He didn't want to keep reminding him to take the medication but he couldn't seem to help it. And Craig didn't seem to be remembering on his own. He'd say it, striving for the light tone, "hey, buddy, did you remember your meds?" but it always resulted in the scowl, the looking down, sometimes a sigh. And he'd get up, go upstairs to the bathroom, and he could hear his footsteps as they traveled up the stairs, across the small upstairs hall to the bathroom, and he could hear the medicine cabinet being opened, the water running, and he'd imagine the pills sliding down his throat.
He didn't want to keep looking for signs, for signals and clues that things were wrong. Looking for all the things he'd ignored before. And he wasn't even that sure what to look for. How could you distinguish normal teenage behavior from disturbed, mentally ill behavior? They were very similar. And he knew the constant scrutiny upset Craig, he knew because he'd say, "you blame everything on me being crazy," and he had to think about that. Didn't Craig still have a right to his emotions and feelings despite being bipolar? But what did he have a right to? Didn't he have a right to monitor his son's illness, his moods and his medication? Didn't he have a responsibility to do this? But how much was too much? And how could he know?
He was in the dark with this, a blind man feeling along a rough surface, looking for the telltale knots that would spell problems.
Craig complained about the meds, the way they made him feel.
"It's like I'm tired all the time, I can't think right. Everything feels too thick," Craig said, and Joey furrowed his brow, called up the doctors so they could see if it was normal or if it was side effects that were not acceptable. The doctors told him the first year or so was tricky, trying to get the right balance of medications and therapies, that everyone was different.
"And in teenagers," they had said, "it's particularly tricky since they're still growing. The doses have to be adjusted,"
Joey remembered how one medication, he thought it might have been seroquel but he wasn't sure, the dose was too high and Craig was always groggy and out of it.
He'd started to wonder if Albert was bipolar. It would explain a lot. His out of control moods and temper and the violence. Or maybe it was trickier than that, maybe he had some lesser form of it, something that still disturbed his behavior and reactions but not the full blown manic type I bipolar that Craig was diagnosed with. After all, Albert had gotten through medical school and was a surgeon, a highly successful member of society. That's tricky to do being mentally ill. He didn't know. What did Albert really matter to it all anyway? He was dead. Craig was here.
He knew Albert mattered. Sometimes he was like a physical presence around Craig. He knew Albert was present that day that Craig had beat him up. Who was he really hitting? At times he felt like it wasn't him at all but Albert.
But things seemed more or less okay now. Craig took his meds each time he was reminded. Joey didn't see any obvious side-effects. Side effects. That devil of medication, the curse of the cure. Weight gain and weight loss and insomnia and excessive sleepiness, trouble with coordination and concentration. He'd ask about side effects and get the same weary response. Craig didn't like to talk about any part of it.