It is suggested to all concerned that Blaze’s greatest need is in the area of self-esteem. He perceives himself only as a problem and has little but his imagination as proof of his competencies. He sees himself as inferior to those around him and is rapidly evolving into a school phobia unless the cycle is broken.
“I really think he’s done you a disservice,” Sally said. “This is an oversimplified report and gives us nothing to go on.”
“What about the dyscalculia and dysgraphia that he talks about?” I asked Sally.
“All that means is that he has trouble with math and writing,” Sally said. “We already know that. He hasn’t said anything about what’s really going on with Blaze.”
In other words, I thought, there was still no definitive diagnosis and a diagnosis was what everybody seemed to want. I couldn’t entirely disagree with Dr. Roberts’s and Sally’s assessment of the report. It was true that the report contained many errors, all of which led me to believe that it had been put together very quickly with little attention to detail. I also wondered if, in the absence of his own tests and evaluations, Dr. F. had relied too heavily on my reports of what was going on at school and the way I shaded descriptions of Blaze’s behavior with my own interpretations. It was plain that Dr. F. had seen Blaze’s native intelligence, I had no doubt of that. But I wondered if he just took me at my word for all the rest and “phoned in” his report without really delving deeply below the surface. It was this doubt, combined with the school’s disgust at the report, that drove me to yet another psychologist.
This time, I obtained a referral to the psychiatric department of our HMO and made an appointment with Dr. C., a clinical psychologist. I decided that I would be as open and trusting of this new psychologist as possible. I would be completely honest about Blaze’s behavior at home as well as delineating, impartially, his problems at school. I brought copies of Blaze’s records and filled out yet another medical-history form. I brought Maya along to the interview so that the doctor could get a clear view of Blaze’s family situation. I cautioned Dr. C. that Blaze was likely to be resistant to tests. He had seen so many different psychologists, I explained, that he was becoming hip to the game and was starting to offer up what he thought the examiner wanted to hear. Please take this into consideration, I begged. Don’t let Blaze know that you are testing him or else you won’t get accurate results. I fought to trust Dr. C. although I had many misgivings. We had two sessions. For the first, Dr. C. interviewed me and Maya for over an hour. For the second, he interviewed Blaze for forty minutes and all three of us for a half hour.
I heard nothing from Dr. C. for weeks. Frustrated, I called his office several times. When I finally reached him, he promised to send his report to the school.
“No,” I told him, “I want a copy of the report. I don’t want the school to see anything before I’ve had a chance to look at it.”
It was two months before I received Dr. C.’s report. When I opened it, I was immediately startled by the heading. Psychological Evaluation, it stated. This report was prepared as a professional-to-professional communication and is not for release to the patient or his family. By the time I finished reading, I understood quite clearly why I would not be the intended recipient of this particular evaluation.
INTERVIEW DATA:
Blaze’s mother was interviewed prior to testing. On a second date, she and her sister were again interviewed and they brought in some extremely interesting videotapes of Blaze singing his favorite songs, which he has written himself.
Blaze’s mother says, “The chain of his logic, the way he thinks is different.” She says Blaze will say things such as “The floor hurts me,” when he means that sitting on his bottom hurts. She doesn’t suspect that he hears voices, but he has often heard music in his head, and that he has even gone so far as to ask her to put her ear against his head, so that she could hear the songs inside his brain.
Blaze is described by his mother and aunt as being extremely inquisitive and wanting a great number of details about certain subjects. For example, he perseverated for several weeks on the death of a spider which has been living in his room. He asks “endless” questions about his mother’s life as a little girl. He appears to perseverate, asking the same questions again and again and again.
Blaze has written a number of songs which he accompanies by rhythmically strumming a guitar. He has given these songs names, and he sings them in the same order each time. Songs include “Nerve Night,” “Catch the Broken Timer,” and “Give Me Back My Note.” Many of his songs focus on disturbing events which have happened at school.
Blaze has been with the same teacher for years. She says that he “is a little stranger this year than he was before.” [She] describes him as having a lot of perseveration, particularly being afraid that frightening noises might happen, that somebody might use a blender, or that some other frightening thing would occur.
When he first came to the classroom, he had no language whatsoever. It was extremely difficult to get him to engage in any type of classroom activity, and the present goals are to keep him in the social arena, to help him stay calm in class, and to help him stop screaming and throwing things.
When Blaze becomes agitated, he screams, runs around the room, and makes siren noises. His teacher says he cannot accept any change in school and becomes upset when there is any alteration in the pattern. He is extremely resistant to anything which he perceives as a demand. He sits in reading group but will not make any attempt to read, and indeed must be assured before reading group starts that reading will be expected. He will not do any work in a journal because “he’s afraid of his journal and he throws it.” He will do the same work on paper, but it needs to be plain white paper with blue lines.
