Raising Blaze (24 page)

“That’s okay,” he said.

“I won’t be there. You can’t call me or come home until it’s over.”

“That’s okay, Mom.”

“You have to eat what the other kids eat and do what the other kids do.”

“Of course I will.”

I was thrilled that Blaze was showing such independence and, more than anything, wanted his camp experience to be a good one, but I drove myself almost insane worrying about what might happen.

“You’ve got to let him go,” my father said. “You’ve got to let him grow up. Don’t be so overprotective.”

“I
am
letting him go,” I said. “But five days is a long time for a kid like Blaze.”

“No, five days is a long time for
you
,” my father said.

Blaze received a journal in which he would write down his camp experiences while he was away. In the front part of the journal, there were several questions that he had to answer before he left. The journal asked what he expected camp to be like. Blaze wrote:
I expect camp to be fun. I expect the classes not to have a lot of work. I expect the food to be cooked properly and the cabins to have a lot of beds.

The journal asked if there were any special concerns he had about camp. Blaze wrote:
I am worried that some kids I don’t know might laugh at me if I make a mistake at something.

This particular bit of self-awareness convinced me more than anything that Blaze was ready to go.

In the week before camp, I conferred with Mr. Davidson almost every day, making a complete pest of myself. With the patience born
of twenty years of experience with frantic mothers, Mr. Davidson explained every detail, discussed every possibility, and offered every reassurance.

“If anything bad happens,” Mr. Davidson said, “and the kid really can’t stay there, I will personally bring him home. But I really think it’s going to be okay.”

“I appreciate all that you’re doing,” I told Mr. Davidson. “It’s above and beyond the call of duty.”

“He’s worth the investment,” Mr. Davidson said.

“And you’ll call me, right? Let me know how he’s doing?”

“I will call you. It’s a promise.”

Blaze left for camp, along with all the other sixth-graders in his school, early on a Monday morning. I couldn’t remember him ever being as excited as he was that day, tossing his bedroll and backpack onto the giant pile in front of the school bus and hopping aboard with glee. He didn’t hover around me or linger for a second. After he offered me a perfunctory “bye, Mom,” he didn’t even give me so much as a backward glance.

Once Blaze was gone, it didn’t take me very long to realize that I had completely forgotten what it was like to have ever been without him. All of a sudden, there were vast chunks of the day that were simply empty. I was completely unable to distract myself. Many of the mothers I worked with had assured me that I would relish my time alone and probably become addicted to it in short order. I was absolutely free to go anywhere, do anything and be home at no particular time. But I did nothing and went nowhere. I felt woolly and limbless. Without Blaze, all my internal structures were missing. I did manage to come down with a raging flu, which conveniently eliminated the necessity to think about anything, especially how totally vacuous my daily life seemed without Blaze in it.

On Tuesday evening, as I lay in an antihistamine haze, imagining fires, floods, and other possible camp disasters, I got a call from Mr. Davidson.

“You sound terrible,” he said. “What happened to you?”

“Got a pretty bad cold,” I said. “Probably psychosomatic.”

“Well, I’m calling to tell you that your boy is doing fine. He missed you a little this morning, but he’s having a great time. No problems.”

“Really? Is he eating?”

“Oh, sure. Tater tots, pancakes…I was at dinner with him tonight. He had a cheese enchilada.”

“My son ate a cheese enchilada?”

“Yes, ma’am, although not very gracefully, I’ll admit.”

“And he’s okay, really?”

“He’s fine. He’s singing camp songs, going on hikes. He’s one of the guys.”

“Thank you,” was all I could think of to say.

“You can stop worrying,” Mr. Davidson said. “I’m not going to call you again because I’m not going to need to call you. We’ll see you on Friday.”

By Friday, my voice was almost gone from the flu and I was reduced to croaking out my words. Both my parents and Maya came with me to pick Blaze up from school and we stood there, with dozens of other parents, at the curb, like some kind of receiving line. Mr. Davidson pulled up first, before the buses, and got out smiling as he saw our party.

“Never had an entire family here to meet me before,” he said.

