watch as he sways with the trees...
My posting here has obviously gone by the wayside, but something happened to me that is making me feel like I need to get something off my chest if I'm ever going to sleep today...
This was going to be a much longer post, but for some reason Firefox is making with its usually laggy hate and the more I type the worse it gets, so... I think I'm going to do this in several parts...
When I was 15, Sharon (my biological mom) and I wound up in a difficult situation. She was jobless for long enough that it made an impact on our way of life, she and I wound up having to move out of the fairly nice house that we had at the time, and were forced in to a place that was little more than a shack with a couple of rooms. I was a high schooler. BARELY a high schooler. There was absolutely nothing I could have done about the situation at the time, but to be honest I really had no idea the gravity of it all UNTIL we were forced to move. And even then, I still didn't know just how bad off we were. Why? Because my mother never told me. Ever. And to make matters worse, I learned years later that she never asked for help from anyone. Not my brother who is 12 years older than me and had a job that could have easily afforded him to help even a little, not my father who was making buttloads of money being an independent hair stylist, NO ONE. Why? Because she was afraid to ask.
Sadly this is a trait I share with her, but I've learned to mentally kick my own ass when I get in situations like that.
Anyway... this move led in to a domino effect. She did manage to get a job at Sykes (a call center) at some point. When, though, I'm a little hazy on. My memory is horribly spotty for a good portion of high school because of the things that happened. But even while she was working there was something wrong with her. She would complain about pain at the back of her legs. I can't remember how she described it, but eventually she asked me to look one day and what I saw was...
... gross. Horribly horribly gross. I don't even want to describe it because it pains me that one memory that is still that clear is something of that nature. Really, it's something anyone would like to forget. Not just me.
It turns out several things were happening at once, but what was going on with the back of her legs was her skin was, quite literally, dying. In huge patches.
Eventually she broke down and went to the doctor. That night she called me and said that she was going to the hospital and likely staying over night. Which she did. I went to stay with a friend because I was only fifteen at the time and quite frankly I was on the verge of freaking out because no one knew what the hell was going on. She did come home... only to go back to the hospital again a short time later...
And she didn't come out for two years.
That is not an exaggeration.
She had been taking Ibuprofen for years. 10+, if memory serves. And high doses of it, too. Not just over the counter crap, but pills that were 800 mg or more each. She suffered from arthritis and this was a time (it wasn't even 2000 yet - I was a freshmen in high school in 1998, and she had been taking them for a good ten or more years BEFORE then) when most prescription arthritis medications were either not available, not tested, or too expensive for some one in our income range to get. And it wasn't like we had insurance, either. Prescription Ibuprofen was cheap, easy to get from doctors who just wanted to throw meds at people, and for the most part effective. But it also destroys you insides. Horribly.
Imagine taking something like that for over a decade. Consistently. What do you think is going to happen?
Her kidneys were failing. Her skin was dying. There were so many things wrong with her that I, at fifteen, probably didn't even understand half of it, and the other half I was lucky if they TOLD me. She went from mostly fine, to fairly incoherent, to being in a coma in less than six weeks while I lived with my friend's family and tried to go to school and failed at focusing on anything other than the fact that my life was more or less falling apart.
And to make matters worse, the doctor at the hospital was REFUSING to treat her. Because she was overweight. No, not overweight. Morbidly obese.
And that was the ONLY reason. ... well lack of insurance may have played a part too, but all I heard back then was "I won't treat your mom because she's fat. Sorry, kid."
Yeah, that's something you REALLY want to hear at 15 years old.
Thankfully an old family friend who happened to be a psychiatrist, and a fairly well known one in town at that, stepped in with the aid of my then-Foster mother Jean and basically told the doctor to do something, or transfer her to some one who would unless he wanted to get his ass sued for everything he was worth.
She was transferred to OSHU in Portland, and I didn't see her again until I was almost 17...
