by Tina Hartley

Created on: January 16, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

My oldest son, Jamie chewed all of his shirt collars. He chewed on the corner of his bed sheets and pillowcases. He absolutely, positively could not sit still. Not in church, not at school, and not at the dinner table. His hands, his feet moved constantly. His attention span was under a minute. He started ten things at once and never finished any of them without supervision. He was mildly dyslexic. He had trouble controlling his emotions, especially his temper. Our pediatrician suspected ADD. They only called it Attention Deficit Disorder then. The change to ADD/ADHD came a few years later.

The diagnosis consisted of Jamie's teacher and I, filling out a questionnaire pre-medication and afterwards. The pediatrician said if the medication works he has it, if it doesn't, he doesn't. I wasn't very happy with this seemingly shot in the dark. I couldn't dispute the difference in my son when he was on medication. After he had been home from school for an hour or two, you could see the change as the medication wore off. Jamie was 7 years old when he started taking medication for ADD/ADHD.

In the early 80's Ritalin was the drug of choice for ADD. The doctor's prescription was for weekdays only to keep my son more settled for school. I never questioned the part-time drugs because I was worried as it was having my son on medication. The teacher reported a huge improvement in school. The weekends and summer were all mine to deal with. I gave Jamie a dose of Ritalin once when we attended my grandmother's funeral.

Jamie was put in special education classes. A special teacher worked with him individually and helped him get organized and be prepared. He really liked the teacher but he really hated being singled out and separated from the rest of his class. The teacher and I explained to him it was just to help him. The teacher told him that the better he did the more mainstream classes he could be in. He worked and he worked. Many nights he cried in frustration but he kept at it. In 6th grade he went into full mainstream classes. About this same time I discovered that he hadn't been taking his medication. He would just hide it. Jamie was determined to be what he thought of as "normal".

His impulsiveness got him into trouble constantly. He would just act without any thought to consequences. He tore his toys apart just to see how they worked. Because of his impulsive actions, he got injured quite a bit. We were on a first name basis with the staff at the emergency room. I lost track

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