32. "In the Best Interest of the Child"

Dr. Burroughs was referred to by Matilda's own therapist, Dr. Loudermilk. Mat had originally hoped that Dr. Loudermilk could consult with Ed since Mat trusted her as a doctor, but after all the years of Mat showing her xeroxed copies of Ed's doodles and expressing her grief that she didn't know how to raise a son like this, Theresa had a pretty strong sense that she ought to recommend the Browne family to a colleague who specialized in children and adolescents with mental and emotional disorders and disabilities. That's where Neil came in.

The mole was scribbling down some final notes on his clipboard, finding himself becoming distracted every three-quarters of a second or so each time the young brown bear jumped on the couch again. Ed had begged the doctor to let him jump on it, citing that he couldn't just jump on his bed at home because the ceilings were too low. This office was designed to accommodate large mammals, with twelve-foot ceilings and couches that could withstand five thousand pounds of mass, so after seeing the sorrow in this kid's eyes, the doctor allowed it; if anything, it would strengthen his case for the conclusion he was drawing.

"Alright, Ed," said Neil, "you can keep bouncing on that couch. I'm gonna go talk to your parents alone for a little bit, okay?"

Ed stopped jumping. "Are you gonna tell on me?"

"...Tell on you?"

"Yeah! Are you gonna tell them Ed was a naughty boy who jumped up and down and up and down and up and down on the furniture like Ed's mommy and daddy don't like Ed doing?"

Dr. Burroughs made a mental note of that. "No, Ed, quite the opposite, I'm gonna tell them that you're one of the sweetest and nicest boys I've ever met, but you just have a… different way of expressing it." (And he was indeed planning on telling them that, among other things.) "If anything, Ed, I'm gonna help them be better parents to you."

"Aw, but my mom and dad are already the best mom and dad in the whole wide mom-and-dad world!"

Neil tried not to dwell on how immensely depressing that statement was; he'd only interacted briefly with the Brownes for them to express their concerns about their son, but in that short time he'd already gotten the read that these two were far from the best parents a kid could ask for.

"Well, Ed… they're worried they're not doing the best they can. They wanna be even better! And they asked me nicely to help them, so I'm gonna try."

Ed still looked morose. "Do you think my mom and dad think I'm stupid?"

The doctor certainly wasn't expecting that. "Uh… y'know what? I'm gonna make sure that by the time I'm done talking to them, they understand exactly how smart you are." Although he wasn't entirely confident he'd succeed in winning them over.

Matilda and Hilary had been in the waiting room for hours. Mat, worried that she was right to fear she'd been negligent as a parent for waiting this long to find help for her child, was trying to take her mind off things by focusing on the daytime soap operas playing on the waiting room television. Hill, however, was more bored than worried, having flipped through every copy of Sports Illustrated he could find in the room; for him, the diagnosis was a foregone conclusion, and he was merely waiting impatiently for his suspicions to be confirmed.

The door opened and a small, bespectacled creature peeked his head out.

"Mister and Missus Browne?"

He led the bears past the closed door to the examination room where they could all hear Ed pretending he was jumping around on the surface of a low-gravity planet trying to chase a rogue band of aliens. They could still hear him through the walls when they walked into the adjacent room, this one with a desk and some chairs, various diplomas and certificates with the name of Neil Burroughs adorning the walls.

Ever inclusive, the practice had provided the doctor with one of those fancy new desks that accommodate for the sizes of his clients while still being able to see them roughly eye-to-eye, one where the height of the desk could be hydraulically adjusted while the chairs on either side could be adjusted for both their height as well as how far back the backs were.

The bears modified their seats to their liking while Dr. Burroughs went through a file cabinet and extracted a manila folder. He placed the folder on the desk next to a few sheets of paper that were already sitting there face-down and sat in his own chair, and pressed the levers on the chair and the desk at the same time until he was at an elevation he was comfortable with. He was expecting this to be a rough conversation, and he was right to do so.

"So… how was your conversation with Ed?" asked Matilda.

"Oh, it went pretty well, actually," said the mole. "He's one of the kindest, sweetest teenage boys I've ever had the pleasure of working with; he just has an… offbeat way of showing it-"

"You really mean to tell me he didn't make your life a living hell?" asked Hilary skeptically, grumbling and a bit difficult to understand.

For the first of many times during their conversation, Dr. Burroughs forced himself to be professional. "I mean, it was a challenge to get through to him at times, but that challenge made it more fulfilling when I succeeded-"

"You mean to tell me he's not fucking up your office as we speak?"

"Mr. Browne, the other day we had a seventeen-year-old rhino in here with intermittent explosive disorder, that kid was actively trying to destroy our space and he didn't get very-"

CRASH! they all heard from the other room.

"Zombie mutants! I will wrangle you and make you wish you had never hatched from your eggs!"

The doctor smiled nervously as he turned back to Hilary. "...far?" he said with an unconfident shrug.

"So, Doctor… do you think you know what's wrong with our son?" asked Mrs. Browne.

"Oh, Jesus Christ, Mat, don't play dumb, you know what he's gonna say!" Mr. Browne grumbled.

"Oh?" asked Dr. Burroughs, leaning in but not trying to seem too sarcastic. "And what do you anticipate I'm going to say?"

"That the kid's retarded," said Hill. "And we've known this for years, but now you're gonna make it official. So sign whatever documents you need and give us the paperwork so we can get one of those placards that let us park in handicap spots."

