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.

She got back to me via phone. She sounded tired and harassed, which may or may not have had anything to do with my e-mail, but her tone and choice of words also had a faint air of formality to it, as if I had set in process some ritual she’d done a thousand times before and found distasteful– a confusing reversal from the afternoon we spent at the parent-teacher conference looking over Jack’s math book. “Write the Child Study Team directly,” she said. “Or write the principal and she’ll inform them. If the request to convene on a 504 comes from me, it won’t happen very quickly. If it comes directly from you, it will happen much faster.” She made no mention of my solicitation for her input on an informal level.

“Errrr… okay,” I replied.

Weaver had been moving somewhat faster, although not to much more effect. When I filled her in on the information Jack’s teacher had given me, she mentioned, “His normal pediatrician’s office says they don’t do ADHD evaluations; they’ll fill the script if that’s necessary, but only if it comes with air-tight credentials from someone else. They say I’d have to find a neurologist. I have the name of a pediatric neurologist, but I don’t know anything about him, and I don’t wanna take Jack someplace where the guy is gonna spend 10 minutes with him and then just throw a script at him, and say, ‘Here, that’s what you need.’ Neuro guys are all arrogant and super-confident. They make quick decisions, because they think they already know what’s going on.”

She paused, presumably to breathe. “I would agree that’s undesirable,” I commented.

“The doctors who evaluated him when he was a baby are retired,” she continued. “There’s a doctor in the same Developmental Pediatrics Center that will do the medical evaluation, but she wants to meet twice, once with him and once without, and I don’t see why, when we just did the same thing with another doctor down the hall, and she’ll have access to those records. And that’s more money. I can’t get a clear statement yet from the insurance on what they’re going to cover. We were swamped at work.”

I chewed on that. “Ask her,” I said. “Call her office and ask why two sessions. They should at least be able to give you a broad outline of what each one would involve.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Then when we know that, we can discuss it further,” I added. “If that’s what we want to do.”

“Yeah,” she said again.

Her next phone call came days later, when I was in the middle of a haircut and couldn’t pick up the phone. I called her back slouching in the front seat of my car, on a little side-street of Shadetree I’d never been down before, surrounded by mounds of melting winter snow that reached higher than the hood. “I made the appointments with that other doctor at the Pediatrics Center,” she said.

“What?” I blurted.

“I don’t want to take him to a neuro guy,” she repeated. “I want somebody who’s gonna take the time on it.”

“Whoa!” I cried, sitting up in my seat. “Back the train up! I thought we were gonna discuss this! Like, the whole thing. Whether we wanted to get involved with drugs at all, not, ‘Where are we gonna take him to get them.’”

Silence. My eyes slid sideways to the phone. “You’ve already made up your mind,” I said, flatly. “You want to put him on medication.”

Even called out on it that directly, she never just came out and said YES. “You were there when we did the book report,” she said. “We did everything we could think of, and none of it mattered. It’s the same thing with all the other homework, and everything else. We’ve been dealing with this forever now, and nothing we do with his environment makes any difference. You were the one who said that. The Carrot and the Stick. If there was something we could have changed that would make that big a difference, we would have found it by now.”

Yes, I was the one who said that, I thought, frowning. But when you say WE’VE been dealing with this forever, you mean YOU’VE been dealing with this forever. You’ve never had the patience to help him work through things, because you don’t think the way he does. Like I do. I bit off the words; it may or may not have been true, but it certainly wasn’t fair, or productive. “I am not 100% on-board with this,” I told her. “And what is that gonna do with the 504 plan?” I added. “Is the school system gonna come back and say, ‘Well there’s no reason to do this for him if he’s on medication, as long as the medication is working properly he shouldn’t need any kind of classroom restructuring’?”

“I don’t know,” she responded. “Look, you–” She cut herself off, in similar fashion. “I don’t know what to tell you. I think it’s scary, too, but… If you want to try him just on the 504 plan, and see how he does, I guess we could do that. But I don’t think it’s gonna get the job done.”

We sat there for a while in silence, until finally I sighed. “When are the appointments?”

After that conversation, I took off my glasses and rubbed my face with my hands, stared at the blurry snowbanks without them. It’s just an evaluation, right? They’re not doing to DO anything to him, or give him anything. They can’t, unless I say it’s OK. I laid my hands on the steering wheel. And I can ask questions.

So I ask questions, I thought, slipping the lenses back on. I had an uncomfortable suspicion, though, even as it went through my head, that the questions I wanted to ask were as yet too undefined for me to ask them. And that I was going to be the only one asking them. And that nobody would be able to answer me anyway.

[continue to the next part]