This is what happens when a child who is good at everything they try is not given sufficiently meaningful challenges and forced (encouraged? whatever) to face them head on.
Oh my. I just realized that the impossible challenge of managing her medical issues is her very first ever, quantifiable, objective, non-optional challenge. There is a very direct link between her behavior and the results. She gets approval for decent ones, outright praise and admiration from a host of medical personnel for great ones, and rapid loss of freedom for bad ones (besides feeling physically awful, we have to make sure she is correctly dosing her meds). And everyone who knows anything about her condition is constantly saying it's impossible to be perfect here. There is no 100%, no top score. Nobody with her condition can quite make it, medically speaking, to the level of a normal person.
We will have to watch that this doesn't go from appropriate challenge to obsession.
In a bazillion ways, she's become an easier person to deal with since those first couple hard months of her diagnosis, even compared to a year before it. And here we thought it was just that she was physically in better shape.
Thank you all for such a clear description of my kid. Of all the problems I thought I didn't have to worry about, perfectionism topped the list. I'm getting a new appreciation for the term 'can of worms' but at least the lid is off now.