"Hilary!" Matilda grumbled loudly as she kicked her husband in the shin.

"Gah! Jesus, lady, don't start this shit in public!"

Dr. Burroughs placed his palms together in front of him, closed his eyes, forced a smile and took a deep breath; this was going to be tougher than he thought.

"Well, for one thing, Mr. Browne… I understand that it's hard to keep up with the euphemism treadmill, but just for your records, that… term you used earlier is no longer preferred by medical professionals and hasn't been for about a decade now-"

"What term?" he asked, an eyebrow raised despite still looking bored.

"...Surely you know what term I'm referring to."

"Say it."

Neil couldn't force himself to keep smiling. "Well, the preferred term now is intellectually disabled. But for what it's worth, Mr. Browne… in the time I've spent with Ed… I see very little evidence to suggest that this is just an open-and-shut case of an intellectual disability."

Ed's parents were both surprised by that.

"Bullshit," Hilary muttered; the others ignored him.

"You mean… he's not handicapped?" asked Matilda, but she was far from relieved. "Y-you mean he is just dumb because we raised him wrong!?"

"What!?" the doctor panicked. "Nonononono, uh… I-I certainly agree that… Ed certainly seems to have something going on upstairs; I'd be lying through my teeth if I said that he seemed in any way… typical for a boy his age."

"But you're not lying through your teeth when you say you saw him for more than five minutes and didn't immediately realize he's retarded?" asked Hilary again, and again the others ignored him.

"But not just your regular same-old, same-old eccentricity," Neil continued. "Certainly something… neurological, on some level. Definitely something… inhibiting his ability to develop at a normal pace, but - as far as I can tell - not something preventing him from developing. I believe there is hope for him yet if we're careful about it."

"What do you mean?" asked Matilda in worried curiosity.

"It means he's being P. C. and Ed's not technically retarded, he just has autism or something, which is… so much different, right!?" Hilary scoffed.

Dr. Burroughs took another moment to breathe, trying to be professional and not tell this stupid mauler off for being another fool who thought autism and intellectual disabilities were essentially the same thing.

"So… there's an outside chance that that's what's going on here," the mole said as delicately as possible, "but I don't have anywhere near enough evidence to conclude that what we're looking at is autism, let alone autism being the chief thing. And just so you know, Mr. Browne, autism isn't exactly the same thing as-"

"'The chief thing'!? What, you mean this broken fucking kid's got five or six different conditions doing a frickin' square dance in his head!?"

Neil realized his mouth was hanging open in disgusted disbelief and made a point to shut it before continuing to speak. "It's possible-"

"Goddammit!"

"-but I'll tell you right now that even with the conclusion I've come to, I - excuse me, we, my colleagues and I - we'd like to see him again before we sign any paperwork with a specific condition cited on it."

"But what condition do you think he has?" Matilda begged. "I-I don't mean to be impatient, Doctor, but I've been dreading this day for a week."

The doctor adjusted in his chair while wondering what this poor woman saw in her husband. "So… I acknowledge that this is a risk telling you this, but I'm not one hundred percent certain of my conclusion. I have upwards of ninety percent certainty, I do, but I'm not comfortable writing it in stone yet. So I acknowledge that confessing my lack of impenetrable confidence in this could either make you trust me more for being completely transparent with you, or it could make you trust me less on the grounds that my lack of certainty makes you think I'm unqualified to do my job."

"Well, for what it's worth, I trust you more for telling us so," said Matilda.

"And I think you're not qualified for this shit if you don't even know mental retardation when you see it," said Hilary.

Dr. Burroughs drummed his fingers together. "Mr. Browne, I'm really not comfortable with you continuing to use that word-"

"Jesus Christ, will you tell us what's wrong with the freaking kid!?" Hill hollered, leaning over the desk and growling at the mole. "She asked you nicely to get to the fucking point, do they not teach you in doctor-college that it's impolite to leave a lady waiting!?"

Matilda leaned in and grabbed her husband by the shoulder to pull him back. "Hill, don't be a dick to him! You shouldn't piss off the guy who's trying to help our son!"

"Bullshit, you know damn well he can't be helped!" he growled as he sat back in his chair.

The doctor, meanwhile, was clearly scared for his life.

"Spit it out!" Mr. Browne spat at him, but then he saw that manila folder on the desk again and decided to take matters into his own paws. "Gimme that!"

"S-sir!" the mole found the courage to protest. "Don't just take-!"

"'Attention… Deficit… Hyper-' What?"

Matilda leaned in and looked at the contents of the folder, seeing an information packet for parents sitting on the top of the pile of papers.

"...ADHD?" she asked incredulously. "Really?"

Neil nodded slowly, sensing their skepticism. "And if I'm right… he's got one of the most severe cases I've ever encountered. To the point that I can actually entirely understand why one without an educated background in such mental conditions could just write him off as intellectually disabled."

Hilary now had his own mouth hanging open in disgusted disbelief, flabbergasted that this so-called expert could draw such an insane conclusion. Oddly, he was now staying quiet while his wife spoke up.

"Well… how sure are you that you're right?" she asked, seeming to catch up to her husband in terms of sheer irritability.

