elizabeth-johanna-blog

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The king of Spring.

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Scamp is pretty excited about the crocuses popping up!

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I was lucky enough to score free tickets to the Zombies in America tour last week. I got to see my man, Andrew McMahon, and this great band, Atlas Genius. THIS is how you do covers, people. So good!

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Most days, I just spend my time wondering how to keep myself calm and seeming to be fine. Inside though, my mind is racing and I have so many thoughts that have nowhere to go. I thought maybe typing them out would help slow things down in there, so I’m giving it a whirl.

A LONG TIME AGO, a minor accident happened that eventually caused major changes in my family’s lives. My mom tripped over our dog and fell down the stairs while doing laundry. It seems like a small thing, right? Someone falls and they get a bump or scrape or two, but they bounce back quickly. Not in this case. My mom had some back pain afterwards, but being the stubborn person she is, she put it off and thought it would go away. When it didn’t, she told our family doctor about it. He thought, “oh, probably just some muscle spasms, these pills should help.” If I could go back in time for anything, it would be for this moment and tell him to do a MRI or CAT scan instead, first. “These pills should help.” It wasn’t an antibiotic, or something little. No. It was narcotics. You know, they give them to people for temporary relief of pain of any sort. But did you know, that when some people take them thinking it’s an innocent way of feeling better, it ruins their lives instead? We didn’t either. I guess the doctor didn’t, either. My mom took them, and they made her feel “better.” And so she kept taking them. And they kept making her feel “better.” And then they would wear off. And she thought she needed them to feel “better.” But did SHE need them? No. Her brain did. Her brain thought, “woah, these things are awesome, they block out all of reality.” And so, the more my mom took them, the more her brain pushed reality back and out and welcomed a new world of clouds, bitterness, regret, unwillingness. It definitely wasn’t a world that my family was used to, so when my mom starting bringing it out, we didn’t like it. Not at all. But my mom seemed to think it was better. With her already several health problems, she started to accumulate more and more. And as she accumulated them, she didn’t feel a need to take care of them all properly. Here she is, being a home for all of these health problems, and she isn’t even giving them the proper care they need. She just kept taking these pills thinking they were a cure for everything. And so, on and on. She would be in and out of the hospital. She would be withdrawing from these pills that she would take too many of in a day, and run out before they could be replenished for her and her brain and her new world inside of her. Years and years go by. She loses her teeth. She spends weeks at a time in a hospital. She argues with doctors and nurses. She sends beams of unhappiness to everyone around her, but especially to my dad. Her partner in life slowly became her enemy. Everything he did was wrong. Everything he didn’t do was a problem. I think the pills planted a seed in her brain telling her that this man is a monster, when in reality, he’s a saint. He always made time in his busy day of driving 3+ hours round trip to and from his job, to make sure she had company. All while keeping his job, to make sure she can receive all this help from the hospitals, and still be able to get her pills. I know it seems like, oh, someone is sick so they should be in the hospital. Well, if it were that easy, maybe she would be better by now, but she isn’t. In the course of 10+ years, she spent the better portion of it making herself sick when she ran out of her pills, so that she could go into the hospital where they would have to give her all of her medicine. It seems smart, doesn’t it? You run out of “medicine” you just go to a place where they’ll make sure you get it. All while this is happening, her body is starting to fight against the pills. Her insides are dying. Her brain is being warped. Her heart is weakening. In October 2015, the biggest fight in her body came to light. She was very sick at home, so my dad decided she should go to the hospital. He took her there, and shortly after a whole whirlwind of things happened, unexpectedly of course. She was immediately admitted to the ICU because of all the blood work and tests they ran. Her whole body was under attack, from itself. The doctors knew something was very wrong but they couldn’t find out what exactly it was. So they began running any test they could think of. After deciding to a colonoscopy, they found (most of) it. All of the tissue in her stomach was gray, and dead which was causing a lot of bacteria in her blood, which was causing infections all over her body. Her colon wasn’t functioning properly, so... in a not-so-polite way, she was full of shit. Which was also getting out, into her body, which as anyone can imagine, is NOT good for your body. So, with all of this, they had to remove the entire left side of her colon, along with her entire rectum. This left her with a colostomy bag. After this surgery