Vindication

Jack is safely bundled off to go see Grandma upstate.  He was carrying his final report card with him when I picked him up from school;  we opened it in the car, before his mother came out of work, and discovered that his third marking period grades had SKYROCKETED.  He jumped at least one letter grade higher in nearly every subject, all across the board, and one number grade higher in nearly every subcategory.  The exception was Science, in which he dropped from an A to a B–  and which all things considered, seems pretty minor!

Also:  as I was telling him goodbye, he called out cheerily, “Maybe I can write you a postcard!”  And then, as his mother looked at him funny, added, “What?  He wrote me postcards when he went away.”  To which she only replied, “I know…”

The Magic Pill (part 8)

(This is the last part of a series of posts telling a single story.  You can read the previous post HERE, or go read the whole thing from the beginning.)

Rael laughed when I told him, but he didn’t write it off either. “Interesting,” he said. “You think she’s right?”

“No,” I responded. “Well… yes. Well…” I shrugged. “There’s a historical disparity between my perception of myself and other people’s perception of me. The two rarely meet.”

“Have you ever been tested?” he asked.

“No.” I downed a glass of water he had provided for me. “Dude. She’s my ex-wife. Obviously she has a long-standing familiarity with my, err… habits. Just as obviously she has certain opinions of me she’s not interested in changing. You tell me.”

“Hmm,” he hummed, mildly. “Okay, well– let me ask you this. Knowing what you know now, when you look back, do you feel like your personal history has been defined in part by a marked inability to concentrate?” Read the rest of this entry »

The Magic Pill (part 7)

[This is the seventh in a series of posts that tell a single story.  You can refresh your memory on Part 6 HERE, or start at the beginning if you didn’t read the others.]

And even that, all of that, wasn’t enough to assuage the lurking sense of unease I felt. As new questions kept popping up, no matter how many answers I found, and as I felt no closer to any sort of resolution, I was forced to acknowledge a simpler truth. This has no logical basis, it dawned on me. This resistance is emotional. I’m just afraid! And that sudden realization swung the door forward halfway open. But why?, I thought, sitting down on the edge of my bed. What’s the problem here? What am I so afraid of?

You’re afraid, said the Voice, that it will work.

The statement held no surprise for me, not even a glimmer of amusement at the irony. Welcome back, I thought.

I never left. It didn’t wait for me to ask the obvious question. If it works, then it’s one more thing you’re responsible for, one more thing you have to help provide. And things aren’t going so well in that respect. The Providing Department. You’re worried that pretty soon you won’t even be able to give him the essentials, let alone enhancements. Read the rest of this entry »

The Magic Pill (part 6)

[This is the sixth in a series of posts telling a single story.  You might want to review part 5, or go back and read the whole story from the beginning.]

I was partially right. The medical doctor doing Jack’s physical evaluations spent the first session bonking him below his knees with a rubber hammer, asking him to balance on one foot, watching him leap up from a lying position and run. She gave us literature, and ran us through another list of background questions. Eighty percent of the eye contact she made while doing all that was with Weaver.  When Weaver commented on or elaborated on something, the doctor would focus on her, and smile or nod as if parsing what she said;  while I was doing it, she would focus on me, until I stopped speaking-  then glance at Weaver, as if to check and see whether or not what I said was really true. It left a bad taste in my mouth, but since Jack was with us the entire time, the few words that came I had to bite down on anyway, for fear of saying something in front of him that would make him afraid, or put questions in his mind that didn’t need to be there.

What is this really going to do to him? I found myself slowly wondering, long after we had left the office. Physically? People like to keep using the analogies to other drugs, other mediators-  how if you’re having allergy problems and need allergy medication, you take it, or how if you’re nearsighted you don’t hesitate to wear glasses, or how if you’re diabetic and need insulin you don’t think twice about using that. But it’s not the same thing-  or at least, it’s all different points on a really wide scale. We’re talking about putting a CHEMICAL in his HEAD for Christ’s sake! Changing the way he THINKS. Aren’t we? And there are all those scary possible side-effects. Sure, none of them usually happen. But they can. I’d rather cut off my own arm than hurt him somehow. Read the rest of this entry »

The Magic Pill (part 5)

[This is the fifth of an ongoing series of posts telling a single story.  You can read Part Four to refresh your memory, or go back to the beginning and read the first part.]

“Discussing it” took the initial form of a division of labor. “You contact the school,” said Weaver, “and tell them we want to get a 504 plan for him. I’ll look into who does the physical evaluations for meds and what my insurance will and won’t cover.”

“Mmmph,” I grunted. Medical insurance or talking to teachers? I’ll take Talking to Teachers for 300, Alex. “Okay.”

