My first heart attack. I’m pretty sure that I had a minor heart attack when I returned home after visiting my brother for the very last time. I had to hang up on my daughter and just go to sleep to deal with the crushing pain in my chest that weekend but recovered enough to return to work and teach for the next several weeks of my brother’s life.
A few weeks after that warning sign, I got the call that tore the plaque from my veins and gave me 100% blockage of the outgoing artery and sent me crashing to the floor.They put my dying brother in a mental hospital, claiming he’d become a danger to them in his final few weeks of his life. It was all about the sugar and my step-father’s deep resentment of my little brother, which he shared with me upon the first day that I arrived to visit after the cancer diagnosis. He apologized to me for the sugar that was sprinkled around the coffee pot and complained that Johnny was always spilling. I thought to myself, “You realize my brother is dying and I don’t give a crap about the spilled sugar.” but I never said it.He’d treated my brother, sister and I like unwelcome houseguest when we visited for decades, and I respected that by staying away as much as I could, but nothing was going to stop me from spending what little time I had left with my brother, after being separated for the better part of our lives, and knowing he’d suffered when I was unable to help him in the past.<<<<**>>>>My step-father was constantly angry about the sugar that Johnny spilled each time he tried to fill the sugar jar at the coffee machine. My step-father’s solution was to put his ten pound bags of sugar on a shelf so high that you couldn’t even reach it with a step stool. I myself had to climb up on their kitchen counter once to get it and replenish the bowl. My step-father was a tall man, 6′ 2”. Johnny was 5′ 7”. <<<<**>>>>Out of sugar one day, Johnny attempted to get down the 10 pound bag of sugar on his own and ended up spilling the whole thing in the middle of the kitchen floor. In terror of being punished they said he grabbed something in the kitchen to protect himself and the whole thing escalated. Authorities were called and he had been put into the very same hospital as that horrible woman who had drowned all seven of her own children, while she was there!<<<<**>>>>My sister sent me the written report they had used in order to commit him. They left out information and some of it was lies, so I typed my own report as I felt an excruciating pain rising up in my chest. I was certain I must be coming down with pneumonia, my whole chest area felt so raw. But I typed on, furiously and accurately. The pain got stronger and just as I got to the end and pressed “Send” … my arms straightened out in such fierce pain I could not bend them and every tooth in my jaw was pounding in pain… I fell to the floor screaming and my son ran in … ran to the neighbors for aspirin … we knew what it was … they had none .. he drove me twenty minutes to town where they air flighted me to Albuquerque. By the time I got there they said I was at 100% blockage and if it had been my in-going artery I would not have survived.<<<<**>>>>If you think that was bad, what happened to my brother was infinitely more tragic. His oncologist had decided that it was time to give up and stop the chemotherapy treatments but he had no idea of that and was used to his weekly schedule of treatments. <<<<**>>>>He knew the day of his treatment so when it came time he told them about his treatment and asked how he would be getting there and since no one from the family bothered to tell him, the hospital personnel informed him, insensitively and without explanation, that he would no longer be receiving chemotherapy treatments, at which point he got upset, because he knew it was a death sentence and they didn’t understand. It accelerated and they ended up pinning him to the floor, injecting him with a strong sedative, putting him in a straight jacket and then into isolation. This.is.how.my.baby.brother.received.the.news.that.he.was.going.to.die.and.it.is.why.I.can.never.forgive.some.people…..<<<<**>>>>period……P.S. My brother never hurt a flea in all his life.
Oikos 