My name is Lyndsay & this is my experience in hell on earth.
I’m 20 years old, female, college student.
The craziest year of my life started August of 2011… Right around my birthday…. It seems like my birthday is a celebration of the worst times in my life. It’s like oh joy but not why you might think.
I was attending college and living at home with my mom and little brother. I had known that my mom had an addiction to pills all of my childhood. This has caused more problems than you can imagine (example seeing her go through withdraws and throwing up in a bowl in our living room floor) . When I grew up I was very physically abused as well mentally abused. I ran away a lot growing up to get away from the abuse. On my 11th birthday I was getting yelled at for getting in the way and no one even told me happy birthday. So I did what I always did and ran away when things got hard. The only issue was I was at my father figures restruant on main street in St. Charles Missouri during a festival called “The festival of the little hills” ….. an extremly crowded festival to say the least. I remember running and crying for a while and then being stopped by a tall male. Maybe he was tall because I was so short… but I will never forget those eyes. He said to me “aren’t you just an angel“ (I now can’t STAND to be called that word… It sends chills down my spine) well that was the first time something sexual happened without my permission. . Anyways moving on, let’s just say I didn’t have a good childhood. During highschool I went through bad pain with my condition called Fibromyalgia, I now think it was due to my living conditions with my mother and that’s why I had so many flares up with the pain. I ended up dropping out of highschool because of it. Which puts us up to August 2011…..I remember for about a month my mom screaming in pain. Her right hand at first just looked a little red. As time went on her hand became swollen.. to the point it didn’t even look like a hand anymore. At the last stages of it her hand actually started turning black… well like this black streaked look… maybe it was dark blue?? It was just odd. She kept me up by holding onto me in bed, screaming and crying…. I remember her saying that she just wanted to die because the pain was so terrible all while I was in my first semester of college, So on my birthday I went to stay at my friend Donna’s house in Murray so I could get some rest away from the on going moans of pain… I tried to get her to go the hospital… she wouldn’t listen… so feeling helpless I left the house for a few days…. About a week later between classes I remember a phonecall from my mother stating that she finally went to the hospital to get help. I had been trying to get her to go the hospital for weeks by that point but she wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t tell me what the doctors had told her… but I knew it was bad… because they don’t keep anyone in the hospital for three days anymore. I mean I’ve had my stomach sliced open for galbladder surjery and they kicked me out the next day. I started to worry even more since it seemed that was a long time to keep someone admitted with no answers. They had answers, my mother just hadnt told me yet. I went to visit her hospital room and brought her flowers and candy (bubble gum and some of her favorites). I still had no idea of what was happening when the nurse walks in and puts blood in her neck…. how confused would you be??? don’t they only give blood to people who’ve been like shot?. Her hand was completely covered with this white gaze stuff… She tells me that they are going to have to remove her hand that she got an infection from getting a nail stuck in her hand and the extra blood was because they tried to save her hand by taking a vein from her leg and she lost a lot of blood. I believed her. I was stupid. I remember dropping to my knees .. Sobbing so badly they took my brother out of the room. She had the operation that Friday and then came out fine afterwards, but she still wouldn’t let me see her arm after the operation, or what was left of it anyways. She spent about another week and a half in the hospital before her blood presure became extremly high. When I called her one afternoon she didn’t know who I was, I knew something was wrong, she had been fine the day before.. let me refrase that… she had been able to tell who I was. I remember calling my dad really upset and him trying to calm me down. I was so scared for her. The next morning I get ready and go to class and on my way stop to get breakfast at a local huddle house. While they were preparing my food I get a call from the CCU stating that my mother had been having seizers and is disoriented and they needed permission to do a spinal tap to be sure there wasn’t an infection and that I was the next of kin so I had to make the medicial decisions for her.. by the way did I mention she had no idea who anyone was? They had to eventually put her in a medicial induced coma so her seizers wouldn’t do as much brain damage. ANYWAYS, at that phonecall I ran out the door of the breakfast place and off to paducah to help my mom… well help the doctors help my mom???. When I got there… I saw her laying there…. moving like an animal in pain…. shaking from discomfort…. bandages on her head… tubes everywhere…. a missing arm… the first time I saw her missing arm was then… it was missing up to her elbow….
