Part Two

I don’t remember most of what happened after Christopher died. To hear my husband and kids tell it, I got lost for a very long time.

Three months after Christopher died, my youngest son was deployed to Afghanistan. So when he came home on leave before his deployment mid December, we sent him down to Florida to spend time with my Mom and to say goodbye. We knew she wasn’t long for this world. In Jan., Michael, Brittany and I  drove him down to Cherry Point and then continued on to Florida, so that they too could say goodbye to my mother. On our way back home, we found out that Stephen’s deployment was postponed, so we decided to stay a week in the area and got a timeshare right on Atlantic Beach. My husband flew down at this point as well and we had another week with him. After Christopher’s death, my sister came to me and said she was telling people about Christopher (she does a lot of volunteering for an organization that many big wigs in the all the branches of the military attend) and one general told her to say the word and Stephen would never be put in harms way, he would stay state side. So when she said this, oh my gosh the joy just bubbled up in me. I could keep my child safe!! Imagine my shock and horror when out of my mouth comes, YaNO! My sister says I tried to look down at my mouth because I couldn’t believe I had said that. I looked at her and asked,  did I really just say no? She told me to think about it, no one would know, especially Stephen. That’s when I realized why I said no.  I just didn’t have it in me and couldn’t say yes keep him home,  I couldn’t tell my child that my need to keep him safe was greater than his need to follow his dreams, and so I let him go. Of course I spent hours and hours threatening God with all types of bodily harm if anything happened to him. I also told Christopher that if if didn’t watch over and keep his brother safe I was going to kick his butt when I saw him. I wasn’t kidding.

Five months and a day after Christopher died, my Mom died. All six of us, her children were with her when she passed. I don’t think I really ever dealt with her death as it was so close to Christopher’s death.

I guess it was sometime in the fall that I went back to work through a temp agency, it was supposed to be for 3 or 4 months at the most which is why I agreed to it, so that would be late 2011. In January of 2012, I started getting sick  and no one knew what was wrong with me. Michael who was in that horrific accident in 2005 where he crushed his right side of his face started having more and more grand mal seizures. His first was in 2010 which he had while he was driving his truck on a very busy road (also the same road where the accident happened years ago). So with his health issues and now mine who flummoxed all the doctors I went to, my job started getting a little cranky with me taking off time. If Michael a seizure I needed to get him to the hospital and would leave work, with my strange illness, I would have to stay home. I would have angioedema, tachycardia (at one point my resting heart rate was almost 200 beats a minute), I had urticaria pigmentosa, that would swell my eyes shut, I started having anaphylaxis episodes, had to have a bone marrow biopsy done. And no one could tell me what was wrong, so I was on steroids for almost a year and a half until even that didn’t help. It was finally my allergist who said well we tried everything else so lets just try this blood test and see where it goes. So she did a tryptase blood test. It came back abnormal and very high. A normal person has a level between 2-10 ( I think they just . changed it to 11 now). Mine was in the high 80’s. I know see a specialist in Boston at Brighams and Womens Hospital every 6 months, I graduated from going every 3 months. They say stress is a big factor. My diagnosis is Mast Cell Activation Disease.  Go me!!! So here we are with my health pretty bad, and me running to take Michael to the doctors or hospital at a moments notice and HR person where I worked getting mad at me. At a company meeting she said yes, we have rules and expectations but if you have an issue that needs to be addressed and I am kept in the loop, then we can work things out.  So I ask to see her, explain what is going on and she basically  said “too bad for you. if you keep taking time off you will be let go”. NOT a very nice person. The funny thing is, I was a temp, if I didn’t work, I didn’t get paid, so what her beef was I will never know. Sometime in the summer, The Marines (or the government) was looking to lower the number in their ranks and allowed special early release if there was good cause. With me sick and Michael having at this point 6 -10 breakthrough seizures daily and Stephen having less than 9 months left on his contract, he was able to come home to help out. There were days my eyes were swollen shut that I couldn’t see, always days when the palms of my hands were so swollen I couldn’t drive. There was also the time I had been sitting down watching TV and when I got up to walk I fell. There was a huge hive on the arch of one foot, it felt like  was in a see saw, if it weren’t so scary I would have laughed.

So Stephen came home on Oct 19, 2012. When he saw Michael having a grand mal it scared scared him and he realized that it was a very real scary situation we were dealing with. On the Monday, the last week in November, after having stayed in the hospital for a video EEG the beginning of the month, my husband took off to take Michael to get the results of the test (Remember, I worked with the lady from hell and didn’t dare take off). Well, Michael   found out that he wasn’t going to get his license back, wasn’t going to be able to go back to school and probably would never be a police officer. He had to take charge of his health and LISTEN to his doctor and to stop googling stuff and believe in his doctors (I used to call him Dr Google, because he would look for all sorts of things that he thought was wrong with him. He wasn’t an active participant in his on recovery. He needed to go to sleep at the same time every night and wake up at the same time, he needed to exercise more and take his meds on a schedule. Michael thought he knew better than the doctor. He was wrong.