Dr. Burroughs forced a clearly-fake smile as he bit his tongue and refrained from pointing out that he'd already discussed that not two minutes ago. "Uh- a-as I mentioned, ma'am, I'm mostly certain about this, but I'm open to the reality that I'm still mortal and I am fallible. But suffice it to say that as I was examining him, I was at first looking at him through the lens of Ed being intellectually disabled - as you'd told me, that was your chief concern, so that's what I was looking for - but I picked up on some clues that suggested he wasn't- hm… nothing that suggested that he was incapable of being intelligent and socially well-adjusted, but combined with the knowledge that this was the first time he's been seen by a professional like myself, I came to the conclusion that, in practice, the disorder he did have has functionally stunted his progress intellectually as well as behaviorally as a consequence of going untreated for so long."

Neil finished that thought looking at Hilary; when he looked back at Matilda, she seemed to have now surpassed her husband's level of lividity.

"Oh…" she seethed. "So you're saying it's our fault for not getting him examined sooner?"

And all the doctor could think was YES, lady, YES, the answer is clearly YES! His sympathy for this woman was deflating alarmingly quickly.

"Mrs. Browne… nobody gives anybody a guide for how to be a good parent. We figure it out as we go along-"

"So you're saying we aren't good parents," said Matilda flatly.

"Dude, are you even a parent?" asked Hilary. "Because you said 'we' but I can't imagine you getting any ladies' phone numbers."

Dr. Burroughs again stopped pretending to smile. "...We're mortals. We make mistakes. But what's done is done and now we need to fix it - that's how you be a good parent."

"Don't think I didn't see you completely dodge my question there, guy," said Hilary.

The doctor started rolling his eyes before he remembered they could see him, so he stopped them halfway and pretended to look at the clock for a few moments.

"...No, sir, I haven't had the fortune of having a child of my own yet."

"And you're never gonna get a woman if you keep acting like such a sniveling little shit. No woman wants a guy who's too much of a pussy to even answer a simple question."

Neil's eyes wandered toward Matilda, wondering if she'd tell her husband to stop verbally abusing this doctor. But all the compassion she had had for this stranger was gone. Dr. Burroughs knew that as soon as he got home, he was going to vent to his partner about how revoltingly (and stereotypically) mean-spirited this bear couple was; at least Scott would probably get a kick out of it.

"What on Earth made you think he's ADHD instead of just… well, slow?" asked Mat, her displeasure still readily apparent in her face but not so much her voice anymore. "Because we really need you to be right about this. Whatever's up with Ed is ruining our lives. You don't even know the toll that it's having on his sister."

"...Would you like to tell me what effect it's having on his sister?" the doctor asked. "And the rest of you, for that matter?"

"Oh, where do I start!? His sister's just getting angrier and angrier every day, and I completely understand why! She can't sleep or do her homework or even watch TV because her brother's always making loud noises, she can't feel safe in her own home because he's always running around and breaking things, she- I-I-we think she's turning into a lesbian or something because the male of her own species she knows the best is just a reprehensible and physically disgusting person and what kind of damage is that doing to her view of bear men!? Hell, the only boy in her life is an effeminate little rabbit boy who she can control and keep under her thumb!" She leaned in and put her paw on the desk. "My Sarah is an angel, Doctor. I know she is. But even angels have to be angry at evil."

Mrs. Browne and Dr. Burroughs stared at each other for a moment.

"So… you think your son is evil-?"

"And the rest of us are getting angrier, too! We didn't used to be like this! But we can't have guests over besides the neighbors who already understand how unhinged our son is, we keep having to pay out the ass whenever he breaks someone else's property, we- we have to deal with the burden of knowing that we have to- that we're societally fucking obligated to love this kid who we can't relate to or understand in even the most remote way! Now do you understand how he's affecting us!?"

She finished up her statement and realized that the two men were both staring at her, Neil in utter shock, but Hilary with a look of perverse amusement.

"Nice going, lady!" Hill quipped. "You just admitted that you don't love him, either!"

"Oh- that's not what I meant!"

"That's literally what you said."

"Shut up, Hill!"

"That's literally the sum of the face values of all the words that just came out of your mouth-"

"SHUT THE FUCK UP, HILARY!" Matilda took a moment to compose herself before turning back to the doctor. "What I mean is… look, I love my son. I really do. But if he weren't my son, I wouldn't want anything to do with someone like him. And I know Hilary here does, too. And same with Sarah. And we don't like having to feel that way. That's why we need you to fix him."

Dr. Burroughs decided to take an even bigger risk than earlier and tried to discreetly tell this woman off: "Well, Mrs. Browne, at times like these, it's important to remember that the person suffering the most out of all of us is Ed himself-"

"HA!"

Neil was surprised to be interrupted by a loud, sharp, scathingly sarcastic laugh.

"You think he's suffering?" she asked, eyes wide and wild with incredulity. "Can't you hear him in there!? He's having the time of his life!"

"I will vaporize you, satanic space Nazi!"

"He's clearly happier than we are," Matilda said with a condescending smile. "Ed doesn't want help; he probably doesn't even think he needs help. There's one of him and three of the rest of us in this family. Let's not kid ourselves: we want help for Ed to make our lives more bearable. Because we have lives."

"'Bear-able'?" asked the other ursid in the room. "Was that supposed to be a pun?"

"Oh, will you hush!?"

With these most recent comments, Dr. Burroughs started envisioning a footrace between these two, with the leader being the one who was more despicable as a person; Hilary had had an early lead as Matilda was slow out of the gate, but now this woman was running laps around her husband. Hilary still had plenty of time to catch up, though.

