that was happening with him and I read about Pandas. In the mental health world we have seen it in the patients that we work with but I just didn't connect the two. After that, I went down a search of providers and that is where we found Dr. Moorcroft. When I reached out to his office there was just a lot of comfort that I felt knowing that this was something that he had treated. I had looked on his website, We just felt very comfortable, even from that initial appointment. The way that he engaged us, engaged my son, Johnny - 'cause it was virtual, which can be really challenging to engage in that platform - but we just felt very comfortable from the start. Looking at the cost, we did have to weigh, "okay... do we go with Dr. Moorcroft or do we find someone who takes our insurance?" And I think for us, we went back and forth a little bit but then we decided - obviously, reading the testimonials, you know, about him and the care he's provided to his clients - we said, "you know what? This is our child" and I would do anything to help him, to make him feel better. Dr. Moorcroft had put him on... like, a maintenance dose of azithromycin and he's been on that for, like, five months maybe. And we are stepping down the azithromycin dosage to just three times a week until he finishes this prescription. And the reason why we're able to do this tapering dose is that Johnny is doing really well. We don't see any more of, like, the night terrors, the ocd, the vocal tics - all of that is completely gone, which I am so grateful for. Johnny is... he's a little spitfire. So I think some of those, like, 0 to 60 behaviors are still there but they're very muted. Like, he still gets upset about stuff but it's within the normal kind of reaction of a seven-year-old rather than being this extreme, intense thing that might last 45 minutes. So, his reactions are age-appropriate. Taking him out somewhere I don't worry if he gets overwhelmed or I have to say "no" to him, he's going to have what we call, like, an episode or he's going to escalate. I don't worry about that anymore. The relationship with his older brother has strengthened because Ryan did not like spending time with Johnny. So I would recommend him for several reasons. One, his demeanor and his, like, bedside manner, so to speak, is very calming. It's very reassuring. When you sit with him for an appointment, you know that he's giving you the facts. Like, he knows what he's doing, he's done this, he's been down this road before. He guides the treatment but he lets the parents really decide where you want to go.