We're All Insane - Surviving Munchausen by Proxy

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

CW: This episode contains descriptions of abuse & animal death. Surviving Munchausen by Proxy, a form of abuse where caregivers fabricate or induce illnesses in others, demands immense resilience and courage. Victims, often children, endure a complex web of manipulation and deception. Emerging from such a traumatic ordeal entails untangling the emotional and psychological knots, as they grapple with shattered trust and identity. Healing involves rebuilding self-esteem and learning to differentiate between genuine care and harmful intentions. Support networks of friends, family, and professionals play a pivotal role in guiding survivors towards recovery. By reclaiming autonomy, setting boundaries, and seeking therapy, survivors gradually dismantle the insidious effects of Munchausen by Proxy. Each step toward healing marks a triumph of the human spirit over adversity, nurturing newfound strength and a sense of agency to shape their own narratives. Resource: www.munchausensupport.com If you have a unique story you'd like to share on the podcast, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/ZiHgdoK4PLRAddiB9 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, it's me DeVora. I just dropped an all new bonus episode inside my new subscription channel, We're All Insane Plus. This week's bonus episode is called My Brain was slipping into my spine. Listen now by subscribing to We're All Insane Plus inside your Spotify or Apple Podcasts app or go to we're all insane.com. My name's Dice and I survived Munchausen by proxy. So I really, really wanted to talk publicly about surviving Munchausen by proxy. It's in the DSM now as factitious disorder imposed on another, which is a mouthful. Either name I don't like. They're not good representatives.

But it's been like pretty big in news like in the past five years or something. I feel like movies too. Like movies definitely have kind of shed some light on. on it for sure yeah um but i feel like when the act came out on hulu about dd blanchard and gypsy rose blanchard in that case that got so public yeah that's when it was like pushed into the mainstream right because it's been a concept for a while i mean baron von manchal so it was like 18th century or something so i don't know when he became a disease i found that the the um gypsy rose story that like i was so fascinated by that.

Yeah. That was something because I just feel like even though obviously it's very real and it happens to watch on both ends, like someone that is doing that to someone else, but also somebody that's kind of like brainwashed in a way and doesn't even really know what's, it's so intriguing to me. There is absolutely a huge factor of brainwashing. Yeah. I mean, how else are you going to go get somebody to like accept being put under a knife?

Right. Other than like convincing. them that they're supposed to be. Right. Or drugging them. That happens a lot. But also like social media, and I found this out with like watching true crime cases, has, I think really made it more prevalent because it's added this financial motivation where people

set up GoFundMe's because the most successful GoFundMe's are usually like, you. like severely ill children. Like the fundraising for care like that. I mean, it's very expensive in reality. And D.D. Blanchard definitely had that going on. There was another one, I think her name is Kelly Turner. And her daughter passed away, unfortunately.

And there was a huge financial motivation. That was probably her primary thing. Yeah. And Gypsy ended up murdering her mom, right? Gypsy arranged for the murder of her mom. With the boyfriend, right? Yes. Okay.

So the boyfriend definitely deserves a larger sentence, in my opinion. He was not fighting for his life. But there is so many parallels between Miss Blanchard and my eldest sibling. So my mom died when I was 10. and my brothers are older than me by six and nine years and my eldest sibling the first target you know definitely set off mom's uh maternal drives because there's definitely a maternal you know caregiving aspect and you want to be a good one of whatever that means to you when you have that um but my brother so he was

the first target and being the eldest, he had more time to experience my mom's behaviors. But also, my mom had a lot of things going on in addition to the Munchausen bioproxy. She had substance abuse problems, big time. And she also had Munchausen syndrome imposed on herself big time. And by that you mean like one of her parents had it? No. Well, I mean, so I recently learned that her mom had like on the spectrum of Munchausen by proxy ranging from like the super subtle just taking too much.

And fulfillment out of whatever does happen to the child to like those cases you sometimes hear about. where the parent, and I am only going to talk about the parent-child ones. Got it. There are plenty of cases where it's a spousal thing or elderly care. A lot of those end in death as well. But so like the far end of the spectrum, I'd say, are those mothers who will dehydrate their child and inject them with a huge ton of sodium. like really direct action.

To like make them sick. Yes. Okay. And there are a few true cases like that as well as like that's what I learned when I was in school for psychology were cases like that before it got mainstream. And it might be jumping ahead a little bit, which if I am, we can like hit on it later. I have notes for it. Okay, good.

But basically like in certain cases, I guess, if the parent is like trying to make the child sick, wouldn't you say it's in a sense of like, well, one control but two to like so that the child basically needs them and like can't leave their care a paragraph okay good good i can go ahead and whatever you want yeah um so but um my grandmother had like the early end of the spectrum there and it wasn't in that like my my mom has siblings and she wasn't the target of that flavor of munch halogens um but she was exposed to it So that's sort of how it went for her. But when I said that she had Munchausen imposed on herself,

you know, regular Munchausen syndrome or factitious disorder in the DSM, she made herself sick for the attention. So a lot of these like mainstream cases that you hear about and a lot of what I think the general population who are aware of it associate with is that somebody ends up being killed. And I kind of wanted to, you know, for me, I'm a survivor of that abuse. I made it out alive, but I still couldn't get away from this theme of death because my mom's munchausen killed her.

Fortunately, there was no murder involved, no suicide, exactly. but yeah it's still pretty pretty extreme she also had borderline personality disorder i don't know if she was like diagnosed with it during her lifetime i know that she saw therapists and always thought that they were wrong about everything so i don't know in those sessions whether she was diagnosed with anything officially but you know i learned about it in school and she She has a textbook case. I don't remember when Marsha Lennahan published the Dialectical Behavioral Therapy works that she did. You know, it's like the seminal treatment for a borderline personality disorder.

It's also used for like eating disorders and just now it's shifting into just every, you know, use of therapy. but she was a person who had BPD herself and she worked really hard and Vagra PhD and did all of this work to find a way for people with that to go from being like villainous people because it's characterized by a lot of disordered relationships and extreme behaviors, extreme emotions to learning tools. and developing healthy relationships. Before her, it was just like nobody wanted to take on those patients. And I do think that my mom probably fell in the before times. And even, you know, with mental illness,

having these conditions doesn't make you engage in these behaviors. That's a choice. Having the trauma that she did didn't make her, do anything. Behavior is always a choice. You can think whatever you want. You can feel whatever happens to you. I won't say whatever you want because it sucks to feel bad. But the choice is there. And one of the things that really pisses me off about my mom is that she was so intelligent. She was so good, like she was charismatic. She had insight into like the human experience, except as it applied to her.

But she had the tools to be better. She knew how to be better. With my dad, he's still around. He was like the opposite of my mom in so many ways. They had divorced by the time she died. I'll get into that craziness. But I kind of say that marrying her was the best thing and the worst thing that happened to him. The best because I don't think he would have found anybody who would have given him a family the way that she did.

But the reason that she probably glommed on to him was that he was that he was. easily manipulated. So with my dad, I feel like a lot of his failings as a parent, not all of them, but during my upbringing and the better version of my dad post mom, was he just didn't have the ability mentally to do better, whereas my mom absolutely did. And chose not to. So let me ask you. And I would assume this is like more opinion based.

but and pronounce it for me again which one munchausen munchausen by proxy correct okay so that's considered a mental illness correct or incorrect it is in the dsm it's diagnosable so it's a mental illness however some psychologists have put it out there that it's not it's just a form of abuse okay got it because that was kind of going to be my question of like if it is a mental illness like even though, because there's a lot of people with mental illness that can have intelligence and like all these other categories and then can't really control the other things that they do. And I almost feel like like a narcissist, like they make choices to be the way that they are. But at the same time, if that's just how someone is, I feel like how do you really train someone out of that?