"You still haven't told us by what insane logic you think the kid's ADHD and not just retarded," said Mr. Browne.

"Sir, seriously, stop using that word in my office," said the doctor.

"What word?"

"Drrf- the one that rhymes with departed."

"Why?"

"Because people with intellectual disabilities - and their families - find it profoundly offensive!"

Hilary was unfazed. "Well… I have a family member who's intellectually disabled; I don't find that word offensive."

"...Y-you do?"

"Yeah, you just talked to him. He's in the room next door," Hill said with a grin as he leaned in toward the mole again. "Listen, buddy, the fact of the matter is that you seem to want us to think of you as a smart guy who knows what he's talking about, but here you are, too stupid to realize that normal people still say 'retarded', we're always gonna say the word 'retarded', and we don't care if it offends some people because guess what, it is a bad thing to be retarded! And if you can't figure that out… buddy, you might just be retarded!"

"Sir, as a society, we don't mock disabilities because they're not a choice-"

"Oh, yes we do! Do you even live in reality? Hey, ya want us to think you're smart? Then be smart enough to figure out how to talk like a normal fuckin' person instead of some out-of-touch egghead. Book smarts without street smarts don't make you overall smart."

Hilary sat back in his chair and put on a devilish grin, certain that he'd won that debate. Not that Dr. Burroughs wanted to let him have that kind of satisfaction, but as much as he wanted to rebut everything this man had just said, he simply didn't have the energy. And looking at the clock (for real this time), he saw that he didn't have the time to argue, either.

"So…" the doctor began, trying to maintain his dignity, "...with your concerns in mind, one of the first things I did was give him a very basic IQ test. Very simple, completely nonverbal so as not to be biased against kids with conditions such as, for example, dyslexia. And I tell him that to get accurate results, I'll have to time him." He leaned in. "And that's when I saw the first sign: he got nervous."

"Yeah, because he knows he's stupid," said Hilary.

"Nope!" said Neil with a smirk of his own. "Though the fact that he knows you think that way about him might have been a contributing factor. I have reason to believe what made him nervous was the deadline."

"Well… isn't that normal?" asked Matilda. "Like… I had anxiety taking timed tests in school, too."

"It's not uncommon, but it was a clue. Later, when he was actually taking the test, he kept asking me, 'What's this one? What's this one?' And he didn't misunderstand the instructions, he knew he just had to pick the picture that completed the pattern, I told him that at the top and he understood it. But he's asking me for help, and I'm explaining that I can't answer for him, but I can help walk him through it. So for basically every question, I'm telling him, 'Okay, this picture looks like this, this one looks like this, this one looks like this, so can you decide which one the fourth one should look like?' And he's still taking a long time to answer, but he's not- hm… whereas a child with a disability might be more inclined to either have a delayed response or just keep chugging along with their best guesses, Ed was… clearly fidgeting."

"What, you've never seen a retarded kid moving randomly because they can't control their brain?" scoffed Hilary.

Just ignore him, this will all be over soon. "...And while that didn't preclude the possibility of a mental handicap that included physical as well as educational difficulties, it certainly seemed like more of an issue of anxiety than a lack of neurological control."

"So how'd he do on the IQ test? asked Matilda.

"Well… if you want to be strict about it - and I don't - technically, he bombed."

"Of course!" said Hilary.

"But that's just because he didn't answer seventy-five percent of the questions. We know the raw number of correct answers he got wasn't accurate because if it was, he should be at a level where he's nonverbal and probably confined to a wheelchair. But if you restrict the sample size to the questions he actually answered - albeit with my help, but that's irrelevant at the moment - he got a hair below average. Not ideal, I admit, but nothing alarming."

"I refuse to believe he's just a hair below average," Mr. Browne grumbled.

Dr. Burroughs refused to acknowledge him. "The next portion was verbal. Fill-in-the-blank, not multiple choice. Simple logic questions instead of, say, 'what's the capital of Uruguay' type of questions. And again, I tell him he's on a clock, and again, he gets nervous. And this time I can't help him. And I'm grading the nonverbal first test, and he's squirming in his seat, but he's at least trying. He's writing stuff down. And when it's time to collect his test and grade it, I… I'm confused. I've never seen answers like these before in my life. They hardly make any sense."

"Yeah, because he's stupid!" shot Hilary.

"Yeah, I'm sorry, but I don't see your story adding up," said Hilary.

"But here's the thing," said the doctor. "So… his answers were all over the place. One of them was, 'What comes next? September, October, November…' And he wrote 'Christmas'."

"Of course he did," muttered Hilary.

"Okay, that could go either way, maybe he's disabled and he really doesn't understand that Christmas isn't a month… or! Or… maybe he's just nervous taking a test and he's jotting down the first thing that comes to mind!" said the mole with a shrug and a smile. "But do note that typically - no two cases are the same, but this is what typically happens - a child with an intellectual disability - provided they are at least at the level that they can manipulate a pencil - they'll usually… at least guess another month if they don't know it was December. And many still do know it's December! And those who don't would likely either give it their best guess or… just leave it blank. Ed's answer was completely outside that data set. Are you with me so far?"

They still seemed annoyed, but they both nodded.

"Another question was, uh… it was like, 'One plus two is three, one plus two plus three is six, one plus two plus three plus four is...?' And… he wrote down 'enchilada'."

