When we think of abuse
we already assume that someone is the “abuser” and someone is the “abused.” However, it’s hard to get to the heart of
people abusing themselves. Nobody wants to talk about themselves being their
own abuser. You have the cutters, the drug abusers, the co-dependents who don’t
feel loved unless they are being abused, the people who don’t feel good unless
they feel bad, and then there are the people who are terminally ill and do not
take care of themselves. At least not the way society says they should. This is my mother.
She was diagnosed HIV positive in 1996. Her physically
abusive boyfriend at the time already knew he had it and knowingly passed it to
my mother, along with Hepatitis C. She has seen a doctor for it, at most, 5
times in the last 19 years. She insists that doctors are villains and that they
are positively out to make us sicker so they can all continue to have jobs. Over
the years she has tried all sorts of natural cures and become quite the health
fanatic. She really gets crazy at times, trying to convince me that if my
children use fluoride toothpaste that the government will be able to apply mind
control on them in the future. And let’s not forget that if they eat cereal
they will get cancer. She goes on the internet and researches things that only convince
her that the government is out to kill us all…..except the rich, who can afford
the treatments to survive. But that is just another scam to get money out of
the rich, not because they want to help them. There was one time when she got
scared and attempted to take the medications the doctors prescribed to her.
They made the veins in her legs bulge out, tore her stomach to pieces and made
her hair fall out. She threw them in the garbage and that was the last time she
looked to doctors for help.
I have to admit, maybe she’s on to something. I mean,
really, 19 years? That’s pretty damn good. She is about to turn 61 and even
though I say she is a health nut she has also been an alcoholic and meth-head
over the years. When she first found out she turned into some kind of suicidal
teenager. She acted like she didn’t care about anything and lived for the
moment. She did not care about tomorrow. As far as she was concerned tomorrow
might not come with the freedom to do as she pleased. The whole time she acted
this way it made me angry and sad and all kinds of other emotions like “grow
up, act like a parent” and so on. But then it occurred to me that she probably didn’t
know how to act herself. How does one accept something like that?
Eventually she began to care about living and started taking
better care of herself. These days she still does her weird remedies but her
biggest killer is stress and wearing herself out physically. She was able to
visit my brother in prison for the first time in six years and had to drive 13
hours to get there. When I spoke to her on the phone she sounded terrible. She
had gotten a urinary tract infection and was trying to rest up for the trip.
Instead of going to a doctor she headed down to California with a friend to see
my brother. She got pulled over, not once but twice, for people calling in a
disoriented driver on the highway. She was told to pull over and rest. She didn’t
listen and when she got to the prison not only did they not let her visit, they
detained her for four hours, insisting that she sleep before they would let her
leave.
On the way home she had to let her friend drive because she
could no longer handle the pain and had started becoming disoriented again.
They pulled over in San Francisco so she could run in and use the restroom at a
hotel and she never came back out. When her friend found her, she was down the
street sitting on a sidewalk moaning and talking to herself. They got back on
the highway to head home and she only got worse, until he was so scared he took
her to the closest hospital he could find. They ended up life flighting her to
Eugene, Oregon where they put her in ICU. She is trying to fight the bacteria
that has spread through her internal organs. They ended up having to sedate her
because she would not relax, constantly trying to leave.
At what point does a person just let go and allow someone to
help them? At what point do you stop hurting yourself and allow others to help
you heal? When do you stop abusing yourself and realize that you need to ask
for help? I guess these are the questions I will ask her when I can.
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