Like if that's just who they are. You know what I mean? Like that's kind of where like- Personality disorders, including BPD are still very controversial. Okay. Because you're like, you're making a person, like their whole personality, who they are, into a disease. Got it.

So you view the way that she treated you guys as more of a form of abuse and a mental illness? I... Or kind of like that? No, I actually feel... Some of it was straight up abuse. Okay. When it comes to the munch house and stuff and, like, just weird shit that happened. I feel that she put her emotional needs before her children.

Okay. And she had had that done to her, and she told me a lot about it. She was very abused as a child. Okay. And, you know, all throughout her relationship with her parents. But so she knew better. She claimed to want to do better. she still did it. Okay. Makes sense. And it's hard to get in that mindset of like a lot of these

munchausen people, they want to not just be seen as a caregiver and a good one. But like there's, there's a seed in there motivating towards that expression of their emotional needs. there, like, there are so many ways to fulfill disordered emotional needs. Like, it could have been with violence. It could have been with running away from us. There were so many other ways, but that's the root that she took. Okay. And with a lot of it, I don't know, like with the medical stuff especially,

I don't know how much was conscious or deliberate and how much was like her other stuff going on in her head channeling into this expression. Okay. Because there were so much going on. And like if you're a hypochondriac and a mom, how's that different than being, than having much houses? Right. You know, a lot of like new moms will take their kids to the hospital and doctors constantly. it's not that they're making their kids sick, it's that they're afraid their kids are sick. And if you add that to thinking that you're smarter than doctors, then you start getting into

trouble. And my mom was incredibly intelligent. She didn't do anything with it, even though she could have. But I'd say maybe like an IQ in the 150s is what I've heard. And you said it. It was your older siblings that kind of really got the most of it? My eldest sibling got the most of it. Okay.

And that was your brother? They're both brothers. And I don't want to go too much into their stories except like as I experienced them. But my eldest brother, I have memories of him being completely deaf. And wheelchair bound, he didn't go to school. for many years and whether he was homeschooled or had dropped out completely. Eventually he got his GED as an adult, but he wasn't going to school. He wasn't building a social life because he was in hospitals, in the wheelchair,

incoherent, like scarily a lot like mischipsy Rose was. And that was all due to your mom? Oh, yeah. Okay. He also, like, I have memories of spending the holidays in the hospital after he'd had surgeries. And were these, like, necessary surgeries or no? So, like, in cases like that, it's like, how are they getting the doctors to do these surgeries? Or, like, was your mom actually making him kind of, like, sick to need them?

Probably a bit of both. She definitely fed all three of us drugs. And that gets into, like, an element of control, you know, if your kids sit down. you can control them. But I definitely remember, like, reading some of these medication bottles. I thought, like, one of them had a pretty name. So, like, it's stuck in my head. And when I looked it up as an adult, it's like, what could she have given me this for?

And I looked into it a little more. And I'm pretty sure it was to induce some sort of symptom. We also lived in severe squalor. and way below the poverty lines. So there were nutritional deficits. There were environmental things that made us prone to colds and infections and, you know, nutritional deficits that people generally look for, you know, we ate a lot of like pasta and plain rice crispy cereal and skim milk and not a lot of fresh foods.

And that's because that's what gets donated. But there are a lot of elements that contributed to us being genuinely ill and manufactured to be ill. And a lot of the comments that I've seen on videos about these real-life cases have been like, I don't understand how these medical professionals could possibly do this to a child. They don't have any evidence for. The mom is like pushing for it. Like surgeries and stuff? Mm-hmm.

Okay. But to that, I say you need a lot of understanding of how medical science works. So, like, you know, we've had, as human history, we've had surgeries and medications since Paleolithic times. And some of them have been accurate. like people, I don't know, 8,000 years ago, we're chewing willow bark for pain relief, and that's where we get aspirin from. So like a lot of it's been legit, but it's like the scientific method, you know, this rigorous testing and evidence-based thing not rooted in spirituality so much is very new.

It's like 18th century new. and really beefed up during the Industrial Revolution when we have the technology to like for Louis Pasteur to see penicillin. So I mean compare that to 10,000 years of written history, it's medicines in its infancy. It's as much an art as a science. And I currently live with a few chronic illnesses, which dealing with that after surviving Munchausen by proxy, oh my God. It's like, do I have Munchausens?

Yeah. Or am I being a hypochondriac? And then sometimes I go the opposite end of the spectrum where my dad was, where I like ignore everything because I, you know, don't want to be that way. Yeah. So, but like my body doesn't care. And I don't know which, how many factors are related to like my current depression and trauma and stuff,

and how much of it were, you know, things that happened in my childhood, whether it was just trauma on my body or the neglect that set this up. Hey, I'm Jeremy Schwartz from American Criminal. On this season, robbery gone wrong or cold-blooded murder. Either way, Boston will never be the same. Listen to American Criminal, the murder of Carol Stewart,

wherever you get your podcasts or to get early ad free access subscribe in apple podcasts Spotify or at americancriminal.com but as a kid you were dealing with things and were not diagnosed just because of lack of I was diagnosed with things okay but that's because my mom was telling them what my history was and what the context at home was to prove to them that I met the diagnostic criteria of these things that are really fuzzy. There's really not a lot of disease. Like, the more science goes on, the more we know that we don't know. Yeah.

Like, was there any thing specific that she basically told the doctors that they ended up diagnosing you with that you didn't have? Absolutely. Like what? The one that comes to mind first is tonsillectomy. I said, my throat really hurts after I cry, because I, through temper tantrums a lot. And that's normal.

Mom said, my throat gets infected this many times. She gave the information that led them to believe it was necessary to take out tonsils. So you got that surgery? I got that surgery. And it wasn't until I had talked to a friend's mom and told her I was going to have the surgery. and I get a little weirdly cheery about medical stuff. Definitely back then I did because I was proud of it because that's what I was exposed to. So I told her about it and she asked why and I said it's because my throat hurts after I cry.

And she's like, that's normal for everyone. And she gave me this look and I'm like, are things not normal? And then I moved on. Yeah. We danced to Shania Twain at that sleepover. Yeah. Was there any other surgeries that she had you get? I had ear tubes.

Oh, that's a funny story. So ear tubes are pretty common for kids. It's this like when they're growing, the ears sometimes are like not opening up in line with the rest of the growth or something. And they put in these things that fall out as you grow older to like, it's kind of like when you get a spacer. Okay. In puberty because your face is growing. And the reason that I had that surgery done was because I got my first ever mark wrong on a test in school. Because I was a perfect student. And if there was one question I got wrong, it was an excuse for my mom to go full care.

And the question that I got wrong, I remember this so clearly. I had just started at a new, new school and it was like the first day it was like first or second grade we were doing a spelling test and back then the teacher would have to read out the things and then we would write them down because that's how spelling tests work and one of the questions one of the words to spell was red in my mind because my family is very literary I was thinking it was the past tense of read it was actually the color red got it and that was was enough for my mom to claim that I had hearing loss and needed a surgery. And you actually got the surgery? I got the surgery. Yeah. And there were so many things I was

told that I had. If you remember at all the early 90s, there was this hype about red dye 40 and kids consuming it and like the problems that would ensue. And my mom fixated on on that and decided that the rashes I would get on my forearms were because of red candy and red yellow. So I didn't have any of that again until I was an adult. I still get the rashes when I pet short-haired dogs because of the oils. And my mom was an animal hoarder. There were always animals going in and out of the house and way too many and not taking care of properly. And we had some. That's where I was getting the rashes from. interesting she just wanted to give me Benadryl gave me drugs and make me part of the big deal

now would she let you obviously she let you go to school right like did she let you have friends and stuff like that oh i was a social butterfly and my friendships are why i'm alive i'm really lucky that i did inherit my mom's charisma she used it for evil but i used it for survival I've always had like, you know, found family. And there have been people in my community who, they wouldn't tell me how weird my upbringing was, but I'd be invited for meals quite a lot. I'd be given rides to school, all of these things. But I always had a really active social life of peers.