I typed an e-mail to Jack’s teacher, since that was easiest place to start. Blah blah blah Jack now diagnosed with ADHD. Blah blah blah intend to request 504 plan. Blah blah blah… I stopped, read over what I had. …Would like to make sure we get your input on the viability of this as an approach strategy, possibly in advance of any formal meetings, since he spends so much time under your direct observation. I couldn’t have put my finger precisely on why I chose to include that last part, but it was true, and it made it seem less like a mandate and more like a team effort, so I figured it couldn’t hurt. Read the rest of this entry »

The Magic Pill (part 4)

[This is the fourth part of a series of posts telling a single story.  You can read the first part HERE.]

“You have a number of options,” the doctor said. “As far as your school system goes, they’re not going to do anything for you, at least in terms of putting him in an Individual Education Program or classifying him somehow, because he does not meet their definition of learning-disabled.” She weighed two sets of papers, one in either hand. ”The way it works is, they look at the intelligence test scoring and the academic test scoring. The intelligence test scoring shows them how smart he is, and as a derivation of those numbers, how well he should be performing academically. The academic test scoring shows how he is actually performing, in reality. If there’s too big a discrepancy between how he is performing and how he should be performing, that represents a learning disability. Which brings us back to the WISC-4.” She dropped the papers. “Unfortunately, because his new WISC-4 score is now lower than his original WISC-3 score, his academic performance lands squarely in the target range of where the WISC-4 predicts it should be. Indicating no necessity to take action. Even though he’s sliding, and you know he can do better, and his teacher knows he can do better, and I’m positive he can do better just from having spent this short time with him.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Magic Pill (part 3)

[This is the third part of a series of posts telling a single story.  You can read the first part HERE.]

Weaver was pretty sanguine about the whole idea, much more so than I expected. We had established well enough between the two of us that neither The Carrot nor The Stick ever made any demonstrable, long-term difference in Jack’s way of handling things, and as the person bearing the brunt of the majority of the struggles to get Jack to do his homework, get Jack out the door on time, get Jack to bring his grades up, get Jack to remember… anything… she was tired of it all, and willing to rationally discuss anything that might seem like it fit the available data. So she hooked us back up at the Developmental Pediatrics Center, where he had gotten all his early physical testing done. They started the ball rolling by plowing us with questionnaires, to get the back story. The questionnaires were comprehensive to the point of being exhaustive, and really horrible to read, as answering them forced me to imagine my safe, mostly happy child being tormented by a variety of awful problems, and to realize that somewhere, at some point, other parents of not-so-safe, not-so-happy children had had to check “yes” to every single one of them. I filled them out sitting on my living room couch, framed in a patch of bright sunlight, and then tossed them to one side when I was done, feeling for all the world like there was a grey cloud around me regardless. Read the rest of this entry »

The Magic Pill (part 2)

[This is the second part of a series of posts telling a single story.  You can read the first part HERE.]

His public school teacher made all sorts of wacky faces at the parent-teacher conference, trying to find a way to tactfully throw the possibility of ADHD out there, without knowing whether or not I was going to rip her head off for suggesting it. “This is his Math workbook,” she told me, placing it in front of me on the desk. It looked like a ticker-tape parade. “The green post-its are assignments he completed correctly, or assignments where he went over the things he got wrong and made the right corrections. The red post-its are assignments where he gave incorrect answers and still needs to make the corrections. The yellow post-its are assignments where he didn’t give an answer at all, or left something out.” She riffled through the pages one-handed, flashing a great deal of red and yellow, and not much green. “There are whole pages here he just skipped. Not even a first try. And they’re supposed to be done with this by now. Completely. The class as a whole has moved on to the next book.”

I sighed audibly, but didn’t say anything. The memory of the two of us sitting at my kitchen table with snacks and drinks, working through the problems together, going over multiplication and long division, talking about money, drifted into my head and away again. It suddenly seemed very long ago. “You know…” the teacher grimaced, looking rather fidgety herself. “Maybe… at this point… it’s possible…” Read the rest of this entry »

The Magic Pill (part 1)

My kid has ADHD.

It’s taken about five years to get to that relatively simple statement, or ten, if you’re counting from when he was born instead of when he went into school. He was severely premature– “No Way He’s Gonna Make It Without Intervention” premature. It took drugs and surgery and a team of doctors and his Mom in the hospital for a month before they could even get him to the point where he’d have a chance, and then more surgery to get him born, and then more drugs and an incubator and a lot of tubes and another month or two in the Natal Intensive Care unit to get him home. And then a heart monitor and a steroid fogger once he was home, to make sure that he didn’t hold his breath while he was sleeping and kill himself, or that his lungs didn’t close up when he got a cold and make him pass out because he couldn’t breathe. So mostly we’ve just always been glad that he’s alive, and that he has all his fingers and toes, and that he isn’t brain-damaged or crippled. If he was a little off socially and perceptually, we figured, well… so are we. Read the rest of this entry »