Against Medical Advice (3 page)
Read Against Medical Advice Online
Authors: James Patterson
AFTER I’VE SPENT a few more days on Ritalin, the totally new things I feel compelled to do keep shocking all of us.
And they change from day to day.
My parents tell Dr. Laufton they want me to stop taking the drug, but she says we have to give it a chance to work and allow my body time to adjust to it. I think that if the doctor had to live in my body
for even a few minutes,
she’d never give out that advice again.
Later that week at dinner, my father is at my side, showing me how to use my knife and fork.
“You feeling better today?” he asks.
Right away I answer, “You feeling better today?”
“No, I’m serious,” he tries again. “How are you doing, Cory? I want to know.”
“No, I’m serious. How are you doing?” I repeat back to him. “I want to know.”
“Please don’t do that,” he says.
“Please don’t do that,” I answer, even though I don’t want to. I want to talk to him about normal stuff, but instead I’ve made him angry with this stupid new habit of becoming a human echo.
Later on, when anybody tries to talk to me, I repeat their words before they can even finish the sentence. When I do this for the fifth or sixth time with my father, he gets up and walks away from me, just shaking his head. There’s an expression on his face that I’ve never seen before, more like sadness than anger. My father’s feelings always show on his face.
The next day, Jessie and I are in the TV room and I have a new urge: clearing my throat. The sound I make is halfway between a grunt and a low-pitched musical note.
After she’s had enough, Jessie gets up to leave rather than start another fight. But as she passes by, I have to touch her on the shoulder.
“Don’t do that, Cory,” she says.
I touch her again several times at even intervals until something inside me feels satisfied.
“Get away from me,”
she yells.
I run after her, touching her shoulder again.
Two
taps, a pause, then
three
taps to make the feeling of having to do it go away. Her yelling gets my mother’s attention and gets me a time-out.
“Sorry, Jessie. Sorry. Sorry, Jessie,” I begin repeating like some kind of broken record.
Alone in my room, I pound my head with my fists to make it stop doing these things.
The next morning, I hear a song on my stereo, and when it’s over I can’t stop hearing the melody. It pushes out all other thoughts until I can’t concentrate on anything else.
Later on that day, I hear a silly word in a cartoon and have to say the word over and over to everyone I come across.
Gooneybird. Gooneybird. Gooneybird.
I’ve begun to flap my arms like a bird, too, and I run around the house doing it whenever I get excited.
Things are getting worse every day, not better like the doctor said.
Today I’m like a jack-in-the-box, with new surprises popping out at any given moment. I feel as if my body is filled with electricity, and when I go to bed I can’t lie still, even though I’m exhausted from my body moving all day. After a while my mother gives me a dose of Benadryl to get me to sleep, then another when the first doesn’t work. The two doses eventually knock me out.
Finally, Gooneybird sleeps.
TWO WEEKS AFTER our first visit to Dr. Laufton, we’re back in her office, but I can’t sit still in my chair for ten seconds. The head shaking is back full force, plus a lot of extreme grimacing and blinking and God only knows what else I’m doing. Even I can’t keep track of all my new movements.
Dr. Laufton closes the notebook she’s been using and sits back in her chair. She talks about some medical stuff that I don’t understand. But I catch a bunch of unusual words coming out of her mouth.
“When I saw Cory last time, I thought we were dealing with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, especially after he told me about feeling so much energy.”
“But not now?” my father asks in a sharp tone. He isn’t a big fan of the Ritalin that’s turned my mind into fruit salad.
The doctor doesn’t like the sound of his voice. “Cory, would you like to go into the waiting room and play with some of the toys I have there? I think you’d enjoy that.”
My mother tells me to go and that she’ll be there in a few minutes.
Years later, my mother filled me in on what was said after I left. Dr. Laufton wanted to let my parents decide what and when to tell me, but she said that from what she saw, it was likely that I had Tourette’s syndrome. The head twisting, the grimacing, the spitting — they were all tics. Vocalizing — making sounds such as throat clearing — was another common symptom of Tourette’s.
Echolalia
was the term for repeating other people’s words.
The doctor said there was no quick fix to get rid of the condition, that my body needed to move on its own. But there were any number of medicines and combinations of medicines we might look into — it would be trial and error.
My mother and father didn’t know it at the time, but they were about to go on a scary roller-coaster ride that would last for many years.