My mom was able to convince these doctors to do things that didn't need to be done. Between her very charismatic manipulation, her high intelligence and ability to, like, for better or worse, I grew up in the internet age and we always had a computer with internet so she could find things out and like twist things around. There were seeds of real stuff going on. I have ADS. I was dislocating things a lot. didn't realize until much later that was actually happening. I thought I was just like, I should have been able to walk it off, you know, like a twisted angle. I didn't, I thought that I didn't need the, you know, braces that I need.

And a lot of it is just like the art to diagnosis because being like involved in all this healthcare stuff with myself. I mean, on the one hand, I am over the moon. anytime like I have a complaint and there's like evidence of it because I'm like I'm not crazy but I do have to go around saying okay this is actually impacting my function or I'll be like I don't know if this is a valid complaint or if I'm overblowing it or if my depression or whatever is generating it I've had headaches all of my life. I've always been like, yeah, it's like dehydration, tension headaches, not having the right glasses prescription, you know, all these little reasons.

And then last week I went into neurologist's office because like my neck has been hurting so much. I've been having headaches several times a week. And I asked my PCP, should I see the doctor, the specialist about it? She said, yes. I went to the neurologist. And he, you know, asked me the questions, how often do you have headaches and all this stuff? Last time I'd been to see him was for my sleep problems and memory problems, and he was like, you need to see a sleep doctor.

We know sleep is the problem. It's probably also causing problems with your memory. All of these little bits that you're describing, it's stress and sleep. I can't do anything for you. This time I expected the same thing. But I started telling him, you know, I have headaches. I think they're from tension and stress. I think maybe my EDS is making my neck too last.

and like that gives me headaches. And it's like, whatever it is, you have a headache to serve and there's medication for her. I'm like, really? This is a valid complaint. Right. I never know whether I am becoming my mom and I really seek validation. So I know you were young because you said she passed away when you were 10. Looking back, even though you were so young, did you ever feel like there were times that you were in fear for your life?

Um. Mostly, I was in fear for my mom's life because she had much houseance. And that was a lot more scary. And the further she went with it and the further she went with her substance abuse. And one of the reasons why I did not suffer even in my first 10 years as much as my eldest brother did was that she was checking out from the world around her. So it was heavy with her mental and cognitive absence. And that has an effect on children too. Oh, yeah.

You know, just seeing that, witnessing it. You're like, a lot of it has to do with, like, the long-term effects are that the kid never has their emotional needs met because they always have to put them aside in order to make things easier for the parent. And there's a lot of this insecurity. Like, if my mom dies, where am I going to go? Right. Because it's like you have that dependence built up. And you're like, you know, my brother picked on me today and I want comfort, but mommy's in a K-hole or something like that. I mean, she usually went for narcotics. And it's just, I've always sort of, I've been digging deep in therapy and sort of recently realizing how much just like bare bones

insecurity and feelings of unsafe, but not necessarily life-threatening, just like uneasiness. And I think that's, that applies to any child of a sick parent, regardless of, why the parent is in that state. If it's like a parent with cancer, a parent with MS and their wheelchair bound and can't do things, and it's not the fault of the parent, but it still comes to like the kid, children, you know, going the psychoanalytic route,

see their parents is kind of like gods. Like that's their everything. All of their life is dictated by those people. And when those people are not as all powerful as maybe your friend's parents are, or like they have needs that go above your own, you know, it might not be right, but sometimes even a child's needs have to take a back burner. And it's really sad and it really hurts the kid. So even if my mom had been right about her own stuff, it would have had the same feeling of insecurity and fear for me. It wasn't, though. She had convinced a doctor, oh, a hallmark of

Munchausen's and by proxy, doctor shopping. And the problem of all of this is that people who have that excuse you i know uh who have valid conditions that don't get heard because oh my god doctors are humans and some humans are real dicks um and prejudice and everything that's why women's health is what it is especially like black women's health feel awful for everybody who like goes around with a valid illness that gets ignored because they're a woman When my mom doctor shopped, she was looking for somebody who would give her drugs, who would believe her claims of having multiple sclerosis. That was like her disease of choice during my lifetime. She went through some others beforehand.

A big one was uterine cancer and breast cancer. We almost weren't born because she was going to get a hysterectomy for no reason. And then she got pregnant with my oldest brother, and he claims that the reason we're alive is because, he saved mom's uterus. So there's three of you, right? There's three. I'm the youngest of three and the only girl. So like the dynamics of the siblings, we had wildly different childhoods.

Yeah, and I was going to ask if you are comfortable with it, like going through a timeline of kind of your experience, I think, would be really insightful. That would make a lot of this being more sense, too. Born 1992. too. I was made to have as an infant severe gastrointestinal reflux, and I couldn't drink breast milk. And there are a lot of possibilities for that. Don't know what sort of toxins were in there. Also, don't know what my mom did quit smoking during each of her pregnancies. We know that. And she didn't drink, but she was a huge fan of Demerol by the 90s. So, uh,

don't know what other things she may have had me in utero swimming in. Also, now I can't have any dairy. Like, it's not lactose intolerance. It's just you can't have it. So I don't know why I couldn't eat. I had to get this, like, really special formula. And it was like a whole deal. And when I got older, the way my mom explained it was probably overdone.

But my oldest brother has this, like, seminal memory of doing homework at the kitchen table. It's probably 11. And little toddler me walked into the doorway and I looked directly at him. He looked directly at me. And then I opened my mouth and projectile vomited across the entire room. So that was something that was happening. And it took a long time for me to put on weight. I also had asthma. My brothers remember me having asthma attacks. Did I really have asthma though? or did I just have a little bit of a delicate system and two parents who changed smoke indoors? I did get a lot of ear infections. I think that was an environmental thing, but also kids just get a lot of ear infections.

I just remember being like leaky as a kid, and I feel like all kids are leaky of something or other. They're gross. Back in 1996, I was four-ish. Summertime, I think my parents had just had an argument because my mom stomped out of the house saying she was going to change the car battery. It's an old beat-up car. Probably did need to change the battery. That was not the sort of thing she would do.

But she went to do that that day. And a few minutes passed, I don't know how long. And she came back into the house in a whole hullabaloo, and she had melted the skin off her hand. Presumably because the car battery was extremely hot. You know how it. is in Maryland in the summer. So that would be valid if it hadn't been the back of her hand that melted off. How does that happen? Like the entire back of her palm and a couple of knuckles?

Pretty sure she did that to herself. So kind of going back, like when you said that you were in fear of your mom's life, basically. Like, was it because of scenarios like that, like if things just happening where you would see her getting hurt. I don't think the fear of her life came until later when it was a cognitive thing that I could perceive. Okay. But I mean, like, do you think like the buildup of like situations like that? Oh, yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. The signs were there well before I was born. Yeah. Before you could really like pick up on it. Yeah. My brothers were picking up on it.

