Speeding to success

About one out of five high school boys "have" attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which means we are now free to pump them up with performance enhancing drugs.

Make no mistake--Adderall is speed, and it works. If you want to do better at something, anything, that depends at all on alertness and reaction time, Adderall will improve your scores.

And that's what school is all about now.

You can look up the side effects of amphetamines, and find anecdotal stories detailing its occasional horrors. It's habit-forming, can induce hallucinations, and on rare occasions kill.

I was once a doc, even prescribed the stuff on occasion, and none of that perturbs me too much--the whole point of drugs is risk vs. benefit, and if there were no risks, there'd be no need for prescriptions.


Here's the scary part for me--we have a culture that worships competition, that accepts winning at any costs, and simply does not love children (or humans at any developmental stage) as much as it cares about numbers.


Numbers which, paradoxically, are rarely understood in our innumerate world.

Go ahead an dope up your kid. It will help her in school.
With a little luck, it will give your child the edge that gets her into that Ivy.

Hokey pokey parenting: That's what it's all about!

Pediatrics vs. teaching

I used to be a doctor, the kind with a stethoscope, the kind licensed to hurt you for you own good. It puzzles children to learn that a physician would walk away from medicine in order to teach, and there are days I am baffled myself.

I liked medicine. I love teaching. I did not know that this would be true when I left medicine, so while it is true, it is not enough to explain why I left. Why leave something you like, especially when it pays ridiculously well?

Every year children ask me this, and so far I have not quite gotten it right. I thought I had it right, but high school sophomores would kind of shake just a little bit sideways. I wasn't fooling them.

I think I got it right now.

***

I saw a lot of bad stuff in hospitals. I saw a lot of good stuff, too, but good stuff can be found in a lot of places. The truly bad stuff has a home in the hospital.

• The unlucky (an elderly woman who slowly died from an infection caused by an errant piece of metal ripping through her car's floor, riveting in her thigh).

• The doomed (a woman burned over most of her body, still conscious, still talking, immediately before we intubated her, rendering her speechless--we knew she was doomed when we did this. We did it anyway.)

• The curious (two babies sharing the same torso, the same heart, the same fate).

• The geographically screwed (an Asian toddler who needed a new heart, but who could not afford one, twisting away towards death as she lived in an American hospital as an alien).

• The innocent (children wasting away from a virus we barely understood, acquired from a mother's heroin habit or her lover's proclivities).

I was very good at diagnosis, and not bad at making things better once a diagnosis was made. A few were better than me, but not many.

***

 When you are surrounded by hurt, there are two ways to respond if you want to remain functional--fix it, or pretend it does not exist. I did a lot of fixing.

If you do medicine long enough, and if you are paying attention, you give death its due. It's real, it's usually ugly, and it's inevitable.

I can't beat death--took me awhile to get to that realization, but I got there. And it's liberating.

Turns out living isn't the goal--living well is what matters.

I was pretty good at helping people live longer. Now I'm getting good at helping people live well.

I thought my job mattered before, but had my doubts in the pitiful wail of a dying toddler, bruised and bleeding as we laid our hands, our technology, and finally our fists in futile CPR on her tiny body as it cooled its way back to entropy.

A life worth living is our only compensation against the greedy hand of death.

So I help children carve out a life worth living.

I'm a teacher.

If you teach, teach as though lives depend on it. If you think this is excessive, get out.
Photos by me or Leslie--feel free to use under CC.