though, came a heartbreaking moment for our family. She began bleeding internally and came very close to leaving us. The doctors called my dad back from the waiting room, and asked if he knew if she would want him to sign a DNR (do not resuscitate) form. As we all remember her saying, “if I have to live off of machines, I don’t want to.” So, he signed it. And we all braced for the worst that could happen and anxiously waited to hear how her second emergency surgery would end. She pulled through, as always. She is one strong woman, that is for sure. After getting through the surgeries, we knew she would have a very long road of recovery ahead of her. Once her body was bouncing back, and she no longer needed a breathing tube, or dialysis she was able to start getting help on her physical therapy and speech therapy and just getting back to life. But... is that what she wanted? I know she hates being sick like she is, but she has a very odd way of showing it. She got home from the rehabilitation center and really seemed like she wanted this second shot that she was given. She would wake up early, eat breakfast, get dressed, do her exercises. It was nice seeing this slight gleam of hope come from her. Until... it ended. She slowly began to go back to her old habits. Sitting in bed, watching TV, getting grumpy towards us when we tried helping her. So eventually, she went back downhill. She would run of her pills. She would throw temper tantrums, and go back to the hospital. After about 6 months, this whole taking too many pills and running out thing caught up to her. She ran out, and we all knew it. I know as soon as she runs out because I can just see that look on her face and hear the sound in her voice that lets me know, we’re in for a rough couple of days. So in August, after her birthday, she ran out. She didn’t want to go to the hospital, so she thought taking a handful of Benadryl would help. Well, all it did was send her to the hospital. Where she had a heart attack, and needed a stent put in her heart. After that, came a stroke, and then another. As I was rushing to the hospital as the stroke was happening, I didn’t know what to expect. I was terrified, especially since I was going alone. I didn’t know if I could handle seeing my mom in that condition. When I got there, I found out she was being transferred to a bigger campus for proper care. After all of this, we decided, we need to get her help of these pills are going to kill her. We decided we should hold onto them and only give her a few days at a time, to keep her from running out and doing something stupid, thinking it’ll help her. Well, she didn’t like it. She would constantly beg and yell at us for pills. She would get physical with us when we wouldn’t give them to her. She would say she was leaving the house. This whole thing, has turned into a nightmare. She is so mean to us, especially my dad. She has punched him countless times, gave him a black eye. All because her brain is so warped from these pills. Oh wait, I forgot something very important. In February, it was a time where my dad was just sick of her being so difficult about someone else holding her pills that she just got to hold them herself. And of course, with the lower doses she was given, she ran out. And this time, maybe because her doses were cut back and her body was probably still withdrawing from all those high doses, she thought, she couldn’t live this way anymore. So. She got up. She got a few knives from the kitchen. She found a sharp one, and cut her wrists, and cut into her stomach. She tried to kill herself because she didn’t have these pills to make her escape her reality and make her feel “better.” So. My dad woke up, on the morning of a winter storm, to find my mom with cuts in her, and a bloody knife in her hands. She was conscious, but not all there. She was taken to the hospital, where she was admitted onto the 6th floor. After a couple weeks, they decided to let her come home. She was given new depression medicine, anxiety medicine, to help her. In my experience through all of this, no amount of medicine is going to help someone unless they WANT it to. She doesn’t want her life to change. She seems to want to be sick, and get help from us, instead of helping herself. I have sympathy for my mom. I always will. But it is too hard to try and help someone that just doesn’t want it. Someone that just sits and thinks back on all the things that happened in life and didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to. Instead of moving forward, and trying to make themselves a better, healthier, happier person, they just live in the past and try to get everyone around them to get stuck there, too. All in all, I think about all of this a lot. I think of things she has said and done to me and my family, and how much I hate it. But, I am also seeing that, as much as I love and care about her, she chose those pills over us many, many times. And I know my real mom, the mom that used to laugh and do fun things is in there somewhere, but after waiting 10+ years for her to come back, and see no sign of her, it just is hard to wait and wait and wait.

I don’t know what to do. All I know is, I don’t want to end up unhappy and unhealthy and bitter. I want to build a life with someone I love, and live a life that I can be happy with when it’s over.

// abrupt ending because I feel like if I don’t stop typing now, I never will. //