"Oh, boy," said Matilda, facepalming.

"Which… despite not making any sense at all as an answer… he spelled correctly."

Matilda and Hilary now looked intrigued.

"And then I get to one about… man, I don't even remember the question. But in the blank space for the answer, he drew an elaborate scene of Godzilla destroying Tokyo, complete with Mount Fuji in the background… oh, and by the way, this kid is an amazing illustrator, I encourage you to foster that, because this kid seems like he's got a gift for art."

"Yeah, that was the one good thing Dr. Loudermilk could say about his drawings," said Matilda somewhat sadly.

"...She saw Ed's drawings?" asked the doctor.

"Yeah, Ed draws things for me and I show them to her to show her what I have to deal with. I'm surprised she didn't tell you."

You showed her your son's drawings that he made for YOU to ENJOY and you take them to your therapist to COMPLAIN about how hard his ways make YOUR life, you self-centered-! "Uh, no, um… Theresa's very much a professional, she takes NDAs very seriously. But anyway… I see that drawing that he gave as an answer, and then it clicks…" Neil took off his glasses and folded them in his paws, looking at the bears and hoping to make more of a connection with them with eye contact that was now unobstructed. "...He isn't unintelligent; he's bored. And he's nervous because his brain is wired to ignore things he doesn't want to do, and yet here he is, acutely aware of the fact that we're going to judge his intelligence based on the results of a test he doesn't want to take, so he's freaking out because he knows he has to focus on it to impress us but his brain just doesn't wanna focus on it because it would rather be doing other things, such as drawing an elaborate scene of a giant lizard monster destroying a Japanese metropolis."

"Cool, so in other words, he's lazy," said Hilary. "Alright, nothing a belt can't fix like with what our dads did to us."

"No, Mr. Browne, this is nothing a belt can fix. This is not willful laziness. This is his subconscious mind really, really wanting to do something, and it will not allow itself to focus on anything other than that. And heck, when he's doing those things, he can work his tail off! You see his drawings? A truly lazy boy wouldn't put that much detail into such a thing, they might not even complete it." The doctor put his glasses back on. "You could even say that his brain is hyperactive in its interests and desires, causing a deficit in his span of attention; do you follow?"

"We understand your logic, we just… don't know if we necessarily agree with it," said Mrs. Browne.

"And I understand that. ADHD is an extremely controversial condition even amongst professionals, and it can look vastly different from person to person. And as the science of it learns more, everything that I'm saying now could be obsolete and wildly politically incorrect in, say, ten-fifteen years. Even now, I'm massively oversimplifying everything for the sake of understanding; my colleagues would have a fit with me for describing it this way. But for now, I feel pretty certain that Ed's condition is best framed as this: if left to his own devices, he's gonna do what he wants to do, and he's not gonna do what he doesn't wanna do. So instead of sitting patiently, he'll tear the kitchen sink out of the wall; instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour, he'll stay up all night watching horror movies; and instead of stressing out over giving an appropriate answer on a test or in a conversation that bores him to death, he'll give a non-sequitur that he finds personally amusing."

"That still just sounds like misbehavior," insisted Mr. Browne.

"And you know what? I'll concede that it does, but I'm willing to bet it's not his fault. At least not entirely. And I got the same feeling from the conversation I had with him: when I was asking mundane questions, he seemed antsy, but when I pitched him a question he wanted to answer, he was entirely devoted to talking until he had nothing more to talk about. And you can't tell me that this kid has prohibitively low intelligence when he's dropping words that even I don't know what they mean; he's talking about aliens and mutants and zombies and robots and he'll use an obscure technical term like… like mesosphere or- or prefrontal cortex or computation or something like that. All this paints a picture that can make one wonder: whenever he gives an incredibly incorrect answer on a test, or does his household chores wrong in an extremely creative way, or just generally zones out and behaves inappropriately in a given situation… is is possible that what we interpret as stupidity is really just… carelessness?"

Ed's parents did not look impressed.

"I don't think I'm any more comfortable with a child who's destructively careless than I am with one who's just plain stupid," said Mat.

"Ditto," said Hill.

Dr. Burroughs smirked; he was prepared for this comment. "Well, wouldn't you know it, a common condition to overlap with ADHD, especially in adults and adolescents… is depression and anxiety. Now, the reasons for this overlap are not concretely known, but in my professional community, many, myself included, theorize that this may be because being an adult forced to focus on things your brain just doesn't wanna focus on… is just too darn stressful to many." He sat back, closed his eyes and threw his arms back playfully. "But again, that's just my educated conjecture. Hey, speaking of symptoms, may I have that folder back, Mr. Browne?"

Hilary handed the folder back. Neil opened it up and thumbed through for a couple of pages littered with bullet points, which he extracted and laid out on his desk for the concerned parents to read.

"So there exist three types of ADHD," said the doctor, pointing with the tip of a pen. "IA, denoted by inattention; HI, marked by hyperactive impulsivity; and Combined, which you can gather has traits of both. And as you may imagine by my statements that this is one of the most severe cases I've ever seen-"

"Ed has the type with both," said Matilda.

