Introductions

I do not know if I would consider this therapy, or a journal. But I feel the need to share my experience with others. I am not an expert, or someone with any special training. I am just a single mom, with a good head on my shoulders that just wanted to make sure my son is diagnosed, and treated properly. It's been about a year and half, that we have lived with the ADHD label over our heads. And as a single parent, you feel as if others look at you, and the ADHD "diagnosis" is only a natural fit for your child. Some people assume it's because of a failure of too little discipline, others say too much. People have drawn all sorts of conclusions in regard to my son's condition, and most of them made me feel as if it was the result of the "non-traditional" family unit we had.

After all these developments and recommendations from teachers, family, and my pure feelings of failure and guilt, I finally decided to take an active role and find some solutions.

It started at the kindergarden level. My son had a teacher that really did not giving him the proper stepping stones to succeed. She went to the extent of implying that I did not have enough time to spend with my child on school work, and that was contributing to his inability to focus and complete tasks in class. Well, that was crap. My child left his kindergarden year no better than when he went in.

So first grade came, and he attended an intervention program. This was just a class with less students, where reading teachers could push into the class to help the children progress. Over the year, we did see some improvement, but the issue of his inability to read seemed to grow. This led the new inuendos. The teachers cannot come out and say, "your child is ADHD". It is prohibited because they are not a medical doctor. But the school campaign began to convince me that there was something more to this. I would always here "Chris is very intelligent, but not performing to his full potential". I hated hearing that, it made me feel inadequate as a parent.
There had to be more to this. My son was not defiant, he was always complemented on his manners, and people were always impressed with his behavior.

So the research began. I read everything I could about my sons inability to read. I spoke to as many parents I could, and read every blog and website I could about children Chris's age. Nothing. Not one shred of anything to help me feel better, until the day I went to a class party. It was almost as someone shined a light to direct me to a possible place to start. I started to know by then in my heart that eventually, my son will need some sort of ADHD intervention, but the thought of medications scared me. I was raised in the medical field since I was a teenager. My father is a doctor, and I always worked at a hospital, nursing home, or some healthcare facility. Ritalin was scary to me, and I knew that the compound, or one of it's derivatives was the standard treatment for ADHD. But I just wanted to know there may be other factors, or even something contributing to it.

One of the parents was still standing outside, talking with another parent in regard to her older son. She was talking about his problems with reading and math, and how they originally appeared in elementary school. She had said that someone recommended a special type of Optomotrist who had a PHD. My ears perked up, and I politely interjected. After some conversation, she had given me the name of a local doctor that could examine my son, to find out if maybe, just maybe, some of my son's issues were medically based.

I ran home and called this special eye doctor's office and made an appointment. After many different eye exams, it was found that my son's eyes did not work together. He had some weekness in the muscles of the eyes, which caused the two eyes not to move in unison. He saw all the words on the page as a blur, and mixed up. His mental perception of the words on the page had not developed at the normal rate as others. She wanted to start "Vision Therapy" to train his eye muscles and brain to repair itself. I ran home happy, but started to research the diagnosis of "strabismus", and visual perception problems. I came to find that though this was a medically based diagnosis, it was considered a component of ADHD.

So the time had come. It was time to own up to the possibility, and find out what the myths and truths were to this diagnosis.