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.

What is it going to do to his creativity? His imagination? The amazing way he sees connections and puts things together? Will he feel like he’s missing something? Will he even know if he’s not acting like himself anymore?

What is it going to do to his self-esteem? It’s like we’re telling him, “You’re not all right the way you are, you need this pill to be OK.” What kind of message does that send to a nine-year old kid? Or anyone? Or is that just MY hang-up, because I’ve always been of the opinion that he and I think the same way?

What do we do once that door is open? How do we tell him, “Well, son, you probably shouldn’t do crystal meth or smoke cigarettes or shoot heroin,” when he’s already used to the idea of, “I take this drug and it makes things better”?

Some of the answers to these questions, for once, were in the literature. There is no statistical evidence, read the pamphlets, showing that these medications act as “gateway drugs”, leading to an increased rate of the use or abuse of other substances. In fact, there is a noted statistical finding to the contrary, that in the absence of prescribed medication, some individuals wind up “self-medicating”, through excessive use of non-prescription stimulants, etc.

Some of it also worked out in play, faster than I could form the questions. Whatever else he may be, Jack is smart, and there was obviously no way we were going to be able to subject him to batteries of tests with multiple doctors without him wondering what the heck it was all for. “You’re having trouble in school, right?” I had told him, when it all first got rolling. “Well, these people are experts on figuring out how other people think. So we’re gonna let them check you out, and see what they say about how you think. ‘Cause maybe once we know that, we can figure out if there’s anything we can do that will help you get better grades.” And he seemed to accept that.

The later, probably more important conversation, damnably happened when it was just him and his mother– I only found out about it later, from her, on the phone. “Pay attention to what he says and talk to him about it if you get a window,” she said. “I had to spell it out for him, and he started to take it the wrong way.”

“Why?” I asked. “What happened?”

“He wanted more of an explanation about what the doctors found out, so I explained to him that the problem he was having was called ADHD and tried to explain what that meant. The first thing that happened was that his face fell and he got this horrified expression, and he said, ‘You mean I’m like Bobby?’”

I winced. Bobby is one of Jack’s classmates; autistic, and apparently more dysfunctional on a good day than Jack on his worst, at least in a school setting– he always has at least one Teachers Aide or Special Education person assigned to him in any given scenario. I had never seen any clearly defined indications that the other children around him gave it much thought one way or the other– he’d been over to Weaver’s house to play with Jack several times, as part of his crowd of local friends, once while I was there– but I knew the expression and tone of voice Weaver was mimicking very well, and it suggested otherwise.

“I need to talk to them,” she growled, more to herself than to me. “He’s been in Jack’s class for three years straight now. Maybe I can request that they get placed with different teachers for fifth grade. Anyway, I told him, ‘NO, you are NOT like Bobby.’ I couldn’t figure out what else to do, so I grabbed a piece of paper and drew a bunch of dots on it, then connected them with a straight line. ‘See?’ I said. ‘This is how most people think.’ Then I drew a big looping curvy line that still went through all the dots but wandered all over the page before it wound up at the end. ‘See, that’s how you think,’ I said.”

Wow! Not bad! Whatever else she may be, Weaver is on-point, and has a certain ability to think on her feet. I would have thrown in a few dots on the curvy path that weren’t on the straight path. If I’d thought of it. I probably wouldn’t have thought of it.

“’We’re trying to see if there’s any way we can help your line be straighter,’” she finished. And that must have been a metaphor Jack understood, because I did pay attention to what he said after that, and did look for a window, and he never gave any sign that there was more to it that he wanted to talk about with me.

Around that, various people who were familiar with the particulars of what was going on chimed in with their own opinions, all of it well-meaning, but a lot of it off-point as far as my own concerns went– a chatter of noise in my own attempts to figure out what the hell was going on.

• From his grandmother on Weaver’s side: “Oh my God, you don’t want to do that, that stuff will turn him into a zombie!” Thanks Inga. Very rational risk/benefit assessment. (“They were zombies!” Rael would say, much later, making me laugh. “They had ’em on too high a dosage when they were first workin’ all this out, they know better now!”)
• From Shiva, his daytime caretaker, who has a learning-disabled daughter in her family, and has taken care of children with almost every stripe of challenge, neurological, physical and otherwise: “He doesn’t need that! You just need to teach him the coping strategies.” Wait a minute-  weren’t you the one who put all that stuff on his eval about him not paying attention and not finishing what he starts and all the rest, just like his teacher did? And you’re ruling it out, out of hand? What the fuck?
• From a good friend: “My mom’s a nutritionist, and she’s studied all that kind of stuff, the effect that diet has on it. As long as he’s already getting all the vitamins and nutrients he should be gettin’, one thing you really want to do is make sure he gets a lot of meat and protein, stuff that his body really has to work to digest, because that’ll help slow ’em down.” Errr, okay. He’s more Inattentive type than Hyperactive type, but I can see where that might help. Maybe. You want I should give him a couple of cups of coffee, too, see if that’ll do instead of the Ritalin?

My own family stayed relatively quiet about it, and sanguine in what they did say, perhaps because they had no qualms about my ability to clearly evaluate matters where my son was concerned, or perhaps because while they were fiercely interested, they figured it wasn’t their place to say anything at all unless I brought it up. I caught up with Iris at her house for her birthday. We spent most of the time throwing virtual darts at her giant-screen TV with her two sons, but one casual comment she made stayed with me. “Man,” she said, tiredly, sprawled on her brown leather couch, “I wish to God there was some pill I could give Log that would just make all his problems go away. If there was, I’d be all over that. ‘Here ya go.’” She pantomimed handing it over with a wave of her hand, shrugged. “If there is for Jack…” she said, trailing off.  ”Dude, check it out.”

The Magic Pill, I thought silently, sympathetically.

Opal was similarly pragmatic. (Opal is rarely anything except pragmatic; that and her terseness are her two endearing qualities.) “Welp,” she said, over the phone from the Sunshine Realm. “If he’s struggling, and that might straighten it out, then maybe that’s what’s gotta happen. The longer you let it go, the more of a problem it’s gonna be. And you know,” she stated, “if he keeps being a problem, the other kids will start ostracizing him. They’ll single him out and make fun of him. No one will want to be his friend.” I heard her turn away from the phone, some background chatter just beyond the range of the mouthpiece. “The Empress says, ‘That’s true,’” she added, turning back.

This occurs to you now, 35 years later, I thought, in spite of myself. How come it didn’t occur to you when you skipped me out of kindergarten into first grade? But it was just old habit, not really a question I needed answered.

Catania went the farthest and said the most that was relevant, although she was careful to keep it neutral. “You’d probably be buying him time for the coping strategies to work. At the worst.” She eyed me over the board game pieces. “Rael is going to be on Ritalin for the rest of his life, without any question, because by the time they figured out what was going on with him, he was too old for the coping strategies to really become an ingrained habit, like they might have become if he’d learned them when he was younger, and had the assistance of meds. He doesn’t default to them.” She scattered some terrain tiles. “Jack might learn to, with time. Then once he did, he could decide for himself if he was more comfortable off medication or on. As an adult.”

“Yeah. Maybe,” I said.

[continue to the next part]