One mother’s battle to save her son from OCD

What would you do if your previously normal child suddenly refused to bathe, burst into fits of rage, slithered along walls and wouldn’t walk out the front door? When Beth Maloney was faced with that situation she fought tooth and nail to reclaim her son, taking on members of the medical establishment who were too quick to label and treat him in a way that only made the symptoms worse. “Saving Sammy: Curing the Boy Who Caught OCD” is her account of her remarkable and ultimately triumphant journey. An excerpt.

Chapter four: Diagnosis
On a day in late August when a storm has cleared and a rainbow paints the sky, I grab my paddle and head for the seals. They rest on their backs, their noses poked high, while they float and drift with the tide. Their bellies are full, their whiskers distinguished and dripping beyond their chins. They peer as I pass. Their eyes look like glass, and they stare at me cautiously. The seals all know instinctively what men have learned over time: the best salt-water fishing in Maine comes when August folds into fall.

The striped bass are heading south by then — and so were we.

If the ride up to Limestone was the worst car ride of my life, the trip back was a living hell. Sammy was crunched into the corner of his seat. The clawed thumbs of his empty hands moved back and forth as if he held a Game Boy. His head bobbed with the bumps in the road. I couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or shut. I just knew that he was far away.

My mind was spinning. When did he last eat? Why didn’t I know this? What kind of mother was I? Maybe if I’d served him a decent meal instead of working so hard, none of this would have happened.

“Sammy, should we stop and get something to eat?” I called back periodically to him. He did not give me a response.

“I’m hungry, Mom,” James answered instead.

“Where are those pretzels I brought with us?”

“We ate them,” James answered.

“Are there any apples left?”

“Yes.”

“Eat those.”

I thought about Sammy standing at the table during meal after meal, with his eyes shut. Had he actually eaten? I had been in overdrive for weeks. In addition to the packing, the unpacking, and all the craziness around Sammy, one of my clients was closing a major deal. I had been pushing that deal through night and day. Had I neglected my child because of my work? Was it my fault this had happened?

“Sammy, do you want to stop for food?” I called back again much later. Still no response.

Stress isn’t causing Sammy’s problems! my head and my heart shouted silently together.

It was ten o'clock by the time we got home that night. I readied myself to dash through the woods if he bolted when I parked, but he did not move. I woke James, held his soft cheeks in my hands, and spoke into his ear.

“You are to go directly into the house and up to bed. Do you understand me?” I spoke in a low, commanding-officer kind of voice. “Right into your room and shut your door.”

“But I’m hungry,” James whined softly.

“Get an apple and take it into your room; that’s the best we can do tonight.”

James nodded and headed for the house. I watched James go inside; then I turned to Sammy. He was hunched over into a ball in his seat. He nodded: yes, he would come into the house. He shook his head: no, he would not run away. I followed him around to the back of the house, and we went in. I locked every door, turned on every light, and shut every window. Once confined, I knew, he would not leave, since he would not touch a door handle. I left him on the first floor in the den; then I went up to my office. I called the psychologist’s voice mail and left a detailed message about what had happened.

“This is not stress,” I said through gritted teeth. “There is something medically wrong.” Then I typed a fax to the pediatrician describing what was going on and telling him that I needed a call back first thing in the morning with an appointment time. I noted that we were in an urgent, life-threatening situation and I needed his help.

Then I collapsed on my bed and listened to Sammy pound his way around the house. I called the pediatrician at 9:01 the next morning. The nurse answered. I held while she searched for the fax and went to talk to the doctor; then she came back on and delivered the news.

“The doctor says you should take him to the crisis unit.”

“Are you saying the doctor won’t see my son?” I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

“He says you should go to the crisis unit,” she repeated.

“I think we have a misunderstanding here,” I said slowly.

“Sammy has been the doctor’s patient for more than five years. He is sick. He needs to see his doctor. We are going to be at the psychologist’s office at three p.m. Right after that, I will walk him over to see the doctor. If four o’clock isn’t good, tell me another time, and we’ll be there.” She put me on hold again; then she came back on the line.

“He says you should take him to the crisis unit,” she repeated once more.

“So you’re saying he refuses to see my son?” I asked, my blood boiling over.

“He thinks you need the crisis unit,” she said.

“Without even seeing him,” I stated.

I had been a guardian ad litem long enough to know that the crisis unit is the last place you take your child. It is absolutely the very last place. You take your child to the crisis unit when you are totally and completely out of options, when you have tried everything else and you have absolutely nowhere else to go. It is the last stop on a dead end. The crisis unit is where I visit the children who are out of control and suicidal or homicidal, the kids who are hallucinating, the kids whose parents have beaten them so badly that they start a fire to burn down the house. It’s where you’ll find the thirteen-year-old girls who have group sex with a dozen grown men because they’ve been molested or abandoned and they feel so lousy about themselves they think maybe this will help. It’s where the kids learn from one another how to cut themselves. My son was not going to the crisis unit. He did not need a holding cell disguised as a hospital. He needed a medical doctor to figure out what was wrong with him, and his own doctor would not see him.

Sammy’s pediatrician was fired the moment he refused to see my son, but I was not going to say that until I had his replacement lined up. “Tell him thanks for me, will you?” I said and hung up the telephone.

Later that day, we went to see the psychologist. Sammy waited skittishly in the lobby while I met with the psychologist. I was dangerously close to screaming that I felt he had wasted our time, but I mustered all of my self-control.

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“We’ve got one minute,” I told him, seething, “because he might run away. We’re not waiting any longer to see if he gets better. This isn’t stress. There is something terribly wrong, and I want my kid back. His doctor has refused to see him, and these sessions are doing nothing. Where do we go from here?”

He gave me a list of about a dozen child psychiatrists. “Tell them we need a screen-out for obsessive-compulsive disorder — OCD,” he said.

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