I remember the doctor approaching me in blue scrubs… they seemed so bright… the lights hurt my eyes… no doubt I had been crying. He proceded to tell me the reason why my mom was there and what had actually caused her to lose her arm. She had been crushing up painpillers and injecting them… this caused a blood clot and shut off any blood flow to the hand…. the tissue then began to die. Heartbroken… crushed… betrayed… I felt like an idiot… I remember finding the needles in the spare dresser drawer… the blood on the bathroom floor…. her locked behind the bathroom door for hours on end. I felt so stupid….. I still feel stupid for not knowing. I asked the doctor how they knew something was wrong, apparently they had found her snorting baby powder off of her hospital floor, disoriented. Shocked… how the hell do you respond to this type of news? Well it was too much to bare and I ended up running out of the Critcal Care Unit to the waiting room, crying and falling into my grandma’s arms. I screamed how I hated her. I had a little 12 year old brother … how could she do this to us? I stayed in KY to make sure she would live through everything… after a few days of seizers and having a stroke. She lived. She stayed in the hospital over a month during everything, the day they told me she was ready to be release I threw all my belonging in trash bags into my car and left. I moved to Saint Charles MO the day before she was released to live with my biological father who I barely knew. I moved because I wanted no one to keep me from my dream of becoming a teacher. I left my brother behind although I didn’t want to … I had to.. it was kiddnapping otherwise… he wasn’t legally mine to take. 🙁 but I promised him I would come back for him. I tried so hard to! His dad took my mom to court afterwards but eventually dropped the case because of finanical reasons and after he had been awarded temporary custody…. my mom split town with my brother. Needless to say going through court battles after that whole ordeal seemed like cruel punishment… I felt like I was reliving it all but it was worth it.. I wanted to save my brother and I did everything I could… his father failed me, and I think of my baby brother Anthony everyday. Since then…. my Grandpa has died, my grandma has died, my step father who is the most amazing person in the world fell and broke his arm… ended up having a brain tumor (not cancerous) the size of a golf ball and that’s the reason for him falling, he had it removed and then had a stroke after the operation.. he survived as well. In the past 2 months, he moved away from my mother which made me happy because she never treated him right. To add to all this fucking drama in my life…. I was born with Hep C because of my moms drug addiction (because she shot up drugs and didn’t just do pills like I assumed, although I always knew I had hep c… I never questioned what it was or why I had it until afterwards…. it was just something doctors told me I had that caused me no symptoms). Anyways I am now currently going through Hep C treatment… I’m depressed but on depression medicine… I want to get out and scream at anyone who gets too close to my car… *Major road rage*. I’m in pain which might be due to my fibromyaglia to… either way… I’m sick as hell but can’t really tell anyone because I don’t want them to suffer along with me… lords knows I put them through enough this past year with all the drama that has been created in my life. OH and my anger issues have gotten so bad that I’ve thrown things across the room… that’s a bad side effect of the interferon and riboviron.  I keep this very well hidden from those I love though….. somehow I still push my self to attend classes this fall at Saint Charles Community College but I’m not too sure how things will work out, but I got a 3.7 GPA last semester WITH all this drama… so hopefully I can make it through this semester too.  Needless to say I’ve been through hell and back in the past year… well my entire life in general but holy shit the past year makes me feel like I’m in some horrible lifetime movie that is too horrible to be real. So my birthday is August 17th 1992… so yes it just passed… not only have I been having bad flashbacks of so much stuff but it’s around the same time a year ago that everything happened with my mother. Im so distant lately.. Like I said earlier… my birthday is offically like a celebration of the shit I went through in my past. Yay let us celebrate with cake! :/ So my week started looking up and I got to go to a concert called Uproar with my boyfriend and friend and old neighbor Manda from Kentucky who came up to visit. So what does she bring along? A birthday present from the women called my mother who I no longer speak to and who’s phone numbers are blocked, along with facebook…. so not only do I have no idea how she found out I was going to a concert with my friend but I feel very stalked. I’m so fucking sick and tired of everything that’s happened recently. I just can’t take anymore… I’m 3 and a half months into my Hep C treatment and about two months ago I became suicidal. Sometimes I sit and think if I knew where my dads gun was…. I would already be dead… I’ve pictured my death far too many times in my head. I won’t tell anyone this because they will take me off treatment…. which is known to have this effect on people…. well fuck you. I will die of liver cancer before having to go through something that feels like a cancer treatment again all because my mom was a junkie. So here is to the next two and half months of being depressed out my mind and suicidal. YAY I CAN’T WAIT.