I already knew what the ride would be like.
I was on it —
and I was in the front seat.
School Daze
I don’t remember much about nursery school; mostly my teacher yells at me to do things I’ve forgotten to do and to
stop fidgeting.
There are constant time-outs when I can’t do simple things fast enough, such as hang my coat on a hook. My teacher is always mad at me, even though my mother tells her I can’t help what I do. The teacher says my mother is overprotective and that she should go have another child and leave me to her. The truth is that in addition to my body movements, I was also born about seven weeks’ premature and therefore am not as good with my motor skills as most kids are at that age.
By the time that long, excruciating spring and summer finally end and I arrive at kindergarten, it is obvious to my parents that my condition is actually several conditions. It is their choice not to tell me or anyone else the names of them. Tourette’s syndrome isn’t something people understand much about. It just makes you weird to other people.
And to yourself.
In first grade, my behavioral problems are a lot easier to see. My body is doing strange things several times a minute, and it has to be obvious to everyone that there is something very unusual about this kid named Cory.
My parents have found a new therapist for me. Her name is Dr. Pressler, and she is one of the world’s leading experts in Tourette’s syndrome.
The drive to meet Dr. Pressler takes about an hour and a half, because her office is in a medical building in another state.
After examining me, she puts me on a different medicine that’s actually for people who have high blood pressure, but she says it helps a lot of Tourette’s kids. Pretty much all the kids like me start off on clonidine.
When my behavior and my movements don’t get much better, Dr. Pressler slightly increases the dose every few days, like my other doctor did. Clonidine definitely tires me out, so I don’t have as much energy. But it doesn’t stop me from twitching and jerking my arms and legs, or even from spitting at kids in school, which I’ve done off and on since my Ritalin days.
Some of the things I’m doing may not even be tics at all. Lately I
have
to stab paper cups with pens and knives, and I
have
to wash my hands several times after I use my computer. These compulsions don’t feel the same as the other tics.
Then suddenly I start something new that happens every morning before school.
As my mother creeps ahead in a long line of cars to get to the entrance of the Dellbrook School, I get obsessed with the thought that something terrible is going to happen to her after she drops me off and I’m not around to protect her.
She’s going to fall down a flight of stairs and die.
She’ll be hit by a car or fall into a ditch.
Unless . . . unless . . .
Suddenly I think of the one thing that can save her, my mom’s only hope.
“Promise you’ll be first in line to pick me up?”
It doesn’t matter to me that this isn’t a logical solution to my mom getting hurt after she drops me off. All I know is that the thought seems to take away my feeling of dread.
“I will if I can, Cory,” she says, sounding very unsure about my plan. “I can try, but there are a lot of mothers who come here to pick up their kids. I don’t know if I can always be first.”
“But you
have
to do it — every day.
Every single day.
You
have
to.”
I wait for her to answer and can see that she’s trying hard to work it out.
“Okay, honey. I will,” she agrees.
“You’ll be first in line when school is out? Will I see your car right away?”
“Yes, Cory, I’ll be first in line.”
“Every day?”
“Every day.”
“Even forever?”
“Yes, even forever.”
ONE DAY my worst fear comes true. Leaving school, I see a silver station wagon at the head of the line. A wave of horror shoots through my body.
She’s not here. Something happened to Mommy!
I know that any second a teacher will come to tell me the bad news. She’s been hit by an airplane that fell from the sky. Or there was a terrible car accident. I start crying uncontrollably, shaking horribly.
Then I see my mother in the distance, pulling up to the school quickly. She drives as close as she can and stops behind the silver wagon to be . . .
second in line!
My mother rolls down the passenger window and yells for me to come, but I’m frozen in panic, still sobbing and shaking my head.
She yells again, but I still don’t move.
A moment later, she steps on the gas and pulls around the silver car and ends up in a fire zone. Right away a crossing guard charges at her, as if she’s just driven through the school’s front window.
“You crossed the yellow line, lady. You have to move,”
he shouts loud enough for everyone in the pickup area to hear him.
By the time I’m running to her, she’s surrounded by the crossing guard, a policeman on a bicycle, and a large, angry lady bus driver. In the middle of all the shouting and arguing, I dive into the car, and my mother takes off quickly.
On the way home, we don’t talk about what just happened, and I don’t really care anymore. I’m listening to a heavenly choir, singing words that thrill me.