So. Yeah. And thanks to our dad, we are like. terminally honest for better or worse. We're just not capable of, you know, glossing over these things or making them up, really. So when they say stuff or when my dad says stuff, I believe it because they don't have it in them to say otherwise. And also they don't really have a filter, which is helpful when you're asking about this stuff. But like this was like the shit that I did see even in my short amount of time with her.

so fucking weird. And I was so young at this point that I was also going with her to her appointments where she got skin grafted from her thigh to her hand. And so I'm real desensitized to a lot of the medical ickiness. Not all of it. I'll tell a story in a bit. But that was like a seminal memory. Yeah.

Fucking weird. Also like climbing up hills of laundry that weren't. clean, just like spilling out into the hallway and stuff because that's how we lived. It's fucked up. I also remember, you know, you know how little kids are like, I can't go to sleep and like they knock on a parent's door and bother them at night. My mom would feed me Benadryl. And this is something I feel very strongly about.

It's bonkers to me that you can buy children's melatonin. Children's Z-Quil, just off the counter. I feel like even though it's not a dangerous medication, that you should have to have doctor approval to use things like that. Because I know to this day, and it's pretty normalized for parents to use these drowsiness medications to control their kid or to not bother with them. And that's what my mom did a lot. she gave us narcotics, the ones that she was taking.

Like throughout the day? Just here and there, you know, depending on the day. And it was usually for control or just to not have to deal with us because she was dealing with her own stuff. And it's so fucked up. And I hate that other people do it. I also know that there are a lot of parents who do the sort of like gaslighting, munch-housy thing where like they convince doctors.

that their kids need Adderall or whatever because they don't want to deal with a kid that is a, you know. Hyper. Hyper or just like think differently than they do or whatever. They're not adapting to their kid. Yeah. They're medicating their kids so that the kid can adapt to them or at least just not bother them. And it drives me insane. But there's also like valid reasons.

Like some kids do need it. I have a nephew who does great on it and he feels happy to take it because all the like buzzing in his brain he can get it into like a coherent state. Yeah. So, you know, it's so gray. Everything's so gray. I had a concussion in kindergarten. I think it was the only actual concussion that I had.

had but I will say I was taken to the hospital for quite a few of them because you know kids bonk their heads not all of them are a concussion but for this story it's a fun story I think um we just got on this new like blacktop installed for the playground for like the bigger kids to play basketball and stuff but like kindergartners were strictly grass that's all we could play on but I was running and the sun was shiny in my face so I couldn't really see it. where I was running and I ran onto the blacktop. And like the second I realized where I was, I think it was a football.

Could have been a basketball. Hit me straight up there. And I was all of like 30 pounds. So I went down hard and I bonked my head there. And I think that's where I went unconscious. But I know because there was a print leftover, that somebody stepped on my face while I was down. A big old boot print for, I guess, the rest of the day.

Like, my brother saw it when I was taken to the hospital. But the next thing that I remember was waking up into the hospital on eating the best butter toast in my life. That was so good. And, like, all the attention I was getting, I really did pick up for my mom the sort of, like, enjoyment of medical attention. and I mean not it's not just learned it's that she would give me attention instead of focusing on her stuff

most of it was learned though but so I think that was the only actual concussion that I had but I know I went to the hospital and was treated for other concussions like minor bonks on the head like it's nothing so you think like mainly with your mom it was like medical abuse, would you say? For me, I did not get the emotional or physical abuse. I definitely got psychological abuse because when it came to like the divorce of my parents, my mom brainwashed me to hate my dad and testify bad things against him. She convinced me that he, he was so evil that after she died, I was terrified to live with him. And why do you think that she did that just to keep you with her?

Because she had borderline personality disorder. If you, like, read what it is. It's this like people with that either adore you and need you constantly, or you do the slightest thing that you don't even know why they take offense to it and they hate you. or if you leave them, they threaten to kill themselves. It's a very extreme reaction. And I think for my mom, the attention that she got from my dad stopped being enough. So he became the villain.

And I was a tool for that. And there was also like putting me into a position where I had way too much control over the medical stuff in the household, where she had convinced me of this, that, and the other that was wrong, pitted me against my brothers, mainly my middle brother, because for some reason she really hated him. And so like one really fucked up thing that she didn't, I don't even know where to put this in the definitions of abuse. she taught me to give her injections of something in her thigh. How old were you?

At best, six or seven. So I remember I would take this little glass vial. I would take a fresh needle, hyperdermic needle. I'd put it through the little rubber seal. I'd pull the syringe for whatever dose she told. told me to, making sure that the needle was submerged enough to actually get the liquid. I would take it out. I would squeeze a little bit to get the air bubbles out and do the shaking and everything. And then I guess this was supposed to be like a sub-dermal type of injection.

So she had taught me like how to pinch the skin of her thigh, avoiding the graft scar, of course, that I was raised and give the injection there, like how slowly to squeeze it and everything, how to, you know, blot it with the cotton ball to stop it. And it's like, first of all, why was I doing that? Second of all, she told me I was giving her saline. I knew what saline was, so I knew it was nothing serious. It wasn't until way later in my life that at first of all, I realized that I had done that. It was a repressed memory that, like, hit me in the middle of, like, walking my dog or something. It's just like, okay, I have that to work out now.

It was such a clear memory. And then I went to college, my best friend and roommate is a nurse. and I told her about this, and she's like, why would she need an injection of saline in her soft tissue? Like, what is, like, that doesn't do anything. It's just, it's sore. And I'm like, oh, you have a point there. And then it occurred to me fairly recently. Saline doesn't come in little glass vials.

what the hell was I giving my mom? Why was she involving me in this at all? And when she eventually finally got a good safe and started putting her narcotics in there, she was mostly bedbound. So I was helping her get her medications. And with stuff that had happened with my brothers, I was the only one other than her. who knew the combination at nine.

What the fuck? So it's just like, I don't know where to categorize that kind of abuse. I know that she hit my brothers. I know that she verbally abused them. She psychologically manipulated them horribly. She made them feel awful about themselves and dependent on her and it was really bad, but I can't really speak to it. Did you feel dependent on her, would you say?

I mean, I was so young, of course I was. Like when she passed away, how did that hit you? Oh, we'll get into that story. That's a good one. I want to get back into this. Oh, also, I don't know why I had so much dental work done, but I did as a, like, small. child before I had any adult teeth, so it was kind of pointless. That was like early, early days

just coming online when we lived in Maryland the first time. I moved a lot. So we get to the first shitstorm in my life. There were others before. When I was in kindergarten, my dad lost his job. He had been a manager of a fancy men's shoe store, and the need for that really tanked. They just went to Macy's. Things got real tense between my parents for a long time while he was unemployed, but he finally got a new job working for the U.S. government. and he sort of had an option of which state he wanted to work in. And my mom said that we should go to New Jersey. And we lived in an apartment that was in a project building.

But we only ended up living there for 11 months. And 11 months is not a long time, but a lot of shit happened. So my dad started working for the U.S. Department of Immigration, helping people who have lived in the U.S. for a long time get their citizenship. You know, they've met that time criteria. And he was one of the good guys. He always wanted to help. And that's when I got my ear tubes implanted, my first surgery.

That's the year my oldest brother spent Hanukkah in the hospital. but I think what really like escalated the situation that year. My dad got news from his doctor that he would require the exact same open heart procedure that his father got at the same age but died during. So dad wasn't well and the dynamic in the household wasn't good. Obviously, he survived, but that kicked in, like, my other end of the spectrum when it comes to health of, like, he wasn't taking good enough care of himself. You know, he let his heart fall apart. He later on developed diabetes.

