First hand account of attention deficit disorder.

When I was a kid it was as if I was drifting in and out of a haze.

It started to become a problem in second grade. The teacher would talk and I would see her lips moving but I couldn't hear her although my hearing was just fine.

When people talked to me it sounded like the grown-ups on The Charlie Brown cartoons. Blah blah blah is all I heard.

I always tested high academically but my classroom performance was dismal.

Forgotten homework, not being able to follow or understand teachers directions, being easily distracted were all major obstacles during my grade school years.

I was called lazy, bad student, unmotivated, careless and disruptive.

I had no idea what was wrong with me and it was frustrating being labeled a bad stupid kid by the school and my peers. My parents knew my test scores were high so they labeled me lazy and I was frequently punished.

Gradually I learned to compensate somewhat but I was still a target for overzealous
teachers and administrators that wanted to make an example out me.

Being humiliated in front of the class by some teachers was an all too frequent occurrence.

Luckily there was no hyper-activity involved otherwise I would have been put in military school or institutionalized.

As I began to hit puberty things became clearer as the haze subsided. I was able to excel in history, science and literature. My grades went from D's and F's to Honor roll.

From that point on I pretty much left my difficult and troubled childhood behind me.

Fast forward twenty years.

We decided to adopt from the department of health and human services, we wanted kids and I thought adopting an abandoned or abused child would be the best answer.

We ended up getting a two year old boy. He had a great personality and had been with an excellent foster family since birth. Everything was great until I enrolled him in daycare. I would get daily calls about my son being disruptive, impulsive and fighting with the other kids. They wanted to kick him out.

I quit my job in order to take care of my son full time and educate him at home.

As he grow a little older I noticed that he could not pay attention for more than a few seconds at a time, his head would weave around and his eyes would dart to everything except the task at hand. Any amount of concentration exhausted him to the point where he would fall asleep in the middle of whatever we were doing.

I was praying that it was just being five years old and not this ADHD stuff I was hearing about all over the place.

We decided to let him try public school so that he could meet some friends and be in a more structured environment.

Bad idea. His teacher sent home daily behavioral notes, and no matter what we did
or said he wasn't learning or able to cope with the classroom environment.

When the school administrators decided that my son had failed the first grade I had enough.

We took him to his pediatrician and after an interview and some testing he asked if we wanted to try medication.

The doctor said he wasn't one to hand them out like candy but he said our son had a severe case of ADHD.

I asked if there were any alternatives to the medication. He said we could try any number of things but in cases like this, structure, practicing self control and medicine were his best bet.

After a few days on a daily pill he was a new kid. He began reading, writing, and forming complex thoughts right away. The biggest immediate change I saw was that my son was able to hold a conversation with me and tell me about his day.

After his diagnosis the school was forced to allow my son to attend the second grade.

He gradually caught up with the other children and began working and passing tests
with no problems.

The pediatrician told us that he had a 60% chance of outgrowing ADHD with puberty.

Then it hit me like a ton a bricks...that's what was wrong with me all those years back. I just got lucky enough to outgrow the disorder.

Don't get me wrong, ADD and ADHD over diagnosis, mis-diagnosis and medicating healthy children with lazy parents is bad news.

However, painting all kids and parents suffering through this disease with a broad brush of dismissal is just as wrong.