She’s alive, she’s alive. My mommy’s alive!
And I’ve made it through another day without my mother getting sucked down into a manhole.
So Hard to Be Good
NO ONE CAN IMAGINE how horrible this is. Every single day,
something bad happens to me.
A few steps from the front entrance to school, a spasm shakes my shoulders and freezes me in place. I jerk my chin straight up to the sky as high as it can go and lock it in that position for the next three or four seconds.
When the spasm finally stops, I take a few deep breaths to relax, but it happens
again,
then
again
a few steps later. I’m only six years old and don’t know why my medicines aren’t helping me by now.
Nothing is working. I’m actually getting worse.
I’m incredibly discouraged that the day is starting off with my tics being so bad. I like going to school, and my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Wilkens, has been nice to me so far. My mother was able to have an early conference with her, and she “gets” my problems and knows how to deal with me.
Mom is always having to explain me, not only to the teachers but to everyone who sees me acting funny. Once she clarifies the situation, people usually get over their shock. But not always.
I try not to look back at the car because I know that my mother is still watching and feeling bad for me. She always tries to hide how worried she is, but these days she doesn’t look as happy as she used to. I wish I could stop being the way I am for her. She is the best mother anyone could ever have, and I love her so much.
School only makes my tics worse. There’s no doubt about that. Now there are so many tics we’ve started to give them names. The
hopping tic,
the
bend-at-the-waist tic,
the
chin thrust,
the
scrunchy face.
When I began the
twisting tic,
I felt something rip in my back, but I still had to keep doing it. I had to go to the hospital and be drugged asleep in order to make it stop. I never thought the twisting tic would end, but it did after a few days.
My tics keep changing all the time. They started mostly in my neck and face, but now they are all over my body and affect my large-muscle movements. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to how many kinds there are.
I do the chin thrust a few more times before getting to the front door of my school. The pressure is so strong on my spine it feels like it’s about to snap. This is not such a wild thought. I already know that my tics can make me hurt myself. Before I ripped the muscle in my back, I was biting down so hard on a bottom tooth that I broke it in half and had to be rushed to the dentist. The dentist didn’t believe what had actually happened.
Even though I’m trying hard to be good, this day gets off to a terrible start. During the spelling lesson, Mrs. Wilkens asks me to write the “word of the day” on the blackboard, and I feel proud to have been selected. I can tell she likes me, even though I tic a lot in class and require some extra work on her part.
When I get to the front of the class, Mrs. Wilkens pronounces the word of the day and asks me to write it.
My writing isn’t very good because I have trouble holding the chalk and forming the letters, but I always try my best to please her. And everybody else.
Before I start, I sound out the word in my mind, the way she told us to do. Then I turn to the blackboard and get the chalk ready.
But instead of writing the word of the day, my hand writes the word
SHIT
in great big letters.
For a moment I stand there, staring at the word in horror and shame.
I don’t know what just happened, only that something told me to do it. I know it’s one of the worst things I could have done, and I’m as shocked as anyone.
As soon as the kids see the word, they start laughing and pointing at the blackboard. I’m so embarrassed, I want to erase it, but I can’t.
“Sorry,” I say to Mrs. Wilkens. “Sorry. Sorry.”
My face contorts, and my eyes close and open fast and tight. Not only have I written a bad word on the blackboard but it’s making my tics worse. The combination of what I’ve written and my silly faces starts the other kids laughing harder and louder. Mrs. Wilkens isn’t laughing at all. She’s angry.
“Everyone be quiet,”
she shouts.
“Cory, take your seat. Now.”
“Sorry,” I say again, but I don’t think she’s listening.
Then I get the idea that it will be better if I make it look like I’m doing everything on purpose, as a joke. The kids will think that I’m funny and not just weird. So I make a few more silly faces, including a dopey grin. This makes the kids laugh again. I laugh along with them.
Mrs. Wilkens yells at us again, and this time the room goes completely silent.
I get to my seat and slip into it quietly. Inside, I’m feeling so bad that I let Mrs. Wilkens down when she trusted me at the blackboard. But I also realize for the first time that I can get kids to laugh
with
me instead of
at
me when I do something inappropriate. I can become the class clown.
One thing is for sure. From this day on, I can’t go to my classroom without thinking about writing
SHIT
or some other bad word. And I live in paralyzing fear of going up to the blackboard again.
