Hopeless and Depressed

Well, according to my mother – everyone in her family hated her and picked fights with her. She used to tell us that her older brother was mean to all of them, but yet she could never pinpoint any one occasion when he did something abusive. She did tell me that her sisters broke the heads off her porcelain dolls that she used to have as a young girl. She was married for the first time when she was 16 to an alcoholic that was in the military and left her alone in their apartment for weeks at a time with no food, but she also told me that her mother would send her a dollar a week and she would go to a movie with the money, but never mentioned buying food with the money (this would have been early 1950s) There were a lot of inconsistencies in the things she told us and we were kept away from the family and not allowed to have contact with anyone. My grandmother died when I was five, so I never saw any of my aunts, uncles or cousins after that time (or even before that time). It’s hard to tell which of her stories were lies and which were truths. I found her brother once about twenty years ago, and asked him his side of the story and of course, it didn’t match what we had been told, but actually did sound a lot more like what my mother’s personality was that we always saw. My mother actually encouraged my sister to be abusive towards me from a very early age. She actually seemed to be ‘proud’ and reward her for her actions at times. I called my step-father my Daddy because he is the only Dad I have ever known, but I actually looked for and found my biological father and met with him and asked what in the marriage led to him having an affair and leaving my mother. His stories were almost identical to those I had heard from my uncle. Even my “Daddy” began drinking heavily to hide from her abusive personality.

I have to take everyone’s “stories” in stride because I wasn’t there and I don’t know who’s telling the truth, but I do know what I have seen and experienced at her hands. She was a very troubled woman whom all say suffered from depression and personality disorders.
For as far back as I can remember, I grew up believing my mother was going to die any day from her disease and that we should thank God for every day we hadn’t killed her with our stress. She was diagnosed with a kidney disease in her mid thirties and seemed to ‘brag’ about her illness and how sick she was all the time and ‘look how much she did for her family and others’ while she was so sick when in reality, she was only “sick” the last ten years before her death. My sister has had the same disease since her mid 30s and hasn’t missed a day of work and suffered no pain and has been told by her physician that there is no pain until the end…. but we didn’t know this growing up. She was just a great manipulator and used whatever she could to control people until the day she died. There was some controversy at the time of her death because it was felt that the doctor’s had just given up trying to help her. But what the rest of the family doesn’t understand, is how she treated her doctors. I was the one that took her to all of her doctor appointments until the very end when I had moved out of town. At that point, someone from her church drove her. She would go to see the doctor, tell him what was wrong with her, how she wanted to be treated and even what medicine to treat her with and if the doctor disagreed, she would “go off” on him. Most of her doctors refused to see her near the end because of that. Only one doctor would see her and he just basically listened and then would send her to the dialysis center for follow up, without doing anything for her, but he stuck with her until a week before she died. She went to the ER and he was contacted, and he left info for the attending doc and never showed up – not even after she had been in ICU for a week, so the family was distraught, not knowing he had given up on her also….

She was a very disturbed woman who always played the victim. If she couldn’t control and manipulate you, then she had no use for you in her life, as evidenced by me finally growing a backbone and breaking free from her manipulation. There are many people in her life that have been tossed aside because they refused to be manipulated. It was her style. Do her bidding or get lost.

I’m making arrangements this week to have the gas disconnected. I will have to use room heaters to heat the place and just deal with not having hot water or being able to use the stove or central heat. The cell phone will be cut of. I will also be getting rid of cable, but will try to hang on to the internet service. No more doctor’s appointments or medications will be bought. The other bills are suffering too bad.

I’ve got to have a place to live and I have to have running water, and I’m going to do my best to keep internet since I won’t have anything else to keep me occupied during the day. But everything else has got to go…..no meds, no doctor’s appointments, limited groceries, no heat, no hot water. It’s just the way it has to be. It’s either this or being homeless and I choose not to be homeless.

It is late Saturday night/early Sunday morning and I have been sick all day. I had my chemo Wednesday which made me sick for a couple of days and then this morning I wake up feeling like I was dying and had a migraine – I haven’t had one this bad since I was in my early 20s. If I could have gone to the ER, I would have. However, my daughter was at work today and my car got repossessed so I am stuck here with no transportation. I did call my doctors (my PCP and my oncologist) and the PCP called me in something for the migraine and after talking to the oncologist, he informed me that the nurse that was with me in the clinic has H1N1 and that it sounded like I had it too.

This really sucks. At this rate I really will be homeless by Christmas. The harder I try, the harder I fail. I just don’t see the point of be even being alive. I can’t finish my chemo, I can’t go to any doctor or even buy groceries when I need them. I have no friends in town and my daughter is always too busy to help me. I literally had to cry and pitch a fit on the phone just to get her to pick up my medicine for me today.

Hi Annie. I just wanted to check in with you….how are you doing?

I had a heart attack December 4th, my car was repossessed December 5th. I now have no way to see my oncologist or cardiologist or rheumatologist, I’m fighting an eviction with the help of a lawyer I can’t afford to pay and my power and gas is being disconnected February 7th and there are no agencies in town that has any money to help me. I have been assigned a counselor from Adult Protective Services, but they also don’t have any money. I’ve passed out three times since December due to erratic heartbeat. I have one pair of jeans that have appx 7 iron on patches and they’re still wearing thin and I ran out of food two weeks ago and have been surviving on a one piece of bread and a spoon full of peanut butter for the last two weeks. Can’t go see the cardiologist, rhematologist, oncologist or the orthopedic surgeon. I can’t stand for more than 30 mnutes at a time and cannot stand for more than an hour – There ya go……..that’s how I’m doing.

Hi Annie. Just wanted to say hi and check in on you – how are you doing?