When Blaze doesn’t want to participate in class, he will say things like, “I’m making a video now and I’m on mute. It’s about the United States of America.” At this point, he will sit and talk to himself, but will not interact with anybody else.
Because of his social limitations, [his teacher] considers him one of the more disabled children in the classroom. She says, “He wouldn’t think to find himself if he got lost.”
TEST DATA:
Interviewing Blaze was an interesting experience. Mostly he appeared to be giving me stereotyped responses which he had included in many conversations before. His first comment on sitting down with me was, “My mom decided to name me Blaze. I like parties with balloons.” There was nothing in the context on the interview which I was aware of which might have elicited this comment.
Asked about school, Blaze says, “I like to run and make siren noises, siren noises, roo-oo-oo…” He was unable to name any friends at school. I asked him if he had enemies and he said, “A little of them.”
Later he said, “If there’s any noise, loud noises, I’d have to run away, or scream really loud, or make a siren noise.” It was quite evident that Blaze was simply describing his coping mechanisms. This was not an attempt at display. He was telling me what it is that he does.
TEST DATA:
Perhaps the most interesting test data came on the Rorschach, although the Rorschach was unscorable. Confronted with the first two cards, Blaze simply repeated, “I don’t know,” again and again and again. Finally, when presented with the third card, he said, “I’m on the phone, I can’t talk now. I’m on the imaginary phone.” This appeared to be the same behavior described by his teacher, in that he enters a role-play world in order to avoid complying with demands.
On the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Blaze attained an IQ of 40, which is in the lowest one percentile of the population. I judge this to be an underestimate of his actual intelligence, because of the interference of his emotional disorder with his test performance.
Blaze’s drawings were of extremely poor quality, showing the drawing level of a 4- or 5-year-old child. This is somewhat in line with the measured intelligence of the PPVT, but again I would be extremely reluctant to overinterpret a
ny findings about his intelligence.
DIAGNOSTIC IMPRESSION:
Blaze meets the diagnostic criteria under DSM-IV for an autistic disorder. He has marked social impairment and stereotypical responses which interfere with his capacity to interact socially and gain academic skills. While he lacks the stereotypic movements often associated with autism, he certainly has stereotypic and repeated verbalizations which more than meet the criteria for this diagnosis.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
Blaze will no doubt continue to need to be in a sheltered classroom setting. For a child bearing this diagnosis, he is fairly high-functioning. Although it is quite evident that he has significant academic and social limitations which are likely to be continuing, it is unlikely that Blaze will respond to psychotherapeutic interventions. It may be helpful to assist his mother in managing his behavior at such points as it becomes difficult.
It is certainly worthy to note that Blaze’s mother is extremely supportive, and Blaze appears to have a family which provides a warm and loving context.
My eyes were burning with tears by the time I finished reading and I had to resist a strong impulse to tear the report into tiny pieces. I was deeply disturbed by this damning document on many levels, but the worst feeling I had was that of betrayal. I had very little confidence in Dr. C. and felt that his assessment was largely a load of crap, but the account given by Sally, the person I had trusted the most, wounded me deeply. Dr. C. had clearly based much of his interpretations on Sally’s information and I had to go through it all a second time to try to understand what she had told him. The words assaulted me like little daggers coming off the page.
He wouldn’t think to find himself if he got lost.
He is a little stranger this year than he was before.
He is one of the most disabled children in the classroom.
If this was how Sally felt, why hadn’t she told me? She had been Blaze’s teacher for the better part of four years and I considered her an ally. This year, especially, I had opened up to her and shared my fears. I believed that she had been frank with me and had kept me informed. But her description of Blaze painted him as dangerously off-kilter and out of touch with reality. It was possible that Dr. C. had misinterpreted her words or taken them out of context (he certainly had with mine), but there were quotation marks around her most damaging comments. I couldn’t imagine that he had made them up. I wondered if she had always thought of Blaze as one of the most disabled children in her classroom or if she’d only come to feel that way this year. I had no doubt that Blaze could sense her feelings. If she thought he was “strange,” as she apparently did, I was sure that Blaze would act as strange as possible for her.
