SERIOUSLY?

I have felt like we have been on a roller coaster for months now.  Sometimes it is climbing, sometimes it is speeding downhill, and sometimes it levels out.  I thought that maybe now we would finally start leveling out.

But, no.  The roller coaster began speeding toward the ground again.  This time, when it looked like it was going to have to level out, it plunged into a dark cavern underground.  I wondered how much it was going to twist and turn as it kept going down, down, down.

We had been having a few good days.  My son was enjoyable to be around and things felt happy and good in our home.  We thought that switching him to Psych was showing him that he really needed to get going, get learning, and let them help him with his emotions so that he could move along in the program.

And then, 4 days after being switched to the Psych program, my son was SUSPENDED from rehab.

When I say it out loud, I can’t stop myself from laughing a little bit.  It sounds like such an oxymoron.  Suspended from rehab!  That is not a sentence I would have ever thought I would hear or say.

Apparently, on Monday, one of the other boys brought pills to Day Treatment.  He passed some on to a kid who asked my son if he wanted any.  My son said yes.  I can imagine that he was not in a very good place in his head at that time, having just found out that he was being switched to Psych from C.D.  But, still.  It made me so mad that he would do that and blow everything out of the water that had been done for him in the last few months.  Not that he thought anything positive HAD been done for him. 

One of the other boys finally decided that he was going to tell the staff what he knew about the situation—4 days later!  My son was asked about it and he said that he had gotten the pills, but had changed his mind about taking them and flushed them down the toilet.

If that is what he really did, he did the wrong thing.  First, he should have not accepted the pills in the first place.  But second, he should have given the pills to a staff member and told what happened, not flush them down the toilet.

Kids in rehab are going to lie.  Kids in rehab who are going to relapse are especially going to lie.  How was anyone supposed to know if he was telling the truth or not?

He was suspended until further notice and when I received the phone call, I was told to come and pick him up immediately.

I had to meet with a man who was not my son’s regular therapist.  My son’s therapist was out of town for the week.  She goes on vacation SO MUCH!  I know that she works 4 days a week, 12 hours a day or more and that she devotes so much of her time and thoughts to these kids, therefore she deserves every minute of her vacations, but I still want my son’s therapist to be there when we need her!  

The man I met with was not very nice and wasn’t very hopeful about my son’s chances of being accepted back.  He said that the kid who brought the pills in and the other kid who was passing them around were going to be expelled.  There would be a staff meeting the next week on Wednesday or Thursday to determine my son’s fate.  I thought that wasn’t fair because his therapist should be able to give her input and fight for my son, but she wouldn’t be back by then. 

He said they had done a urine analysis to try to verify my son’s story.  A U/A 4 days later to see if Lortab was still showing up in his system?  That made no sense.  They should have done a blood test, at least.  I wish the kid who had confessed his knowledge about the pills had done it on Monday, and not waited until Friday.  At least on Monday or Tuesday, the U/A would have been more accurate.  The results on the U/A wouldn’t be back until Tuesday at the earliest.

I asked the alternate therapist to contact our regular therapist and give her a chance to help my son, but he didn’t act like he would even try.  I tried to email her, but she had put a vacation stop on her email.  I felt very abandoned and afraid.  I didn’t know what we were going to do with him if he were expelled.

I was upset because it didn’t make any sense to me that they would expel my kid for relapsing.  He didn’t bring the pills and he didn’t pass them along to the other kids.  His mistake was accepting them.

I wanted them to give him another chance.  But, I really didn’t think they would. 

The reason for the suspension was that they have to keep their community safe and they can’t have kids who bring drugs there and they can’t have kids who enable them by not alerting the staff about it.  Apparently the pills had been taken them from the kid’s grandparents.  He took Lortab, Seizure medications, and high blood pressure medication. Someone could really have been hurt by taking these pills.

I asked why they don’t search the Day Treatment kids every single morning when they are dropped off, but I guess there are legalities that keep them from doing it.  I think every parent would sign a release allowing their child to be searched because none of them would want drugs brought into Day Treatment endangering their child and giving them a chance to relapse while still in treatment.

I got the feeling from the alternate therapist that a lot of the staff think that my son is so stubborn that he isn’t getting anything out of the program.  It made me wonder if this was going to be just the excuse they needed to expel him and get him out of their hair. 

My older son said that expelling my son for relapsing or almost relapsing, was like taking a bleeding person and throwing them into the water with sharks.  They will be eaten alive.  My son would probably relapse for sure if he thought they had given up on him.  He was not ready for the real world.  He may have wanted to be back in the real world, but mostly because he is tired of being in rehab, not because he is ready for life yet.  If he accepted Lortab from a kid in treatment, then what would he do the first time someone on the outside offered him weed or cocaine?

He said that the addict part of him was the first to jump when he was offered pills.  But, then he thought about it and changed his mind.  I want to believe him.  I want to feel like he can use his wise mind skills like that.

But, I began to wonder about the Monday that he came home from Day Treatment and didn’t talk very much or give us the hard time that we thought he would about being switched to Psych from C.D.  He did not give us the reaction that we expected—that he normally would have based on how things had been going lately. 

We thought that maybe he had just radically accepted his new course of treatment and decided not to fight it.

The final thing that made me skeptical now that I thought about it was that he fell asleep VERY easily on Monday night.  He was almost asleep before I even gave him his sleeping medications.  Was it because he was on Lortab that night?  Or was he just really tired?

If I just believe his story, then he must have been really tired.

I want to believe him.

He wants me to believe him.