Ctrl+Alt+Delete: Restarting My Son’s Mind

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Three years. Three years of in and out of hospitals. We’ve visited some of the worst, and we’ve been to the best.

It’s been three years of medications that worked against him, bringing life-threatening side effects—myocarditis, toxicity, and every worst-case scenario imaginable. My boy was always the 1% who got them. From severe akathisia and involuntary movements to tachycardia, weight gain, unwanted tissue growth, fatigue, insomnia, and uncontrollable projectile vomiting all day, every day, for weeks at a time—if a side effect existed, he got it.

Then there was the issue of short-lived medications. Sometimes it was human error, and sometimes his body just decided, We aren’t accepting this anymore. I honestly don’t know how many different medications he’s tried. We did gene testing, and while some drugs would work for a while, randomly one day they just stopped. The doctors ended up creating a cocktail for him: 12 daily pills, 14 if you count the as-needed anxiety meds. It’s been an exhausting battle of mind against body, trying to find the magic potion to keep him stable.

I remember being asked back in March when he was last at his baseline. Baseline. What does that even mean? When you live with someone with schizophrenia that is technically being treated, but whose body simply won’t comply, how do you answer that? I thought back hard and guessed the fall of 2025, but I had no real idea what they meant. When was the last time he was stable? Stable. Another question I couldn’t answer.

We’ve had 11 hospitalizations in the past year alone, ranging from 2 days to 45 days. The best hospitals, like McLean, kept him for 40 to 45 days. The worst was a facility in Derry that discharged him after just 2 days when he was clearly still very unwell.

So many medications either made him worse or, like Clozapine, showed amazing results at first—only to quickly cause flu-like symptoms, chest pain, and myocarditis, forcing us to discontinue them. We began considering non-pharmaceutical treatments. Initially, we hated the sound of ECT. Electric shock treatment sounded so barbaric. Eventually, when all else failed, we agreed to try it, but his cardiologist denied the treatment because of his heart.

During our last stay at McLean, they talked to us about TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation)—similar to ECT, but much less scary. It essentially uses a magnet to send pulses to the brain, restarting pathways that are no longer working. To me, it felt like pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete. The side effects are minimal, but it does carry a 1% chance of a seizure.

And knowing our luck? Chance is going to be the one who gets that seizure.

I prepared myself for the worst. Walking into the room for that first treatment, I clenched my jaw and braced myself. But he completed the first procedure, and it was completely uneventful.

From there, things kept going well. He now gets a treatment every day, five times a week. He is currently in week 7, and we have seen no negative side effects. What I have witnessed is a gradual, incredible change. It started subtly, but it’s evolving every day.

The first things I noticed were that he wasn’t sleeping as much, and he was actually sitting down for dinner and enjoying his food. For months, he had been on a routine where he’d starve all day and only eat at night. Then, he started to putter around the garage again. Chance loves tools and taking things apart. I remember around week 2 when he came into the house with grease all over his hands and face. To me, that grease symbolized healing. He hadn’t touched a wrench in over a year.

Slowly, I have watched him emerge from the cocoon this disease encapsulated him in. He is making a huge mess in the garage—taking things apart, getting covered in grease—and although I could live without the mess, I welcome every bit of it right now.

Beyond the tools and the grease, this past week I witnessed real growth. Ever since he was little, Chance has wanted to get his ears pierced. It has stayed on his short list of goals for years, right alongside visiting his friend in Florida.

This week, he finally did it.

He asked me to take him, and we went. He walked inside on his own, and when he came back out, the little spark from the stone in his ear shined so bright I had to hold back tears. Not because I cared about the earring itself, but because that diamond was a symbol. A check in a box. A piece of hope he has wished for for over a decade. That tiny stone was his very first step toward realizing that he can—and will—move forward.