I felt like a wife who has just seen the lipstick on her husband’s collar. I wanted to march into Sally’s room immediately and confront her with Dr. C.’s report but I couldn’t. I had absolutely no intention of sharing that document with anybody from the school—ever. I didn’t just disagree with Dr. C., I felt he was dangerously off base. I had taken such great pains to explain to him why and how Blaze would react to a testing situation and he’d completely misconstrued what I’d said. He’d come up with a diagnosis of autism based on Sally’s report of Blaze’s classroom behavior, his own interpretations of what I’d told him, and Blaze’s refusal to participate in any of the tests he’d given. What struck me as most ridiculous, though, was that in the space of two months, Dr. F. and Dr. C., colleagues at the same HMO, had come up with two completely opposing reports. I rejected both of them and decided that I would never set foot in the psychiatric department of that institution again. Nor was I particularly disposed to searching out another psychologist. I was finished, for the time being. I didn’t believe that Blaze was autistic just because Dr. C. had managed to tweak reported data to match a few entries in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Nor did I believe that he had dyslexia or ADD or any other disorder that would make him easy to classify. Yes, he was different. Yes, it was a challenge to understand him. Certainly, it was proving difficult to educate him. But if I were to believe the conflicting opinions of the professionals who had seen Blaze to this point, I would be convinced that my son was mentally retarded, intellectually gifted, autistic, and emotionally disturbed. This was why these doctors and reports, especially the most recent, were dangerous. I could only guess at what would happen if Blaze were saddled with an inappropriate label. Eventually, I felt sure, he would become his diagnosis.
I buried Dr. C.’s report in my own personal files. My doubts about Sally and her assessment of Blaze, however, refused to be as neatly dispatched. I no longer felt particularly comfortable around her, nor did I trust her reports of Blaze’s behavior, good or bad, when she offered them. I began staying longer during my volunteer times, slinking out of the quiet room when I was finished with the reading, to sit at a desk in the back of the room and watch what was going on. I didn’t hear any siren noises coming from my son, but I believed that he probably reserved his worst behavior for when I wasn’t there. Still, I saw no evidence of the crazed child described in Dr. C.’s report. Rather, I saw a frustrated, isolated boy who was getting less and less positive reinforcement for being in school. I wondered if Blaze had been with Sally for too long, if, perhaps, they both needed a break from each other. But despite my new misgivings about Sally, I still hadn’t met anyone more qualified to teach Blaze. It was a conundrum and I tried to imagine what would happen in fourth grade where the stakes would apparently be raised once again. Fourth-graders were considered well out of babyhood and into increased academic and social expectations. I wondered how Blaze would cope with being a veteran in Sally’s class while negotiating another new teacher in the regular. As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait long to find out.
Sally pulled me aside one recess shortly before the end of the school year and said, “I think you should know…It’s not common knowledge yet, but you’ll probably find out soon enough and I know you want to plan for next year….”
“What is it?” I asked, alarmed.
“I won’t be teaching this class next year,” Sally told me. “This class isn’t actually going to exist next year.”
“What?”
“No more special day class here,” Sally said. “The district has decided to combine the SDCs, so all the kids here can transfer over to the other elementary school for next year. Of course, that’ll mean Blaze too.”
A string of expletives formed in my mouth and I swallowed them quickly before they could tumble out. “There’s no more special ed at this school? Is that what you’re saying?” I asked, deliberately ignoring the acronyms that everybody in special ed seemed to be so fond of.
“Well, there will still be help from the resource specialist.”
“Who’s that?” I asked, my head spinning from this new information.
“It’s a pull-out program. The kids go see her for an hour or so a day for help with their classwork. Nothing like what the kids would get in an SDC.”
“So I’m supposed to just pull Blaze out of the school he’s been in since kindergarten? Away from everything he knows? So he can be in a special-ed program I don’t even know anything about?”
Sally said nothing, struck temporarily mute. I imagined she was searching for the right words. Something between empathy, professionalism, and reason, I guessed.
“And where are you going?” I asked her.
“I’m going to regular ed,” she said, a smile bursting like sudden sunshine on her face. “I’m going to be teaching first grade.”
“You want that?” I asked her.
“I asked for it. I’m burned out here,” she said, and it was my turn to be mute. So she was sick of special ed. And why wouldn’t she be, I thought, looking around. It didn’t take a whole lot of insight to know that hers was probably a thankless job. Her considerable teaching skills would most likely produce shining, tangible results with a group of happy little six-year-olds.
“First grade is lucky to have you,
” I said, sincerely. “I hope they know that.”
There was a brief silence between us and for one horrible moment, I was sure I was going to burst into tears and struggled to hold back the flow.
“What am I going to do with Blaze?” I asked her.
“It’s a good program at the other school,” Sally said weakly.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, I’m not going to send him there.” I felt a sudden anger clutching at my throat. “When were they going to tell us parents about this?” I asked Sally sharply. “Were we just going to show up with our kids in September and have them shipped off to another school?”
“Oh no,” Sally said. “They’ll send a letter, you know, over the summer.”
I gave her a hard look. It was pointless to continue the discussion with her. She had already checked out. I was on my own.
“I guess I’ll go talk to Dr. Roberts,” I told her.
Sally nodded and bent down to pick up some stray scraps of blue construction paper. I turned away from her and headed out to the playground.
Two days before the end of the school year, I met with Sally and Dr. Roberts. It was a quick meeting, resulting in only one paragraph of notes, not one word of which reflected the contentiousness of the preceding conversation.
Raising Blaze Page 14