The mole nodded. "So, symptoms: has trouble paying attention and makes careless mistakes - as we discussed, he has this in spades; has trouble listening, check; has trouble following through on instructed tasks, check; dislikes or avoids tasks that require strenuous amounts of mental effort, such as homework - most definitely; easily distracted and forgetful, most assuredly." He scooted the sheets of paper over so the second page was now front and center. "That was IA, here's HI: likes to fidget and squirm and can't sit still, check; has trouble doing things quietly, check; talks excessively - eh, I'll put that in the maybes pile, but he certainly can go on a tangent about things he cares about; cuts into conversations and can't wait his turn - absolutely." He dropped the pen as a show of finality. "You know, a lesser doctor would see him struggling to take an IQ test and say 'okay, fine, he has an intellectual disability, case closed,' but I dug deeper and found an explanation I feel fits better: he has a severe, unabated case of ADHD and profound the effect it's had on his ability to learn has created the illusion that he has an ingrained learning disability, and likewise the effect it's had on his social development has created the illusion that he's incapable of developing socially. But it's not too late to right the ship, though it will take time and effort and we need to act now. So… do I have you convinced yet?"

Matilda looked like she was coming to terms with a conclusion she didn't like, but Hilary still seemed stubborn.

"You're sure he isn't just clinically stupid?" asked Mr. Browne. "If he's not retarded, does he have autism - whatever the difference is?"

The doctor was ready for more. "Honestly, I briefly entertained the thought that it was a form of autism, what with his poor social skills and his obsessive, uh… obsession with his hobbies; the traditional wisdom is that people with ADHD hop between interests frequently, intensely focusing on them before abandoning them, whereas autistic people tend to stick with their intense interests indefinitely. So with his obsession with horror and sci-fi movies and comics, um… y-you tell me, does he tend to hop between obsession with different such media?"

"You think we pay attention?" said Hilary.

"Yeah… we can't keep up with his babbling about… Space Cowboys 4 or whatever," said Matilda.

Hill chuckled to himself. "'Space Cowboys 4' sounds like the name of a porno." For this, his wife kicked him in the ankle.

"Well considering he went on and on about one specific… property called The Return of the Curse of Evil Tim or something," continued the doctor, "I'd say my theory is correct and his leapfrogging interests tend to stick within the horror/sci-fi genre, though they still do leap." He started putting away the papers on the table and extracting others. "Plus people with autism often have trouble empathizing with others, and considering how much he told me about how he cared about you two and his sister and his friends, I'd say that's not applicable. But let's talk more about the other conditions that often overlap ADHD. I see on his medical history sheet that he has no history of epilepsy; is that correct?"

The parents looked confused again.

"...N-no, uh- I mean yes, correct, he does not have epilepsy," said Mat.

"Alright! How about trouble sleeping?"

"Well yeah," said Hill, "you just told me this kid's mind is always racing, and you think he doesn't have insomnia?"

"Just checking. Makes sense so far. How about bedwetting? Does he still wet the bed? If not, did he continue to wet the bed until an advanced age?"

The bears winced and glanced at one another, wondering where this strange little mole was going with this.

"This really is none of your business," said Matilda with a glare.

Neil emotionally knuckled down; he'd received that comment before but it never got any less infuriating. "Perhaps not in any other context, but in verifying my hypothesis, it helps to know if he also has associated-"

"Listen, man," said Hilary. "We came here for an answer, I… guess you gave us an answer, now we're good to go. Can you just give us the piece of paper so we can get a handicap sticker so we can leave?"

That, however, was a new one for Dr. Burroughs. "Well, Mr. Browne, I can offer you something better. Shall we discuss treatment?"

"Naw, we're good. Just give us the piece of paper."

A small squeak came out of the mole's throat as he caught himself before saying aloud What the fuck? "Wait… Mr. Browne, you… really don't want to treat your son's condition?"

"What's there to treat?" Hilary shrugged. "He's gonna be this way forever, and those of us who're capable of acting like adults're just gonna hafta deal with it."

Neil was struggling to find the words. "Um- a-actually, sir, with proper treatment, there's a very real chance that Ed can grow out of this condition. Heck, back in the day a few decades ago, the disease was called 'Hyperkinetic Reaction of Childhood' because it was observed chiefly in children but not adults, leading experts to believe that it can be grown out of-"

"If that's the case, then it sounds even more like this is some bullshit made-up disease that can be cured by a belt and some good discipline."

"-but one-third of ADHD patients do see their condition continue into adulthood, and the longer your son goes without treatment, the more likely he'll be among that number!"

"So you just told me it's curable and then told me why it's probably not gonna actually work."

"Hey. Doctor. Listen," Ed's mother cooed. "We'll be upfront with you: we came here for closure. But you telling us that our son has some entirely different condition than we were expecting is raising more questions than answers."

Neil blinked a few times. "Do you not want to help your son?"

"Oh, we'd love to help him, but we're busy people, we just won't have the time for it. If you want to tell us what you have in mind to help him, you can go ahead, but we don't have all day. I have As the World Turns taping but not Guiding Light."

The mole was starting to get nervous that he was going to lose these people on a point that he didn't think would be quite so contentious. "So… if diagnosing the condition is controversial, actually treating it is even more-"

"Just spit it out," said Hilary, barely bothering to keep his eyes open.

The doctor was spooked. "Medication and treatment."

"Fine. Drug him if you want. Unless our insurance won't cover it, then fuck off."

"Uh, okay. So… we could go the route of stimulants or nonstimulants-"

"The kid's ADHD and you want to give him stimulants? Are you fucking crazy!? Why don't we just give him crack while we're at it!?"