He was still smoking for seven years after open heart surgery. Oh, my God. And when he got back from the hospital, I, like, my five-year-old self was like, oh, you're supposed to eat low saturated fat. I can read that because I was precocious. And so I ended up like trying to make his food for him. A lot of it ended up being like jelly and ketchup sandwiches, but I was trying. And I was seriously like my adolescence with him, I'm the one who made sure nutritional needs were met. I didn't know enough, but I'm the one who did it.

He's been awful at taking care of himself. And that time was really what kicked me off of like. why aren't you taking care of yourself? Because my mom was, you're doing too much. And my mom, for some reason, was a stay-at-home mom. She shouldn't have been. But she was spending a lot of time on the computer. And this is like Windows 98.

She spent a lot of time on Yahoo games talking to people. And she met a guy on the internet. And I guess that was closer to. to meeting her emotional needs and what she was getting from dad at the time while he was dealing with his stuff. And my brother was out of the hospital. So she got into her head that she was going to take the family, leave her abusive husband. I don't know how they were both abusive to the kids and they both yelled at each other. So, um, and go have her happy ending with this man she met on the internet in 1998.

So one day I got home from school and things in the household were weird. A lot of movement was happening. My mom told me to pack up whatever I can fit in our little Honda Civic alongside her, both of my teenage brothers, our cat, a dog, my own body. We drove away that day. My dad didn't realize that this was kidnapping over state lines. So he kind of just let us go. and we just drove south. My mom had stolen his financial information and manipulated my siblings into

helping her with that. And we would stay at hotels and timeshares of family members and friends' houses that she'd had in the past and internet friends' houses. So great parenting there. But it turned out that this man on the internet did not want my bonkers mom and her three children, lo and behold. So we were effectively homeless for a while. And we didn't have to be. When I did sleep in the car, it was while mom was chugging energy drinks and driving. We usually had a roof to sleep under one way or the other, usually by theft. So we eventually settled down in northern Virginia, the first place in northern Virginia. And we lived there for, I want to say, like a year and a half.

Did you have contact at all with your dad at this time? Yeah. Okay. I mean, during the homeless bit, I don't remember. But I remember, like, when we settled down into this apartment, he came down for visits. Okay. And they were working out the divorce, so, like, there had to be communicated. mom occasionally would have a job for like a week or less and then not this is where I really

like became aware of her decline because she would start spending many days in a row in her bed I remember myself being asked to go get her oxycontin and like I would read the labels on the bottle I bring the pill to her she wouldn't be able to even like do anything so I'd open the bottle I'd give her whatever pills that she asked for and I'd hand her her water um there were times during this that she was still like had days where she was a person um but they were she was often out of the picture as well she would just be doing her own thing and it was just very weird um we had this term that we used called episodes

and what I was told is that they were MS episodes. I don't know what the fuck that's supposed to mean anymore but a lot of times they seemed like she was high on narcotics. She had moved from Demerol to Oxycontin and if you picture somebody who's high on Oxycontin is pretty much like that

like you can talk to them and there's they're obvious alive but they're not there they're not getting out of bed um they're checked out it's like that's not my mom that's she's gone um she'll come back but a lot of them were like her acting like an entirely different person like with energy and it's it was almost like having a dissociative identity alter but i know it wasn't because she never gave information, no like identifying of who she'd been. She wouldn't lose track of time, you know, stuff like that. It wouldn't last more than like a day. And it didn't happen while she was out in the world. It happened from bed. But it scared the crap out of me. It was the most terrifying experience and it happened again and again and from here on with increasing frequency. She'd ask for

like peanut butter sandwiches. She hated peanut butter. She would talk in a little baby voice and be like, I don't know where I am. Where am I? And it's like, that's my mom. I don't know how to communicate. And I've definitely repressed a lot of the details. But I remember that feeling of being like something's wrong with my mom. She's not here. And I'm scared. And I need my mom to make me feel better.

But she's scared. I'm taking care of her. And I don't know what it was. I don't know if she was doing it on purpose. I don't know if it had any dissociative aspects, if it was regression. I mean, obviously that factored into part of it. I don't know. She could have been faking.

She had been consciously faking. I don't know. But it was for a long time, like the worst trauma that really stuck. It was repeated. During this time, the divorce proceeded, but my mom had menace. The situation, she got, you know, me and probably my siblings turned against him. And she had also, like, manipulated the system and miscommunicated things so that my dad wouldn't be, you know, showing up to the hearings when he was supposed to. And basically, she got full custody and he got visitation rights with, like, what is it called?

Like chaperone, which he didn't deserve. So we also got evicted from that one because my mom wasn't working and the house was disgusting and we were probably neighbors from hell. Because my oldest brother was still pseudo disabled, we'd had social workers involved. We had so many professionals involved in my upbringing and some of them knew what was going on, but just it was such a weird situation. My mom was so manipulative. And the social working field is so overworked. And like, those people were present and yet things still never happened.

I mean, the Gypsy Rose case, there were social workers involved who thought she was mentally disabled and everything, who believed it because they could see it. And when she wasn't being given drugs and she stood up and she talked, they were amazed. Yeah. Because that's the things that happen. But anyway, this social worker happened to have a dad who wasn't in his house for this time. I don't know why. But we were able to stay at this house while my mom arranged for us to move into a new. place. So even though we were in a house, I still consider us homeless. We were in a weird spot.

But we got Section 8 housing, which is through a welfare program. We just moved to a different part of Virginia. And I started another school. And we lived here the longest. So this is the place where most of the really bad stuff happened. I have this really bad trigger involved with tobacco and smoking and stuff. It makes me infuriated and I get panic attacks and things. And that's because, first of all, both my parents were smokers and gross. But my mom was increasingly bedridden. And she'd be using the child support payments for just nothing to do with the kids.

kids, a lot of the times it was for cartons of cigarettes. It was those big ones and the marble, Marlborough worst brand name ever. Packs with the red triangles, those are seared into my mind. And she just smoked them and she'd be high and like dropping them and she'd have like her nightgowns and her skin would be pockmarked with cigarette burns. And a lot of them fell off the couch and there was an ashtray, not the couch, the bed. There was an ash tray, but she often knocked it over in her stupor. So like the side of her bed that she was closest to, it went from like a medium pile beige carpet to basically like a black vinyl sort of texture, compacted with dirt and a lot of cigarette. Ash. And when she didn't have money for more cigarettes or couldn't convince my eldest sibling

to buy them for her, she wouldn't do anything herself. She'd have me do this. I would go down on my hands and knees and crawl next to and under the bed, picking up all the dropped cigarette butts with like little tiny amounts left and I'd collect them for her. I'd be like, you know, hands and knees getting covered and not just the impacted ashes, but also like with the way we had animals, like a lot of shit and piss and her bodily fluids inevitably and bits of medication and garbage and everything. And I'd be like collecting them into her ash. tray so she could smoke these little bits off. That was another repressed memory that came up.

And in that same spot on this one occasion, she had a friend over, a female friend, which we never had friends there, especially not adults. It was a very weird off day. I don't know what the dynamic there was, but she was during one of her bedroom phases. I don't know what this person was doing, honestly. But they were going to watch Rocky Horror Picture Show in that bed, which I shared with my mom. I didn't sleep in my own bed. I had one.

I didn't use it because things were weird. Anyway, they were going to watch Rocky Horror Picture Show. And I felt like I was being pushed out. I was so unhappy. I didn't have my bed. I didn't have my mom. So I may have cock-plocked them. I don't know.

