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.

Once the DP Center had that information from the two of us, and from his teacher and daytime caretaker, they brought Jack in and ran him through two days of pleasant testing: answering questions, analyzing patterns and playing games, writing. He didn’t mind in the least– enjoyed it, actually– and he did his best to do everything the doctor asked him to do. A few days after that, we came back and sat with that same doctor in that same testing room, only this time without Jack, and the three of us perched at the points of a triangle around a small desk, balanced, trying to make sense of what was going on.

“The irony,” she said, sorting through her graphs, “as far as the intelligence testing aspect of it goes, is that they changed the test. His initial intelligence testing was done with the WISC-3. We now use the WISC-4. On the WISC-4 they added two new categories, Working Memory and Processing Speed, and they changed how all the categories are weighted for purposes of the overall test result. Those two new categories play right into his weak points. His lower scores in them brought his overall WISC-4 score down, to the point where by the WISC-4 standards, he’s no longer considered gifted.” She smiled at us. “I think he’s obviously gifted, though, and anybody else who interacted with him directly would probably agree that he’s gifted. So on the off-chance that anyone ever asks you to see the numbers again, just show ’em the original WISC-3 results and ignore these.”

His mother and I laughed, perhaps a bit grimly. “Fair enough,” I said. “But as far as the ‘weak points’ go, I mean– I’ve been listening very carefully to everything you’ve told us so far, and I’m not looking for a quick classification or an easy solution. But for clarity’s sake: yes, he has ADHD? Or no, he doesn’t?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’d say he does. Based on these results, and my own observations during the testing. He’s intensely verbal, and he’s great with visual patterns, perceptive reasoning. But he’s also very distractable, because he has a moderate level of fidgetyness, and is hyper-aware of his surroundings.” She looked up at the ceiling for a moment, as if searching for an explanation, then pointed in the air. “Hear that?” she said to us, not clearly indicating anything. “The sound the air-conditioner vent is making? It’s barely audible, and if it turns on or turns off, you and I probably don’t notice. We screen it out. He can’t. He notices it. He commented on it every time it went on or off during the testing. Every time.”

I was still processing that and listening to it myself, one eyebrow raised, as she slid a series of simple multiple choice problems across the table to show us. “Here’s another really good example,” she said. “He got every problem right on this test, except for… this one,” she added, tapping it with her pencil. “Now, I’ve given these tests a million times, and I know what the answers are. The pattern, I mean. A,A,B,B,C. So I can tell as he does them whether or not he’s getting them right. And I watched him get the first one right, and then the second one right, and then the third one right, on and on, all the way up to HERE–” She tapped it again. “–And on this one, the fax machine, outside the closed office door, three doors down the hallway, went off. And I watched him glance up, away from the paper, pause for a beat, then go back to the paper– and put down the wrong answer. Then move on.” She leaned back in her chair. “That’s the pattern. There were some things I just had to take off the desk, because otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere, because they kept drawing his attention to them. The tissue box. The red and white cubes, because he knew you had played with those in the past,” she nodded at me. “I had to start hiding when I made notes about what he was doing, because every time I moved my pencil on the pad, even a little, his eyes instantly darted to the motion. If I got up, and went over the computer to do something, because he was doing a long test, in less than a minute, his neck would be craned around to see what I had on the screen, or he’d actually get up and come over behind me. ‘Whataya doin’?’”

I chuckled. “He likes computers,” I said, smiling.

“I know,” she said. “What I’m trying to illustrate overall is, his hyper-awareness, and to a lesser extent, his need to move, continually take him away from whatever he’s supposed to be doing. And then he can’t get back by himself.” She glanced at the WISC-4 scores. “If he had above-average memory and processing speed, then he might be able to pull it off even so, because he’d be able to retain information without concentrating on it. It’d just be there. But he doesn’t. He’s average in those areas. So he misses a lot. And then he doesn’t know what to do.”

“Yeah,” said Weaver. “That matches the reports from his teacher.”

“It does,” I agreed. “Her analysis was that he wasn’t paying attention during group instruction, so then when it came time for individual study he was lost. And that he was afraid to ask for help, because if he asked for help, then he’d have to admit that he didn’t know what to do because he wasn’t paying attention, and was afraid that would get him in trouble.”

“Mmm-hmm,” she nodded. She showed us more tests: groups of pictures, pages of patterns, answers he wrote. “Faced with that, he compensates by trying to rush through it as fast as possible, just to get it over with. Or tells himself he knows the answer before he does. That’s when he starts making the omissions and the hasty mistakes. It fits together.”

We soaked that in. “So?” I said, at last. “What do we do?”

[continue to the next part]