"Nonono, th-these are, uh, these are stimulants that stimulate neurotransmitters that improve focus. In fact, they, uh, they seem to be more effective and fast-acting than slow-acting nonstimulants, which ironically were only approved by the CDC, like, just two years ago."

"...Whatever."

"So as for the treatment-"

"What, you mean the drugs aren't the treatment!?"

"Yeah, that's what I thought you meant, too," said the wife.

"Uh… no," the doctor choked out. "The treatment includes behavioral therapy, psychotherapy-"

"Fine, send the kid to therapy," said the husband. "'Slong as we don't have to be there for it."

"...And family therapy so parents and siblings can-"

"Oh, fuck that!"

"-so they can learn how to be the best parents and siblings they can be to understand and help the patient!" Dr. Burroughs protested, perhaps having lost the last of his patience.

"Ooor you could just tell us what to do and save us all our time," said Matilda bitterly.

"I've got a real job, buddy," growled Mr. Browne. "I wake up at the asscrack of dawn and work all day, and I'm not giving up the rest of my waking hours to sit in a room with my wife and her idiot son listening to a bunch of new-age hippie mumbo-jumbo about 'connecting' with this kid who-" Hilary was suddenly inspired to stand up again and point down at the little mole. "There's a one hundred percent chance he didn't get his fuck-up genes from me! Because he didn't get any of his genes from me!"

"Hilary, quit making a scene!" his wife protested.

"Lady, if you didn't want me to make a scene, ya shoulda thought a' that fifteen years ago," her husband spat.

"Folks, folks, please!" the doctor begged. "You came in here looking to help your son become more well-adjusted, and now I'm telling you exactly what you need to do to do it, and… it really seems like you don't wanna do it!"

"Hey man, for the record, I never expected you to tell me he had anything that had a cure," said Hilary, sitting down again.

"Doctor," said Matilda, "I'm fine with you giving him medication and having him see the school therapist-"

"No no," said Neil, "a therapist outside of school, in sessions both with and without you two."

Mat just threw her arms up in annoyance. "Well I simply have no interest in that."

"What do you mean you don't have interest in that!?" the mole squealed. "Okay, so he didn't come in here expecting anything besides a fu- besides a stupid sticker to put in the car so he could park in spaces reserved for the disabled, but you made a point to bemoan how much you needed help because your son's condition was making your life hard. Wh-what did you come here for? What- what kind of help were you expecting to get?"

"Well, since we came in here expecting to be told that he was just clinically stupid, I thought you'd give us a pamphlet with some tips about how to deal with him when he's annoying us, like how to effectively scold him so he'll stop being such a freaking cretin, and maybe give us some advice for what to do with him when he becomes an adult, like whether to put him in a nursing home-"

"You wanna put your son in a fucking nursing home!?"

"Of course! Are you crazy? I'm not taking care of someone like that for the rest of my life!"

"You won't say 'retarded' but you will say 'fucking'?" asked Hill sardonically.

"Like I said, if you want to medicate him and pull him out of class to have him talk to someone who can talk to him on his level and convince him to stop being so… weird, then that's fine, I have no problem with that," said Mat, fuming. "But I've sacrificed enough of my life cleaning up that boy's messes, I'm not wasting anymore time on him than I already have to as a mother."

"And me neither," said Hilary, slouching in his chair as he felt relaxed saying what he thought was the obvious. "I didn't do anything to deserve having to raise a kid like this and neither did his mom. It's not our job to make him normal; it is literally yours."

Dr. Burroughs was simply dumbfounded; he was kind of hoping these were the worst parents he'd ever meet, because he certainly didn't want to ever meet parents who were anything close to this bad ever again.

"Now- perhaps you didn't do anything to deserve this challenge," said the doctor, "but this is the hand you've been dealt, and now we have to work together to help him out! I can do my best, but I'd still need your help, and since he spends most of his time with you, so it only makes logical sense that you two would have to do the heavy lifting-"

"What, more than the heavy lifting I do every single day tossing trash into a truck to support this fucked-up family!?" the male bear growled, leaning in toward the mole again.

"Dgfrghrfgh- YES! Part of being an adult is accepting that sometimes we need to clean up messes that we didn't make-!"

"No, motherfucker, being an adult means standing up for yourself! It means putting your foot down and saying 'No, this is bullshit, this is not my problem and fixing it is not my responsibility!'" He again was standing over the mole. "I gave the fuckin' receptionist my insurance card, they accepted it, you're gonna get paid. Now do your fucking job and earn your check."

Neil searched for a response to that as he looked back and forth at Hilary, then Matilda, then Hilary, then Matilda, then Hilary.

"Well!?" said Hilary. "You ain't got nothing to say for yourself!?"

"...Do you two love your son?"

"What? Of course!" said Mat. "That's why we're here, to find someone who can fix him! Because we definitely don't have the energy to do it ourselves! We wouldn't have ever bothered coming here if we knew we'd be told that we'd have to do all the hard work ourselves on top of everything we're already doing!"

Dr. Burroughs turned to Hilary, who was still towering directly overhead.

"What about you?"

"What about me?" he grumbled.

"Do you love your son?"

"Are you blind and fucking deaf? That kid ain't my son!"

"GODDAMMIT, HILARY!" Matilda stood up just to grab her husband by the shoulder and force him into his seat again before sitting again herself.

