Sleepless Nights
They say that desperate people sometimes do desperate things. Wow... I really do understand that statement more than ever now. In a desperate attempt to find the right answers... we left behind a steady stream of professionals. Silly as it sounds.... you can actually "fire" a professional if you don't like what they are saying... or don't agree with their diagnosis. Seriously... we hired them to help us, and we're the one's paying the bill, so if we don't agree... if they're not helping us... we FIRE THEM! Over the years I have found that there were a lot of very nice... well-meaning professionals that really didn't have a clue as to how to help us. Sadly, many of them even tried to blame us for the problems that we were having in the home. When this happens.... when they try to make this our fault... and when we start beating ourselves up really badly... we know that it's time to start looking for someone else to help us. Also, when the therapist tells us that there is no hope... we need to find someone that CAN offer hope. Of course, we have to be smart about it too. As much as I would have loved to scream at them and tell them exactly where to go... I didn't. I had to make sure that I had what we needed first. I had to make sure that all of the bases were covered. So... before I fired our son's therapist and psychiatrist... I had to go to work finding a new therapist, and put my son's name on a three-month waiting list for a new pediatric psychiatrist. Then, I called my son's Neurologist and told them exactly what my plan was. I asked him for help in prescribing my son's current medications until we could get in to see the new psychiatrist. After they agreed to help me, I went back to his psychiatrist and asked her for a referral for a neuropsychological evaluation so we could try and shed a little more light on what was causing all of these difficulties. As soon as I got that appointment set up... I fired both the therapist and the psychiatrist. Yikes! What a scary feeling that was... knowing that we were pretty much on our own for a while through all of this mess. Yet, I found that it was better to be alone... than to have someone crushing what little bit of hope and self-esteem I had left.
So, as we waited... I continued to spend most of my evenings at the computer researching. My son seemed to fit a lot of the criteria for the eight different diagnosis' that he had been given over the years... but he never quite fit all of the criteria for these disorders. Night after night I researched... printed off the symptoms of hundreds of possible disorders... and highlighted anything that pertained to my son. Yet nothing ever seemed to be a perfect match. It wasn't uncommon for me to find myself nodding off at the computer every day at 3:00 AM ... or to find myself waking up as my head dropped down and hit the keyboard. I was being obsessive about this... I knew that I was. But... I didn't care. This was my son... my family... and we were all living a horrible nightmare. Nobody else was doing anything to help improve the quality of our lives, so I knew that it was up to me to keep researching, and I had no intentions of stopping until I found the answer that I was looking for.
It seemed like an eternity, but the day finally came for the neuropsychological evaluation. I was actually quite pleased that my son woke up with the same uncooperative disposition that he had been showing me over the last several months. To my surprise, he continued to be uncooperative throughout the entire day, and throughout most of the testing. He basically fought them every step of the way, and refused to comply with most of what was asked of him. Yes! They were seeing him at his worst... which was what I had been hoping for all along. I didn't even mind when he started fighting with me and I was forced to physically restrain him right there in the lobby, because I knew that they were watching... and I wanted them to see what life was really like with this child. It was a long day for everyone involved, but a day that would eventually shed some light on his problems... so I honestly didn't mind that we all had to live through it.
It seemed like it took forever for the day to come where we actually sat down and discussed the results of all of the testing. I was so excited at the thought of finally getting a proper diagnosis... or at least a reason for all of our struggles. I was so happy that someone was finally going to be able to tell us what we needed to do to help him, or at the least... point us in the right direction so we could finally start getting him the help that he needed. When she said the words "REACTIVE ATTACHMENT DISORDER (RAD)," I was so thrilled to finally have a name for all of this. But as I listened more closely to what she was telling me... as we read through the report together, I found myself beginning to worry again. It was the "Diagnostic Impressions & Recommendations" at the very end of this long report that actually triggered the tears that I had been fighting so badly to contain. As I listened... I felt my body starting to go a little numb. I completely shut out the words that I was hearing, as I stared down at this piece of paper... the one that was supposed to tell us what direction we needed to move now... the one that was supposed to offer us some hope... but didn't.
Diagnostic Impressions & Recommendations
***The family will require a great deal of professional support as they attempt to raise this child. They are encouraged to seek out all pertinent agencies that might be able to offer assistance. Long term residential care may be a reality in the future. It is recommended that the family continue their efforts to document progress and collaborate with professional agencies. If and when the time comes that they can no longer manage his behavior in the home environment, they will need the support of these agencies to facilitate transfer of their son's care to the best facility.
I continued to read and reread the report over the next couple of days. Maybe I was just in denial over all of this but I just didn't want to accept what the professionals were telling me. I adopted this child to help him... not to put him in an institution somewhere and give up on him. Sadly, the neuropsychological evaluation offered no hope... so we were on our own once again... and the sleepless nights continued as I researched and researched... looking for the hope that we so desperately needed. When I first started researching RAD, I wasn't exactly pleased with the information that I was digging up. Most of what I was finding on the internet really wasn't all that hopeful. One site that I ran across even scared me, as the names Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer appeared to almost jump right off the computer screen at me. When you're a mother of a newly diagnosed RAD child, and you're researching RAD for the very first time, the last thing that you really want to read about are those two monsters. Seriously... it nearly scared me half to death. As I started to panic at the thought that I might be raising a child that was destined to kill... I realized that I was going to need to do everything in my power to prevent that from happening. I knew that as broken as our family had become, we were going to need to find a way to pull ourselves back together and find a way to continue fighting this. I also knew that this was not going to be an easy task, because the closer we tried to get to our son, the harder he seemed to fight to keep us all at a safe distance. It was pretty clear that we were no longer living in a family... we were living on a battlefield. Our son didn't see us as parents... he saw us as "the enemy," and the more we tried to move into his territory... the harder he fought us. The harder he fought... the angrier we became. Oddly enough, the angrier we became... the happier he always appeared to be. It really did feel as if we were fighting some kind of a war here. An impossible war.... a war we were destined to lose.
A RAD Life
Mixed up feelings...
frightening thoughts.
Painful memories...
of fights we've fought.
Angry words...
never meant to be spoken.
Hurtful looks...
that stir up emotion.
Empty threats...
of walking away.
Struggling to make it...
through just one more day.
He is so tired...
I am so sad...
How will this marriage
survive with RAD?
Copyright © 2002 Suzanne
