Old Habits

 For years I have searched for answers for Ryan. I've read books, scoured websites and watched youtube videos in hopes of understanding what he needed. When someone mentioned a new medical or therapeutic method, I've compulsively asked myself if it might help Ryan.

Old habits die hard. I'm no longer searching for answers for Ryan. In part because he's gone, I'm finally giving my own health the attention it has long needed.  When I find myself wandering the internet health world it is in hopes of finding better health for me. And still I ask myself if the thing I'm learning about can help Ryan. 

It can't, of course. That's the thing about death. Anything else, whatever hell he might have lived, however bad things got, whatever damage he did to himself or others, the hope for health survived. That all changed the morning I found him cold in his bed. He had died hours before. Hope died the moment I touched him and knew that he would never breathe again. 

Hope died in that moment, and also it didn't. The old habit lives on and hope transfigures into something more like wishing with a tinge of regret and sometimes more than a little rage. 

Yesterday I watched a youtube video of a doctor I know well interviewing a therapist about a well established drug that is beginning to be used more broadly in mental health. It carries very little chance of side effects. Unlike the drugs Ryan was taking when he died, LDN does not cause suicidal ideation. It can be highly effective. Yet most of the people writing prescriptions for mental health do not know of it. 

The more they talked about how LDN works and who is helped by it, the more it fit my understanding of Ryan and his struggled, the more the hold hope sprang up with unrealistic certainty that this would have helped, maybe cured, maybe given all of us our lives back. 

I began to wish. To wish I'd known, to wish his psychiatrist had known, to wish I could go back and fix it. It felt as though I was looking at the answer I didn't have for him when he so desperately needed it. Grief, loss, hopeless wishes.

It was in the night when I might have been sleeping that the rage hit. I remembered the speakers asking why, if it works so well, don't doctors know this. In my mind they were asking why didn't Ryan's psychiatrist know about this. When the first drug didn't work, or the second (in the same class) and even adding another in combination did not work, why didn't he try LDN?

The answer is probably simple: He did not know because no one told him. He learns about new therapies from the corporations that profit from drug sales. No one profits from LDN because it is past its patent. It isn't standard of care because big pharma has made sure that their model of million dollar studies reigns supreme. They use lobbyists, marketing and all the influence money can buy to prevent safes, better options from competing with their profits. 

LDN might have given my son the life we all wanted for him.  It might not. We'll never know because our system maximizes profits and sacrifices children and their mothers who sit up at night grieving our babies, wishing for the chance to try one more thing, desperate to change what cannot be changed and striving to replace useless hope with peaceful acceptance. 

Being helpless to do anything for the child I loved has not yet erased the old habit of searching.