Then she had started giving him more medication before therapy. She told me he was having pain days. When he tried to stand one night and she caught him, she told him that if anyone saw evidence of mobility before the lawsuit against the trucking company was settled, the insurance company would claim the disability wasn\u2019t genuine and we would lose the van and the house and everything we had been holding onto. She told him I would blame him.<\/p>\n
I had to look at the window while he talked. I could see him at thirteen, medicated and scared in the dark, listening to the sound of his mother\u2019s voice making a cage out of words that sounded like care. I could see myself downstairs at the kitchen table, paying the bills that kept arriving, believing we were enduring this together.\u201cWhy didn\u2019t you tell me when you were older?\u201d I asked, and I hated myself before the sentence finished.<\/p>\n
He flinched. \u201cBecause every time I pushed further, she adjusted my meds. And she made it sound like you were barely keeping it together. She said one wrong move would collapse everything.\u201d He rubbed his hands together, the habit he\u2019d had since he was small. \u201cI thought maybe wanting to get better was selfish.\u201dI had no answer for that. There is no answer. You sit with it.<\/p>\n
He told me about the substitute therapist on a telehealth check-in the previous week who had asked, casually, why he had never started the standing program Dr. Levin recommended. Noah had looked at the screen and said: what standing program. That night, while Brittany was in the shower, he had rolled to the garage and found a spare key taped behind an old wall clock and opened the lockbox, and had spent a week waiting for her to leave long enough for him to reach me.<\/p>\n
The pharmacy bag held a receipt showing his muscle relaxant dosage had been increased months earlier than I knew, and refill dates that didn\u2019t match what I thought he was taking, and notes in Brittany\u2019s handwriting clipped to the outside. Keep afternoon dose consistent. Heavy legs after dinner expected. No standing if Mark home. I held the paper for a long time. The letters kept rearranging themselves into something I didn\u2019t want them to say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Then she had started giving him more medication before therapy. She told me he was having pain days. When he tried to stand one night and she… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n