A Meeting with DR. M

In the movies, when bad news arrives it's always quick, obvious and clean.

Including the time it took to raid the fridge during the commercial, it takes all of 15 minutes to get The News.

In real life getting The News is painfully, painnnnnfuuuuly sllloooow.

The wife called probably every psychologist and psychiatrist in town...and this is a pretty big town. They did not work with children. They had a 8-year waiting list. They did not take our insurance. The number was disconnected. They never called back.

We knew that whatever it was, whatever Dr. G's cryptic, "I have an idea..." meant, it meant time was of essence. Young children with intervention can often be helped.

Months started to slip away.

I thought this must be what it's like for ship wreck survivors...you try to get the attention of the help that's out there; but help keeps passing by without taking notice of you and all the while, the water's starting to run low.

One day, Dr. G. the speech pathologist, called to see how things were going and when she heard that they were not, she pointed us to Dr. M, psychologist, who just happened to specialize in children with autism. Dr. G. said insurance be damned, pay for it our of our own pockets if we had too...just go see Dr. M.

And so we did.

The thing you'd remember about Dr. M if you met her was that she was always well-dressed and had beautiful, big blue-green eyes that looked right at you.

It would also soon dawn on you that she was a remarkable woman.

She worked most of her life as a fashonista in New York's garment district and then apparently decided one day that she had enough of everything fleeting, such as fashion is.

Well into middle age by then she went back to school, got her doctorate's in psychology and went to work bending the arm of Ohio's legislators to provide better funding for autism.

We were in the presence of a person who changed their own life in large strokes to change the lives of many for the better.

We had finally found a person of the type that many of us only read about: Dr. M was a real life hero, by the most altruistic definition of the word.

She listened closely to us; but was more interested in Timothy, who of course found her comfortable office a treasure trove of things to throw around. She was totally unfazed by him. One could tell that she'd seen this before.

She stopped by the house and gave Timothy a test one day. She concluded that he was very bright.

She also concluded that he was PDD-NOS: "Pervasive Developmental Delay- Not Otherwise Specified."

We learned that this is on the autism spectrum...not as bad as full blown autism but not the more socially workable Asperger's Syndrome either.

At the time, Tim was three and 1/2. We were told that with an intensive therapy called "ABA" there was a chance...A Chance...a little chance....a twenty percent chance...that he would "loose his diagnosis" by the time he was ready for school. One in Five odds never looked so good.

Dr. M somehow managed to get us to the top of someones list somewhere and in a few months, Tim was to start "Parent Directed ABA" funded by the county we live in. This was a Godsend. We had been reading and had learned that ABA ...like all of the treatments for autism...are not covered by insurance. Parents who go it alone end up depleting their retirement, their mortgage, their savings, their hopes and their dreams in a few years to cover the cost.

We found the volunteers, the country trained and paid them. The first train-the-trainers session was over a weekend in October '03 at our house. We've had people walking in and out of the place ever since.

One day, during a routine parent meeting Dr. M was seized by a coughing fit. It would not go away. She excused herself, leaving the room with a tissue that she had been clutching. I could hear her coughing in the next room. It sounded violent.

We got the news a few weeks later...Dr. M was ill and would be on reduced hours.

Then Dr. M was on medical leave and getting worse.

Then Dr. M was gone.

We went to the memorial to "celebrate her life", as one of the speakers said. It was a brave thing to say in the face of such a huge loss. The immutable, irrevocable and permanent loss. Sunny words of celebration spoken on a humid Spring day. Spoken bravely into the face of an endless black void. All lost to the entropy, silence and vacuum of death.

Christ.

This was worse than watching any long awaited rescue ship burn in the harbor. Dr. M was our hero, truly she was and we loved her for what she did for our son...and now she was dead.