What?????

I guess that it is best to start at the beginning! Well the beginning of our journey of Tourettes! It all started a year ago when Baby Mermaid got her glasses, I started to notice some eye twitching...blinking...face scrunching, I thought that her glasses must not be the right prescription or some such problem and we went back to the eye doctor. The doctor assured me that everything was fine with her eyes, and that the cause of the eye blinking was dry eye. We got our nifty little eye drops and off we went, but right then and there I KNEW that the problem was not dry eye. Well her eyes kept blinking and we kept putting drops in until the eye drops were gone and then we just dealt with the blinking. but as school was getting out this spring she started to sniff her nose, and then as the summer started she was clearing her throat and kind of growling. well, I had started to notice that the sniffing/blinking/growling was worse when she was stressed out so I took her into our pediatrician and told him what was going on and he said that he would recommend a psychiatrist to take her into, Next thing I knew we were sitting on a couch talking to a wonderful lady about the stress that was causing my 8 year old to growl. The whole time Baby Mermaid keeps telling me that this has nothing to do with stress. Then we went on our big family vacation to Washington D.C. Her Tic changed to coughing and I realized that my daughter was right, this problem was not stress it was something else entirely! Nothing like spending 3 days solid in a car with your family to notice a continual cough! So as we coughed our way threw the nations capitol, trying everything we could think of to stop her from coughing, until she told me that when she tries really hard not to cough she felt like she was going to throw up. At this point I put my arm around my daughter and told her to cough away! If you feel like you need to cough go for it!
So we get back from vacation and I tell the psychiatrist that it is indeed as Baby Mermaid has suggested and not a stress thing at all. we both leave our appointment Baffled about this problem. But as I lay in bed that night crying and praying for an answer I remembered a little girl that was in our theater group about 10-15 years ago who did the same face scrunching (that Baby Mermaid had started out with) that had Tourettes, So with this new in site I went to our doctors office prepared the next week, I told her that I was thinking it was Tourettes and she said that she thought the same thing. I left for the two of them to talk and went into the waiting room full of anxiety and fear, I felt like it was the end of the world. I guess that when you learn that your child's life is not going to be exactly what you think and as easy as you hope it would be, Your whole world seems to fall in on you. My DH was working swings and just getting ready to go in to work, So I texted him "They Think she has Tourettes, talk to you when I get home hopefully" waited for my daughter to come out with some tests (you know the ones, how often does your child soil themselves, and How often does your child think about death) Just to make sure it wasn't some other problem, and some info on Tourettes, and off we went!
We arrived home with enough time to give my DH a hug and off he went to work. That may have been the longest night in my life. I was devastated, and my best friend was not available to talk to and cry to. Thankfully my second best friend (my mom) lives less than a mile away and she came and we talked for a while, Then I went to work reading all the info that I had gotten. As I was reading (and crying) Baby Mermaid came up and climbed on my lap and asked me if she could read with me, I said sure and as we read the information, I knew and she knew that this is what we were dealing with! In fact she asked me if that's why she had to cough all the time. I hesitated and then said "We think so" and she was like "O.K. that makes sense." and off we went on our crazy ride called Tourettes