"I'm just saying, man, you can see it from space and I've been dropping hints this entire time. His fur don't match either of ours, and I thought the 'fifteen years' remark made it pretty obvious."

"Alright, Doctor, so let's talk about the pills," she said, ignoring her husband. "Maybe… maybe if we up the dosage, it might fix him faster?"

The doctor's posture simply collapsed in exasperation.

"...Holy heck, you two really did come in here expecting a quick fix, didn't you?" he asked.

"Of course we did!" seethed Matilda. "We don't have time for a slow fix! Nobody has time for a slow fix!"

"Well, this is a very complicated problem that doesn't have a quick fix-"

"WHAT!?" she shrieked as she herself stood up and leaned over the little mole. "Why not!? How do you people not have a fast-acting solution by now? What's even the point of this entire fucking field of medicine if you idiots don't even have any answers by now!? Are you people even trying!? His idiocy is ruining our fucking lives, this is an EMERGENCY!"

"Life lesson, fuckface, don't piss off a mama bear," quipped the papa bear, still sitting calmly in his seat.

Neil was shaking in his chair as he felt the heat and moisture from her breath rain down upon his face. "W-well, ma'am, what do you want me to do?"

"TRY HARDER!" she screamed. "TRY! HAAARDERRR!"

Click.

"Dr. Burroughs, is everything okay in here?"

All three looked toward the door, where a gazelle was peeking her head in.

"Rita, call the police."

"WHAT!?" said both of the parents.

"We didn't even do anything criminal!" said Mr. Browne.

"You've both verbally assaulted and physically intimidated me."

"Oh, you're just afraid of us because we're predators, you fucking racist!" said Mrs. Browne.

"You're two specific predators who have tangibly gone out of your way to make me feel threatened."

"Uh…" said the receptionist.

"Rita, call the police. A-and Child Protective Services! These people refuse to give their child proper treatment-"

"Oh, don't you DARE LAY A HAND ON MY BABY!" Matilda screamed as she grabbed the mole by the shoulders and started shaking him.

"Oh, I'd just love to see CPS try to wrangle him!" Hilary chuckled. "You'd think someone in your line of work would know about the phenomenon known as 'retard strength'."

CRASH.

"Mom! Dad! Is the doctor trying to remove your brain and make you join his zombie army!?"

Now all four adults were staring at the teenage bear standing amid the rubble of the enormous hole he had just knocked through the wall.

"Congratulations, Ed!" Mr. Browne beamed sarcastically. "You're not retarded! You're just ADHD, which is totally a different thing! Really!"

Ed quickly went from concerned to confused and glanced at the doctor (still in his mother's clutches) whom he had not ten seconds prior feared was a supervillain.

"Mister Doctor, what's ADHD?"

"Goddammit, we're gonna have to pay for that wall, aren't we!?" Mrs. Browne grumbled.

"Rita, call the police."

"Well, hey, you know what?" said Hilary, standing up and making his way toward the door. "You keep the pills, we'll find a better doctor. Or maybe we won't! We've dealt with his bullshit all these years, we can keep going, we're used to it… 'Scuse me, ma'am."

The gazelle made way for the bruin, not knowing if there was anything she could do to stop him.

"Uh… sir?" asked Rita.

"Pardon us, miss," said Matilda, grabbing her son by the wrist and following her husband out the door.

"Does ADHD stand for Android Designed for Hunting Demons?" asked the patient as he was dragged out of the room.

"Uh, m-ma'am, you guys still have a forty-dollar copay!" the receptionist stuttered.

"It's fine! We have their names and address on file!" the doctor called out, loud enough for the departing family of ursines to hear him. "We'll send the bill for the copay along with the INVOICE FOR THE FUCKING WALL!"

The mole laid his head on his desk and buried his face in his hands, emotionally exhausted. The next time he saw Dr. Loudermilk, he was going to interrogate her about just what the fuck kind of crazy people did she refer to him. And yet he didn't feel comfortable dwelling on his own frustrations with them; after all, as he had tried so hard and failed so bitterly to illustrate to Mr. and Mrs. Browne, the real person to be concerned about here was their son.

Dr. Neil Burroughs never did see Ed nor his parents ever again. The doctor was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2013 and valiantly battled his disease for half a decade before finally succumbing to his illness in 2018. He passed while in the company of his partner, Scott, who had since become his husband; it is from Scott that this narrator and our editing staff know much of the doctor's side of the story. Neil had told Scott much about his career, not just of his proudest achievements but also of his greatest failures, and on one particular day nearing the end of his life, Dr. Burroughs was listing his biggest regrets in hopes of finding solace in Scott's reassurance that he had done the best he could; chief among these regrets was the case of the teenage bear boy with a case of ADHD so advanced from its lack of treatment that it manifested in what many could understandably mistake for a mental handicap, who had a heart of pure gold but couldn't show it through the gigantic beastly body he was trapped inside which made his uncontrollable impulses all the more damaging, and whose parents were too lazy and solipsistic to do what they needed to do to help their son overcome his challenges. On that day in 2018, Neil confessed to his partner that he had never stopped thinking about that boy and had always wondered what had become of him; he had spent many nights thinking about how desperately that boy needed somebody in his life who cared enough about him to try to help him get better, and in his waning hours Dr. Burroughs expressed immense guilt that he couldn't have been that person for him.