But my mom said, you can, you know, make a little bed for yourself over here and watch it. Never mind that I actually couldn't, like, see the TV much because of the poster of the bed. Or the fact that I was eight years old watching Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I love now, but it has themes of nudity, murder, abuse, cannibalism, incest, transphobia, hateful language, and more. and a lot of tatas. So that was the first time I watched that. But I was setting up my little bed there, and I'd put pillows down,

and then I needed to reach something on the table that was going to be behind me. So I, like, scoot forward on my knees onto my pillows, but then I stopped. And I didn't know why. So I backed up, and there was this little black line sticking out of the pillow, and I started to feel a feeling,

sharp pain in my knee. I looked at my knee. It had about, you know, a centimeter long cut. It was bleeding, not like gushing, but pretty heavy bleed. And I picked up my pillow, and I didn't realize that I'd put it on a pile of used needles. And usually for even a minor injury like this, my mom would have taken me to the hospital for stitches. And honestly, it probably should have had stitches. And definitely like a tetanus shot and screening to make sure I didn't get like hepatitis or something. But obviously, I would be taken away if anybody said what had happened. So we did not go.

And I don't know really what happened the rest of that day. I know that I did clear things out and make my bed and watch Rocky Horror until I fell asleep. And then she moved on to Fetnauton. fentanyl, you know, that big hot topic in the opioid crisis. That was her drug of choice at the end. And she got them in lollipop form. It's called Actique, and it's meant for terminally ill children. And she got huge boxes of them because she had found a doctor that was later sued for malpractice well after she died.

But gave them to her. You didn't care. And I know that one of my siblings did get hooked on them and stole them a lot, which is why we later got that safe. And my mom continued to villainize him. And also I know what those lollipops taste like, which is not good. But yeah, she was basically out of her head most of the time at this. point I don't think she left her bed a lot of the time. I mean, certainly at no point in my childhood were my parents doing laundry, cooking meals, making sure that I got bathed, making sure that I made

it to school on time. A lot of that was handled by my siblings and by neighbors if it was done at all. It took me a long time to start bathing regularly. I didn't start washing my face regularly until I was 16. I didn't know. Yeah. And when I moved in with my dad, he didn't know that I didn't know. He didn't think that things were like that. There was this one really fucked up story where all the kids had been gifted cats for some

reason. And my brother's cat had, they were outdoor cats in our own. outdoor. And this one had tried to crawl underneath the fence between us and the neighbor. And the neighbor kid came and got me. We had played sometimes. And said, you know, come out here and see this. And I saw it and it was bad. And I ran into my mom who told me to put the cat into a box and bring it over. And I did that. And I also wrapped up his butt in some sort of of cloth because he'd lost control of his bells. He had broken his spine, trying to crawl under. And so my mom and I waited for a while until that brother was available. My mom convinced him that

her plan was okay and that this cat had no life ahead of it. And she used her medical supplies, possibly medication as well, but definitely needles to euthanize it at home with us watching. And this was her least favorite of my siblings. So it definitely felt personal. I had a cold and I learned from my mom that you spend a full week in bed regardless of what it is anytime you're sick. So this one time I was doing that and I was kind of high. I had in cold medication, which is probably more than I needed. My mom was in the other room chatting online with strangers. And I had gone and asked her for something to cut yarn with because I was doing a craft in bed. She told me to go get scissors. I couldn't find scissors. I didn't feel like going back. So I grabbed a steak knife. And I used that to cut the yarn on my crafts in bed. And the next morning I got real, zoomy from cold medicine and being eight or nine years old, but I also knew not to leave bed. So I was rolling around on it, just like being a crazy kid. And then for some reason, I stopped.

I didn't know why, but my body couldn't move. And then my brother, who had been in the house and who had been hearing me just be a crazy kid, he'd noticed that I'd gone silent and that was weird. So he walked in and he saw what had happened. And he made this weird, the weirdest sound I've ever heard from a person who wasn't trying to make weird sounds. It was just like, ah, from this giant six foot two, 300 pound mountain man. And that alerted my mom that something was up. So she came in and assessed the situation. And what had happened was I left the steak knife in bed.

And in all of my rolling, I'm so lucky, it didn't hit like my kidney or something, but in my rolling around, it had gone through my arm in and out and then through the comforter. So it's like I couldn't move because if I did, the comforter was such a weight, I'd probably like get half my arm cut off. And usually my mom loved calling 911 for anything. But she saw this situation, knew she'd be in trouble as a parent, and instead acted really fast, and knew that even though you're not supposed to do this, she was like, okay, we can't take you to the hospital without removing the comforter. So she ripped it out of my arm, had my brother wrap it super tight with the towel, loaded us three in the car, sped off to the hospital. It was sometime while I was in the car that the pain and fear registered, and I started screaming.

Back then, I was great at screaming. When we got to the ear waiting room, I had to be put into a private room because I was scaring other people. And so, yeah, I got stitched up. I didn't get it signed this time because it hurt, and I learned that that was kind of lame. But I got the stitches removed a little too early, and I could see straight through my heart. which is pretty cool. And I was desensitized to Gore. My dad insists that this was an instance of my mom being a shitty parent.

And yeah, how she should have had 9-1-1 come and do that. But he feels like the whole thing was her fault. And it was like, no, I'd asked for a scissard. She told me where to get them. I didn't do it. And then I left the knife in bed. I was old enough to know not to leave. a knife in your bed. It wasn't that stupid. It was my fault. But he disagrees. September 9th,

2002. I was once again sharing bed with my mom. It was the middle of the night. My oldest sibling, who was 19 at the time, came into the room and woke me up and told me to be quiet. And I thought it was really funny. I had gone to the fair a couple days before and I had these gigantic glow-in-the-dark glasses. I put them on so I could see him better because it was dark. He didn't appreciate that. But he told me, I want to make sure that, you know, before it happened, before mom hears about it, that I am leaving tonight.

I'm moving out. I'm moving to Illinois with this person because it's not good for me here with mom. And I can't tell her about it or she'll make things very bad. And I want to take you with me. You deserve a life outside of here. And I just can't. Because that's going to be connected. snapping over state lines and mom is going to have me put in jail and you'll be right back here. But I want you to know that I love you and that I need to do this and I'm sorry I can't take you. And that was the most important thing anybody had said to me in my entire childhood because it told me, Yes, things are weird. Yes, this is bad for us. Mom is the enemy. And there's a reason why people who care about you can't get you out of here. But I still love you. It was so, like, honest and up front and adult and mature because there have been so many adults who like knew what was going on. on and I didn't realize until later that they knew or that they wanted to help or that they couldn't

help. And this was so honest. And really, the only thing that bummed me about it was that my birthday was like two weeks later and he'd be missing that. And that birthday was sadly uneventful even though I was entering the double digits. That was my 10th birthday. But also him being like the target and my main parent. and honestly and, you know, a shield for me.

When he left, mom turned all of her attention on me and herself, mostly herself. My other brother was high-armed narcotics or doing whatever teenagers do. So somehow she had rented out this other brother that left his room to a random guy. Whatever. I'm going to call him Guy because he is pretty important in this. About a month after my brother left is when I developed the skin picking. And then for Thanksgiving that year, my brother, not my brother, he was off doing something. My dad had come down to have Thanksgiving with us.

And mom was having an episode. So it was really just my dad and me. I was really sad, especially because, like, I'd made a pie for the first time. I'd cooked for the first time. And my dad's diabetic, so I made it with a sugar alternative. And I did not know that sweet and low is, first of all, disgusting. And second of all, undergoes a change when baked with. And it was poison, but he liked it.