The crowd at the curb burst out cheering as the yellow school buses pulled up and the kids tumbled off. And there was
my
kid, dusty, chapped-lipped, and tan from the sun, dragging his jacket along the ground, wearing Mr. Davidson’s baseball cap on his head. He looked beat. He looked happy.

“Hi, Mom,” he said. “I had a great time at camp.”

I was so proud of him I could barely breathe.

We celebrated Blaze’s success at camp for months. The fact that he could take care of himself for almost a week, away from me and away from home, was something I couldn’t have envisioned only months before. Ironically, this very success was what got me thinking about the challenges Blaze would face in his next year of school. For some time I’d been ping-ponging from one school crisis to another with Blaze. Now, in a quieter time when he was making steady progress, I had the space to look ahead and try to avoid losing the ground it had been so hard to gain. Middle school was looming and I had no idea what to expect. Those middle grades were difficult under the best circumstances, I knew, and Blaze was most definitely not a kid who would just fit in. In addition, there would be no Mr. Davidson to smooth the path in seventh grade and beyond, and that worried me more than anything.

Mr. Davidson, it turned out, had similar thoughts.

“So what should I do?” I asked him. “What can I do to prepare?”

Mr. Davidson suggested that maybe I should try to have Blaze evaluated once more by someone I had faith in.

“Chances are, whoever I find will recommend medication,” I said. “What do you think about that?”

Mr. Davidson paused before answering me, as if he were choosing his words carefully. “You know, when Blaze first came to my class, I was told
never
to mention medication to you,” Mr. Davidson said.

“Dr. Roberts?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I guess she
was
listening, after all.”

“Are you reconsidering now?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve always been opposed to these drugs, but if there’s something…If you
know
of something….”

“Well,” he said, “you shouldn’t do anything you’re not comfortable with but there really are a lot of very good medications out there now and maybe, well, you just never know. I’ve seen a lot of kids do really well. For some, it’s like night and day.”

So, once again, I tried to open my mind to the possibility of a magic bullet in both diagnosis and medication.

My long resistance to drugs wasn’t born of ignorance. Over the years, Blaze’s odd medical issues had thrown me into a world I knew almost nothing about and I wanted very much to become educated. So, in addition to researching growth hormone and prednisone, I started reading about a whole other class of drugs that was moving into the limelight just as he was starting school. I am referring now to the seratonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. The SSRIs are antidepressants that influence the amount of seratonin present in the brain. An older class of antidepressants, the tricyclics, influence all the brain’s neurotransmitters. The first of these SSRIs to enter into the mainstream was Prozac but there were many more to come, including Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, and Luvox. Intrigued, I read
Listening to Prozac
when it was published and then read the answer to that book,
Talking Back to Prozac,
which I found much more convincing. I saw what seemed to me to be a trend toward the “Prozac nation” that Elizabeth Wurtzel addressed in her book of the same name. Every doctor I’d had since the early 1990s (and these were general practitioners, mind you, not psychiatrists) had recommended one of the SSRIs for me—and not because I was depressed, but because I had a backache or stomach trouble or occasional difficulty falling asleep. At a certain point, I noticed it was almost impossible to avoid some kind of contact with these new antidepressants. Talk of them was everywhere (ads in
TV Guide
!), prescriptions for them were profuse, and periodically, some kind of article either denigrating them or extolling their virtues popped up in the papers and magazines.

I had a deep distrust of these medications. Part of this distrust
stemmed, no doubt, from my upbringing and my parents’ attitudes. But another component of my wariness came from the fact that, often enough, many drugs touted as cures later turned out to be more dangerous than the maladies they sought to address. Who hadn’t heard of thalidomide? DES daughters? And who hadn’t seen at least one article blaming various school shootings on the fact that many of the shooters were taking prescribed antidepressants? I had too many unanswered questions about the long-term effects of most drugs to feel comfortable with the claims of short-term benefits. But, of course, this was just my opinion. I was free to take or not take any drug prescribed to me and feel vindicated if my concerns were borne out or happily surprised if they weren’t. The real problem, for me at least, was that whether or not
I
took the drugs was not the issue. It was whether or not I chose to give them to my son.

