My Husband’s Letter to the Psychiatrist Who First Diagnosed Ryan

Dear Dr. Goodman:

This is an update on my son Ryan’s progress. You diagnosed Ryan with PDD-NOS at the age of four. You told my wife and me that he would need special schools, be unable to deal with people, and had a good chance of ending up in an institution or group home. And if we were extremely lucky, someday he might get to work in the basement of some company where he wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.

Ryan is now eighteen and a senior in high school. My son was one of seven students from his high school out of a class of 560 (if you do the math, that puts him in the 98.75th percentile) selected for this “Celebration of Excellence” honor. The award was not for running a computer or memorizing inane facts (as YOU might have predicted), it was for SOCIAL SCIENCE.

I’m taking time out of my day to write you, not because I have a lot of time on my hands. You see, next week we get to go to Ryan’s end of season track banquet where he will receive a letter in track for running the 800 and 1600 meter runs. This award will go well with the letters he earned in Cross Country and Track from last year. The week after that, we attend a dinner at the Reagan Library, where Ryan has been selected as a Ronald Reagan Library Scholar. In the middle of this, Ryan is taking four AP exams. Of course, that is not unusual for him, having taken three exams last year, scoring two 4’s and a 5 (out of 5 possible).

He graduates in June and his schedule doesn’t let up. Ryan will continue helping out at a local nursing home and start his summer job to earn money for college. Oh, I forgot to mention that Ryan was accepted at Santa Clara University, the University of Southern California, Loyola Marymount University (with Honors), California Polytechnic University (San Luis Obispo), and the University of California, both Irvine and Santa Barbara campuses.

Ryan chose Santa Clara University both because of the outstanding engineering program and the fact that they along with Loyola offered him the most scholarship money of the THREE schools that each offered him MERIT-based scholarships. Did I mention that Ryan had to interview for these scholarships with university alumni and staff (you know, the kind of people he shouldn’t be able to talk to)? He’ll miss his best friend (surprise, Ryan has friends) who’ll be attending UCSB, but he’s already met some great kids at Santa Clara University.

Have I left anything out? Oh, yeah, my wife and I would like to thank you once again for making us so angry with your diagnosis/prognosis that we were determined to prove you wrong. I assume you won’t respond to this e-mail just as you have failed to respond to all of the others.

Thanks again,
Frank Hinds