I know that's a crappy place to leave it, but now Firefox is even worse and I can barely type, so I'll continue this tomorrow after some sleep.
This was going to be a much longer post, but for some reason Firefox is making with its usually laggy hate and the more I type the worse it gets, so... I think I'm going to do this in several parts...
When I was 15, Sharon (my biological mom) and I wound up in a difficult situation. She was jobless for long enough that it made an impact on our way of life, she and I wound up having to move out of the fairly nice house that we had at the time, and were forced in to a place that was little more than a shack with a couple of rooms. I was a high schooler. BARELY a high schooler. There was absolutely nothing I could have done about the situation at the time, but to be honest I really had no idea the gravity of it all UNTIL we were forced to move. And even then, I still didn't know just how bad off we were. Why? Because my mother never told me. Ever. And to make matters worse, I learned years later that she never asked for help from anyone. Not my brother who is 12 years older than me and had a job that could have easily afforded him to help even a little, not my father who was making buttloads of money being an independent hair stylist, NO ONE. Why? Because she was afraid to ask.
Sadly this is a trait I share with her, but I've learned to mentally kick my own ass when I get in situations like that.
Anyway... this move led in to a domino effect. She did manage to get a job at Sykes (a call center) at some point. When, though, I'm a little hazy on. My memory is horribly spotty for a good portion of high school because of the things that happened. But even while she was working there was something wrong with her. She would complain about pain at the back of her legs. I can't remember how she described it, but eventually she asked me to look one day and what I saw was...
... gross. Horribly horribly gross. I don't even want to describe it because it pains me that one memory that is still that clear is something of that nature. Really, it's something anyone would like to forget. Not just me.
It turns out several things were happening at once, but what was going on with the back of her legs was her skin was, quite literally, dying. In huge patches.
Eventually she broke down and went to the doctor. That night she called me and said that she was going to the hospital and likely staying over night. Which she did. I went to stay with a friend because I was only fifteen at the time and quite frankly I was on the verge of freaking out because no one knew what the hell was going on. She did come home... only to go back to the hospital again a short time later...
And she didn't come out for two years.
That is not an exaggeration.
She had been taking Ibuprofen for years. 10+, if memory serves. And high doses of it, too. Not just over the counter crap, but pills that were 800 mg or more each. She suffered from arthritis and this was a time (it wasn't even 2000 yet - I was a freshmen in high school in 1998, and she had been taking them for a good ten or more years BEFORE then) when most prescription arthritis medications were either not available, not tested, or too expensive for some one in our income range to get. And it wasn't like we had insurance, either. Prescription Ibuprofen was cheap, easy to get from doctors who just wanted to throw meds at people, and for the most part effective. But it also destroys you insides. Horribly.
Imagine taking something like that for over a decade. Consistently. What do you think is going to happen?
Her kidneys were failing. Her skin was dying. There were so many things wrong with her that I, at fifteen, probably didn't even understand half of it, and the other half I was lucky if they TOLD me. She went from mostly fine, to fairly incoherent, to being in a coma in less than six weeks while I lived with my friend's family and tried to go to school and failed at focusing on anything other than the fact that my life was more or less falling apart.
And to make matters worse, the doctor at the hospital was REFUSING to treat her. Because she was overweight. No, not overweight. Morbidly obese.
And that was the ONLY reason. ... well lack of insurance may have played a part too, but all I heard back then was "I won't treat your mom because she's fat. Sorry, kid."
Yeah, that's something you REALLY want to hear at 15 years old.
Thankfully an old family friend who happened to be a psychiatrist, and a fairly well known one in town at that, stepped in with the aid of my then-Foster mother Jean and basically told the doctor to do something, or transfer her to some one who would unless he wanted to get his ass sued for everything he was worth.
She was transferred to OSHU in Portland, and I didn't see her again until I was almost 17...
I know that's a crappy place to leave it, but now Firefox is even worse and I can barely type, so I'll continue this tomorrow after some sleep.