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?”

I thought about it: all those nights reading, or drawing; the time I worked 9-hour days for 20 days straight at my job to bring a heavy project in on deadline; every math equation or physics calculation or personal research topic I ever slaved away on to the exclusion of everything else. “Nah,” I said. Just the opposite!

“Do you feel that you’ve lost a lot of opportunities over the course of your life because you weren’t able to focus on what needed to be done?”

Rrrrr… that’s a harder call. But no. I have no problems doing what needs to be done, once I know what it is. MY problem is figuring out what needs to be done in the first place… “Nah,” I said again.

“Okay,” he said, nodding. “Well, then. Probably not!” And we let it lie.

As for Jack? We got off easy. He responded so positively and so definitively to the lowest dosage of medication it was possible to give him, that there wasn’t any need for us to fine tune, or wrestle with a cost-benefit analysis. We had intended to start him on Ritalin for a week without telling anyone else about it, make it a blind experiment. He torpedoed that plan when he immediately told his public school teacher that he was taking it, himself. But we needn’t have bothered. Within two days he was calling me excitedly to tell me that he had gotten his homework done in less than an hour, and now he had time to play. Within five days his teacher, his caretaker who had insisted he didn’t need anything of the sort, Bobby’s aide, who had never said anything good or bad about Jack’s behavior before to anyone we knew of– all were remarking on the positive change. By the time we got to the meeting for the 504 plan, the administrators were smiling and declaring him a success story (with no small relief!). They instituted a number of common-sense protocols typical of ADHD 504s:

• Allowing him to test in a different, smaller room, with fewer students and other distractions;
• Allowing him a certain latitude to move around more frequently within the classroom environment;
• Giving him additional assistance in breaking large projects down into specific, manageable tasks;
• Seating him closer to the teacher, to assist in his concentration;
• Working out non-verbal correction methods of bringing his attention back on point when it wanders, so the teacher isn’t making him the focus of negative attention by calling his name constantly.

…and then they got back to whatever it is they spend the rest of their time doing day to day. The only snag we hit was a brief period where Jack got hyper-emotional-   including one day where the source of his frustration was realizing that the medication wasn’t going to give him superpowers, or enable him to effortlessly master anything he confronted!

“The head of the Child Study Team talked to him,” said Weaver. “They took him out of class for a few minutes, and explained to him, ‘Look, it’s not a Magic Pill.’”

But it is, I thought, grinning. Kind of.

For my own part, whatever changes I’ve noticed have been subtle ones. Jack has an ability to surprise me day to day that has nothing to do with anything except the fact that he’s growing up; our time together hasn’t gone quickly, as so many people say it does, but it has gone steadily, and with plenty of pleasant memories. When he notices me drawing on a piece of paper and stops what he’s doing to give me a 20-minute dissertation on how to make vines look like they’re wrapped around a log, or when he can sit next to me for an hour and direct me making an animated film, or when he knows the correct pronunciation of “onomatopoeia” and I don’t, it’s hard to tell whether that’s the medicine helping him, or just a product of him getting older. Either way, it’s still him… and I suppose that’s the point. He continues to be happy, and his backwards slide of falling behind has stopped. The questions and debates don’t seem terribly relevant now, because really, in the end, that’s enough. The rest of it will take care of itself, one way or another.

It always does.

***