But, like, yeah, my mom was missing Thanksgiving, even though she was. She was just in the other room, and my dad was pissed off at her for this, and he was exposing me way too much to that. But they kind of, like, when she'd been coherent, kind of arguing, like, what the fuck is wrong with you? And it's like, how dare you call me out for this? Don't you know, blah, bitty blah. And at one point when my dad and I were at the table, we heard a fall, and she had fallen.

And my dad was pissed off yelling at her, claiming that she was faking this and whatever. And I was so confused because I was looking at my mom who had fallen. She may have fallen on purpose. But there were bones sticking out. She had severely broken her ankle. And because of dad being a bitch about it, she wanted to spite him and didn't go to the hospital for it for a couple of days. and had to spend, I think, a couple of weeks there in the hospital. And so I was basically home alone with an AWOL brother and Guy.

And neighbors taking care of me. And Guy would drive me to the hospital after school to talk to my mom. And so weird. But she did come home with the cast arm. At that point, I don't remember when it happened, but she'd had an IV implanted in her chest. for administering whatever medications she was taking that day. She may have had that put in a while before, I don't remember.

She really shouldn't have been sent home with that. That should have been like a facility managed thing. But they were going to send nurses to take care of her. But they didn't because we lived in squalor. And my mom was a difficult person to get along with. and she chased each of them off and they were, you know, pissed that they couldn't even, like, wash their hands properly to do their job. It basically had just been very badly neglected.

And then comes holiday time. I don't remember what we did for Hanukkah. But my brother at home went to go spend winter break with brother not at home. So it was just me, Guy. my mom. My mom was mostly not present anyway in my guy and guy was off in his room. So I was just sad and alone and it was a very depressing time. And then our New Year's Eve. My family has this had, I don't know, this tradition of watching the ball drop and like spending all evening, like eating like those, you know, freeze and bake in the, um, in the, um,

oven, you know, appetizers, you know, potato skins, mozzarella sticks, whatever. Um, so I had like prepared those for myself all sad, like, and gone into the living room and had the TV on. But mom wasn't like, usually when she was higher on drugs, I didn't know she was higher on drugs. I thought this was all MS, but usually she'd get up occasionally, use the bathroom.

I'd be able to have, uh, short conversations with her, you know, she'd be a person but this day she was like not really waking up from whatever thing she was in she'd have her eyes open and her body would move and I'd keep having to go in there because her night gown she didn't wear underwear kept riding up and it's like that's not decent and I put it back down and sometimes she made it difficult because she was like rolled over but it was like really weird because usually when she was, you know, seeking attention, she'd be seeking attention, you know, playing it up. Or she'd just be asleep with a burning cigarette in her mouth. And I went up to Guy and I'm like, this episode is really weird.

Like, I've never seen it like this. And he's like, he'd been over it with my mom. So he kind of just dismissed it. And, you know, I'd go back and forth, being alone in the living room, checking on my mom. and occasionally, I'd be like, guy, I, like, this is really weird. And her eyes were open the whole time, and she was breathing and everything, but, like, she wasn't, her eyes weren't focusing. She wasn't saying anything except for, like, the occasional murmur.

Totally non-responsive. And I'd finally convinced him, I know we have ambulances come all the time for no reason. but can you please call one like this is weird it was like 10 30 or something an hour and a half until the new year started and it was just weird and like I said we'd had them over all the time and usually they'd be like talking amongst themselves and kind of ignoring mom because they were familiar with her bullshit but this time was different they were like serious and you know They talked with Guy to arrange for me to come to the hospital behind them. And I didn't know what was going on, but they were, you know, loading her into the ambulance and we went there.

I wasn't taken to see her immediately. We were really familiar, my family, with this hospital. And I was taking to a part that I'd never seen before. I ended up talking to a social worker who was asking me a bunch of stuff. and arranging for my aunt to come down from New York to come get me that night because I wasn't going to go home in that situation without mom. And when I was taken in to see mom,

she was, I think, put into the ICU or a coma ward or something, but things were different. Things were very serious, very quiet, very somber, and usually mom would be attention-seeking. and at like 2 a.m. or something, my aunt had made the drive down and taken me to my other aunt's house who was doing business in Italy, and I didn't even know she lived so close. And another aunt arrived. I have three of them, so one's gone, the other two there. And I woke up the next day, and they had made me breakfast. I was really tasty. It was a nice house, and everything was pretty, and I was kind of just viving, and I'm enjoying the attention from my family. And gradually over time, like my dad came down from New Jersey and unfortunately we had to return to our house.

And, you know, my brothers returned and we as a unit, all of us would go to the hospital each day and see my mom in the ICU, I think it was. and she had been cleaned up, but underneath she looked not great. And what I was really fixated on was that for some reason they couldn't keep her eyes closed. So they were bolted open the entire time. And because of that, they had to have like these gauze pads soaked in, I think, iodine or something, taped to her face. so that they went and it's just like, and freak us out even more. But every time we went to look at her, I stared at that. She still had the IV porch.

She still had the cast on her leg, but that's what really freaked me out. And when we went into like the family hanging out room of the hospital, the adults would kind of gradually introduce me to the idea of my mom's brain. dead and, you know, telling me that there's no chance this time. She, like, there is, she's dying. She's dead. It's just a matter of getting my brother, who is, you know, the power of attorney in this case to sign off on her machines being turned off, and then we're going to have a funeral, and then I'm going to move in with my dad, and all of these changes were happening. And I did not want to move in with my dad because I thought he was evil.

Was it all the medication that basically led to this? It was definitely a big factor. Okay. The official documented cause of death the doctor wrote was blood infection, which implied that the neglect to her chest IV had created an infection that entered her bloodstream and brain, heart, everything. And that's what she died of. People in my family say that that was just the polite thing to say and that she'd overdosed, that she'd committed suicide, whatever. Don't know. But, you know, even if it was just the infection in her chest and she didn't mean for

that to happen. She caused it to happen because it was Munchausen. She wouldn't have had that if she wasn't making herself sick. And it was also the drugs. She wasn't cleaning it because she was too high to give a shit. Like it's complicated. Yeah. And I got so angry for such a long time that it happened specifically when I was alone with her.

Like, why couldn't it have waited for my other brother to come back from his visit? Or why couldn't it have happened before he left? Why couldn't have there been somebody more mature around that I could trust? Why did it have to be me alone? I think what it was was that she wasn't getting enough attention with just me. And, you know, people actually can't control things like that unless they can. But I'd been told around that time that, you know, the reason that she went into a coma as opposed to just straight up died was that she was holding on long enough for all of her family to get there. And it's like, if she has control over that, why do it when I'm alone?

And like, does she not love me enough? All those things. And I've mostly worked through that. But, yeah, so she died. She wanted to be cremated so that happened, but we're Jewish. So it was kind of dicey trying to get the rabbi to agree to have a funeral with a thing of ashes in there because it's not a thing that you're supposed to do. And I hated the funeral because my dad was like weeping and like strangling my hand the whole time. And I was annoyed at him.

I didn't feel close to him. I wanted to grieve on my own. But like I apparently her parents, my mom, my grandparents were there. But my aunts had made sure that they didn't say shit to us, that they didn't say shit to anybody. Because in a lot of ways they made this happen. Like the abuse that my mom had endured led to this. The relationship that they had led to a lot of this. And they were not very nice people and they would have made things worse.

And then even though I like, you know, fought against it as hard as I could, I still had to move in with my dad who had during his single times recovering from my mom's financial ruin of him had been living in New Jersey in the studio apartment in a really bad place and didn't have the time to pick up and change everything for his two kids now moving in with him so that's where we lived studio apartment fully infested with cockroaches um he slept on the bed the proper bed because that's that was his bed my brother slept on a bare mattress in the kitchen area and i slept on a recliner that had been crawling with roaches i could hear them they bit me and i spent every night after my dad fell asleep crying for that first year every night.