On November 30 2012, 4 days after being told all the things he couldn’t do, Michael decided that he was done listening to the doctors, they didn’t know anything and he was going to do what he wanted. So that cold morning, I went out the front door to start my car and put the heat on and I turned back to the house, I saw my garage door was open and Michael was sitting in a lawn chair on his phone and a friend of his was looming over him. My first thought was that the friend looked like the grim reaper. He was dressed in black with a black hood over his head. I totally freaked out on both of them The friend was told to get the f out of my house and stay away. The I went ballistic on Michael. I screamed that he was making me watch him die and he needed to be an active participant in his health, I said over and over over again, you promised me you would be ok, you swore you would take care of your health and you promised me I would not bury another child, that I couldn’t do that again. I went into the house knowing in my gut that I should stay home, but I also knew I needed to be at work for a meeting. Michael and his friend came in and went down to the basement. And as I debated what to do ( I had to be in work at 8:30 and it was already 8:15). I then heard the friend start up the basement stairs (he coat made a loud swishing sound) so I would make a noise and I could hear him go back down. Finally at 8:20 I knew I had to leave. So I woke up Brittany and told her to go down to her brother in five minutes, I told her that I didn’t trust the kid that was here (he had just got out of a drug program). At 10:30 ish I got a frantic call from Stephen. He had gone into the garage to get something from the refrigerator we have in there and he found Michael unconscious lips blue and not breathing. he did CPR on him for 10 minutes before the police got there, they did CPR for another 10 minutes and then the EMT’s got there and after a while they were able to get a faint heartbeat. When I got home, the police took me to the side of my house, wouldn’t let me see Stephen or Michael. The ambulance left just as Brittany was brought home from her job, my husband had gotten home right before her. We all then left for the hospital. Michael was admitted as a drug overdose. From what we were able to understand, him the reaper friend had gone out to get heroin. They went to friends who dealt. FRIENDS!!!!! So we are now thinking that he OD’ed on heroin (snorting it) and trying to cope with that. Then friends and family converge on the hospital (ICU floor), there had to be over 30 people there waiting to hear what is going on. SO much chaos and unknowns, but all I see is yet another son in yet another hospital and I was losing him too. Funny thing, as they were leaving with Michael in the ambulance, they asked me what hospital I wanted him to go to, and I just thought, it can’t be the hospital Christopher died at, so they  took him to another one. We managed to get hold of his neurologist and when he got there, he looked at he scans of his brain and with tears in his eyes, he told us and showed us that there was no grey matter in the brain, it will filled with I think he said edema, but I could be wrong. We asked him what do to and he said that if it were his child he would stop everything. there really was no hope. Unfortunately, the hospital had a different view point, they had started protocol and they wouldn’t stop if for 24 hours.  At one point, my sister and Brittany were in the room with Michael, when this doctor walks in, all cheerful and happy and says to us, “I have good news for you. If we can get his heart to beat on its own, then your son will be a vegetable for the rest of his life. Yeah, I ape shit on him. My sister pulled me away before I could hit him. Molten lava flowed from my mouth as I told him off. I still shake my head at that memory, he really needs help with his delivery.  At some point a doctor comes in to talk to us, she isn’t on the case, but when she saw Brittany in the hospital she had to look into why we were there. Brittany went to school with her son and had been at her house many times. She looked at all the lab work and then came over to talk to me and Brit. We told her he had Od’d on heroin. She then corrected us. She said that yes, he had trace of heroin, but it wasn’t enough to do anything to him, it was what it was laced with that did the damage. There was anxiety meds, high blood pressure meds, something else and Britt swears she heard her say rat poisoning in it. There were a number of people in the hospital that day due a bad batches of heroin that were mixed with other stuff. And they got the stuff from FRIENDS. But with all the stuff it was laced with plus all the meds he was one for his seizures, it was a lethal cocktail, courtesy of his good FRIENDS!

At 1:00 AM, the nurses told us he was stabilized and we should  go home and try and sleep. SO everyone left. AT 2 AM the phone rang and the nurse said he has taken a turn for the worse and we should get there. When we got there, he had stabilized again. At 8 AM, the admitted defeat and were going to take him off life support. At this point I told them that they would wait until Stephen and Brittany got there so they could say goodbye to yet another brother. Michael lived mere minutes after the tubes were taken out, but we were there with him.

And once again, I had to tell another child that it was OK to go home to God and then lied and told him that we would be Ok.

The ironic thing is, I kept thinking all year that all I had to do was to get Michael to age 25, then he would be ok.  Christopher and Michael were born 20 months apart and they died a little over two years apart. Both were 24 when the died.