Although I’d been hearing about medication since Blaze started school, the pressure to give it to him had been fairly subtle at first. But he started school in 1992, when Prozac was making its first appearances in the mainstream and before diagnoses such as pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified; Asperger’s Syndrome; and bipolar disorder were being regularly applied to children. By the time Blaze was in sixth grade, Asperger’s Syndrome—on the autism spectrum of disorders but with several markedly different characteristics—was cropping up all over the place. In addition, bipolar disorder, which I’d previously been told was never diagnosed in children, was becoming the new “hot” diagnosis for kids. There was also sensory integrative disorder, which usually got tacked onto a more established disorder as a sort of bolster. Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) was mentioned more than ever before as well. Gone were the simple days of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and eating disorders (although those often joined the party as “components”). Now there were newer, better, and bigger fish to fry. And it seemed that there was a drug to go with every one.

Had it not been for Mr. Davidson and the stunning success he’d had with Blaze, I would never have considered another visit to a psychiatrist, much less medication for Blaze. It wasn’t that Mr. Davidson pressured me or even suggested that I medicate Blaze. But he believed in medication and I trusted him implicitly. Because of this, I opened my mind.

On a recommendation from a psychiatrist friend whose opinion I respected, I took Blaze to see Dr. B., another psychiatrist in another high-rent office. Dr. B. had a lousy bedside manner, if “manner” was even the correct word to use for his gruffness. I gave him the abbreviated version of Blaze’s trials at school and flung out all I’d garnered from time in special ed about childhood psychiatric disorders. After a forty-five minute session, Dr. B. told me that Blaze had all the classic signs of ADHD and prescribed Ritalin.

“Gee,” I told him, “I’ve heard just about everything but ADHD. That’s a new one for the smorgasbord.”

Although I was slightly suspicious of the rapidity with which Dr. B. arrived at his diagnosis, I was almost happy with it. In the face of all the strange, dark maladies on the table, ADHD seemed like a lucky break and Ritalin like a gift. What I found disturbing, though, were the reactions I got from those I told that I’d finally caved on my antidrug stance. “I’m proud of you,” was the most common statement I heard from the teachers and school staff. My friends applauded the decision. My family was less enthusiastic but, like me, only wanted to make life easier for Blaze. Helen congratulated me on my decision and then added, “You know they’re having really good results when they combine Ritalin with a little bit of Prozac. You might want to think about that option.” Her enthusiasm was astonishing to me. It was like I had finally decided to become part of a club. A cool club.

At first, Blaze seemed to have little reaction to the Ritalin. Mr. Davidson reported no real improvement in his behavior. Blaze was still leaving class when he felt like it and still refusing to work when it
didn’t suit him. When I asked him how he felt after taking the pill, Blaze shrugged. I called Dr. B. and after speaking to his answering service a few times, he called back and suggested I raise the dosage. I added a pill at lunchtime. Blaze didn’t mind traipsing off to the nurse’s office before lunch and taking a pill. After all, there were plenty of his peers doing the same. After upping the dose, Mr. Davidson told me that Blaze seemed a little more focused. I held out hope.

Soon after, Blaze started showing some physical effects. His sleep patterns became erratic. Sometimes he’d have nightmares and sometimes he’d wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to fall back asleep. His eating habits changed too. He was either famished or refusing food altogether. And then he started to become irritable in the afternoons. When I was in college, we had a word to describe his condition: crashing.

“I’m just not sure about this drug,” I told my father.

“Well, have you tried it yourself?” my father asked. I admitted that I hadn’t. The thought hadn’t even occurred to me. I felt my father had a valid point. I had spent Blaze’s whole life trying to make his environment safe. I put plugs in sockets and tested jars of baby food. I wouldn’t let him watch violent TV shows and trained him to look both ways before crossing the street. I wouldn’t let him eat candy he’d dropped on the floor. But I’d been giving him a powerful stimulant without having even an inkling of its effects.