And some of it was, you know, I missed my mom. And some of it was that I was here now. And a lot of it was that I felt deprived of any sort of mothering. I missed the idea of my mom. And I felt really bad for myself and trauma happened. And after a year, living in this apartment. It, like, the infestations got so much worse because we were so crowded in.

I still had a dog with me, and he was shitting everywhere because nobody taught me otherwise, really. There was no sense of responsibility in my childhood ever. And, you know, we had all the stuff crammed in everywhere, and things were just bad. And so when I was getting ready in the mornings for school, I had to wear shoes the whole time because there would be maggots crunching under my feet. And we got a few mice come through. And the cockroach problem got so bad that they would crawl out of my backpack at school. And usually I could stomp on them before anybody else noticed, but it happened a couple of times where my classmates noticed and screamed in middle.

hullabaloo and my teachers would notice and have me from then on store my backpack in the boiler room every morning so that I didn't get cockroaches everywhere. And I think that's probably what led to child services getting involved. They've been involved in our entire lives, but with mom, nothing ever happened. With dad and with that situation and with it happening at school, we were kicked out of that apartment. And that day I came home. I was barred from coming in. My dad came home from work early.

He found out what was going on. And he sobbed and like hugged me and I was pretty numb to it and still very annoyed with him. I mean, this was his fault. And also I didn't love him at that point. But he was just like putting all of this emotion on me when it was his fault. It's like, I'm going to go stay at my friend's house for the night. And then the next day, he got us a motel room for a couple weeks while he got us a new apartment. We lived in that apartment for a year.

And then the landlord wanted it for something else. So we went to another apartment for a year. And by that point, my brother was in college. So it was just me and my dad. And oh, my God, people underestimate the burden of being the youngest. You get your parents alone during your teeth. teenage years when it's the worst. But then my dad, he'd been working for the Department of Immigration for a while.

He had the opportunity to move to a federal job and asked me, do I want to live on the Maryland side, which is where I was born, lived for a while, or the Virginia side, where I have more memories, many of them bad. and I chose the Maryland side. And by that point, I'd been in nine different schools by ninth grade. I had changed schools that many times. I had moved 16 times by age 14. The lack of stability, the developing your brain

and having these other things to remember and learn, like, how to navigate your school, making new friends, stuff like that. It really fucked up my long-term memory. Oh, I should say my memory for long-term because I have trouble forming new ones. But by the time we got down to Maryland, I didn't know it at the time, but I would be in the same high school all four years. We finally got furniture. crappy furniture, but furniture.

We still had cockroaches. My dog still shat everywhere. And I went off to college, and these cockroaches would occasionally crawl out of my suitcase between semesters when I came back, and that was humiliating. And I didn't learn until I was living on my own, like not even at college, but got my first apartment. And that's not hard to not have cockroaches. So there were so many failings. But I will say, like, especially once we moved back to Maryland,

each year things got mostly a little bit better. And the way PTSD works is that the further you get away from danger, the more you can express that fear and all the emotions that you had to repress earlier for survival. So that's when PTSD gets bad. That's when I started having flashbacks and panic attacks and periods of catatonia. And my dad was really bad at handling it. He knew, like, I was a 10-year-old whose mom had died unexpectedly. Obviously, I had trauma.

He knew I had PTSD. He actually got me into therapy. Great job on him. He got me into therapy first time when I was 12. And again, when I was 14 and had like the first depressive episode that like a teacher noticed and brought to my attention. Like he was good about that, but he had so little just emotional regulation that when I was distressed, he'd be, you know, confused. He'd take offense to my silence. He would be very reactive and impatient.

and again put his emotional needs first and his inability to regulate his emotions ahead of my obvious intense experiences that he knew about and respected. So we'd always have these blowups where he'd scream at me and I'd cry and scream back. And eventually I would stomp off to my bedroom as if this was any or old, normal teenage tantrum. And, you know, later in the day, I'd have to come out for a meal or something. And he'd be apologetic. He would recognize what he did wrong and he would apologize.

And then it would be the same thing a week later. Now that I am living in a place where I am fully secure, I don't have to worry about food. I don't have to worry about people yelling at me or dying or any of that. all of those times where I've had to push my fear or my needs or anything aside have come up and are manifesting themselves now, which is why, like, with my health problems now, a lot of it is I don't know how much of that is reenactment or manifestation of the past. I get my mom. She had this emotional need that couldn't be met.

you know, between her parents being the way they were and her emotional, you know, borderlines type stuff being the way they were, she had such intense emotional needs and didn't know how else to express it than what she'd been exposed to and what had been successful in the past, which was medical attention. and medical attention for the ones around her. And that got, you know, enough emotional fulfillment that it outweighed the actual mortal danger to her body. So I really get it. Like, I wasn't taking care of as a kid. And, like, my tolerance for my pain, for the real things going on as well as all the stuff that I don't feel sure about is so low that little things seem bigger than they are.

And a lot of it, big and small, feels like it needs more attention and it's more consuming and I feel more helpless to it because I want to need to be taken care of. and so in a psychological dynamic type thing, I'm afraid of becoming like my mom, but I definitely see those instances where I put others into positions where they have to be worried about me. And it's because I want my emotions validated. Sometimes my emotions are just like my leg hurts like shit. Like, I want to cut it off right now. If you were experiencing this, you'd be on the floor crying, but this is my daily existence.

Please validate me. But other times, it's just like, I can't. And a lot of that's depression, you know, theories of helplessness. It's so hard trying to figure out how to get that to me. I can. Like, just recognizing the emotions isn't enough to change. But it will take practice. Yeah, and I think like you said, too, just sorting through everything that you experienced and went through, it takes time.

You know, and it's a lot. And that's a lot on a child to have to go through whether things were directly done to you by your mom or your dad or even just things that you witnessed. That's stuff that you're going to hold on to for years and that you have to work through years of therapy and just, you know, self-work and stuff like that. So it's a lot. Oh, yeah. I've been in therapy more than half my life. and I do it every week and I see my psychiatrist every month and I try different medications and with Munchausen and Munchausen by proxy entering the mainstream I do feel like it's bringing

a lot more out of the woodwork because right now like there's no anything for survivors we don't know what is the typical survivor experience like physically and emotionally. Yeah and everything's going to be different too. But but we're getting to the point where you know the actions to learn about that are being taken. Yeah. Because people are aware of it. Right. Same thing's going on with complex PTSD, which no doubt I have both PTSD and complex PTSD. Complex PTSD isn't in the DSN yet. It will be. I'm sure. But it's just like we become aware of it. And then everybody else becomes aware of it.

And more people become aware that they have it. And we realize how important it is. So we dedicate more research to it. We develop modalities the same way Marshall Lennahan did. And so I have hope for the future. I also have hope that there's going to be medications developed in my time for my physical stuff. But, you know, I wanted to show that there is. survivorship out there.

Absolutely. And life after it and stuff that we got to figure out. I also have been on the inside. I've seen how these things happen and survivors aren't being asked. It's all the psychologists and the doctors and people on boards of whatever being, like piecing it together from outside and not understanding how these things pan out. Yeah, and that's why I think it's important too that, you know, you had this platform to share your experience and your story and bring education into it as well and vulnerability. So thank you so much for that. And you did a great job, really.

Thank you. I do like to talk. Of course. No, you did great, though. Okay. Yeah.