As I page through “Star”, “People”, and “Elle” sitting in the hospital waiting room I begin to ponder what kind of role models my children will have?  I see the popular faces we all know all too well, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan and so on.  The thought that these girls are the kind of people today’s teens look up to and emulate scares me.  What kind of messages do they send?  If you have enough money morals are optional.  Drinking and drugs are actually socially acceptable, and if you get caught pay a fine and go to rehab.  You need to be a size 4 to be considered beautiful and intellect doesn’t matter. 

Then my mind wanders to why I am actually paging through these magazines in the ICU waiting room, my grandmother.  I think of the kind of woman she is and the life she has led.  It is evident in the people waiting to see her.  The waiting room is filled with over 20 members of her immediate family, all of whom are hoping to hear that she will be ok.  I see my grandfather, 91 turn into a child and weep uncontrollably.  The heart wrenching sorrow in his eyes is overwhelming and I feel a tear slide down my own cheek.  When he’s in the room with her he tells her how beautiful she is, even though she has 2 tubes down her throat, her hair is all matted, her arms are bloated and filled with IVs and there are countless machines buzzing around her.  He professes his love for her and how he can’t go on if she doesn’t come home. 

She is the kind of wife that I can only hope to be one day.  When she made her vows they were for ever, divorce was not even a fleeting thought.  Her husband and home were cherished.  She cooked, cleaned, did laundry and all those seemingly mundane daily chores with love and made a small house a home.  Starting off they didn’t have much, but their love and devotion some how made it enough.  Over the last 67 years their lives inner twined so tightly you can truly say the two became one, one heart, one mind, one spirit.  Yet she never lost her sense of self and who she truly was.  Amazingly she was able to create what so many people long for, but so seldom find.

I un-cross then re-cross my legs and see my Father and Aunt talking across the room.  They are a testament to my grandmother’s strength, and to what kind of mother she was.  She entered the hospital for a fractured pelvis from a fall and some where along the line developed MRSA with septicemia while in the hospital.  It’s so hard to see a once vibrant and strong woman reduced to the condition she is in, lying in a hospital bed hooked up to all these machines and not able to communicate with us.  Never the less, both my father and aunt are there every day to see their mother.  They ask her questions hoping to get even the smallest response, to revive some hope that things may get better.  They ask her if she is in pain or if she is feeling better, and there are nods here and blinking at times, but all the medication makes it hard to qualify the responses.  The frustration from not being able to know what my grandmother needs is overwhelming, but it doesn’t keep her children from trying to make her comfortable. 

My aunt lovingly applies chap stick to my grandmother’s lips to help the dryness, and my father leans over and speaks softly to tell her how much he loves her, soothing her.  Both are things my grandmother probably did for them many times as children.  It’s kind of ironic yet touching at the same time.  I think back to stories my Father has told me about growing up and I can’t remember him ever saying one negative word about his mother.  All the stories were filled with how she sacrificed to make sure they had everything, putting herself last at all times.  She is the epitome of what a mother should be.  I think to the future to the day I will be a mother, and I pray that my children will see me the way I know my father and aunt see my grandmother.

I snap back into reality as my brother and his girlfriend walk back into the waiting room allowing two more a short visit with grandma.  My eyes sweep the waiting room and take inventory of her grandchildren.  Out of her 9 grandchildren 8 are present.  The only reason on is absent because he is in Iraq fighting for our country, if it was at all possible for him to fly back he would be here.  That in and of it’s self is impressive but there are 6 more “grandchildren” waiting as well. These “grandchildren” are ones that married into the family, or will be marrying into the family soon.  If you asked them who they are there to see you won’t hear “Michael’s grandmother” or “Cheryl’s grandmother”, they will tell you they are there to see grandma.  She makes everyone at ease that no matter how long you’ve been a part of our family 8 years or 8 months.  They feel like she is their grandmother as well. 

Growing up she was at every dance recital, football game, baseball game, award assembly, graduation, and the list goes on.  I remember that even though we moved almost two hours away when I turned one, she and my grandfather made every effort to see us.  They would come and stay with us for a week or two at a time, just to visit.  They were a retired couple, still very much in love and could do anything with their time.  They could travel the world, and they did travel here and there, but what they lived for was their children and grandchildren.  They made time for us above all else.  Not a one of us ever felt neglected or left out.  We only felt loved.

It’s eight days later, and I am once again at the hospital.  I have taken up to going to work, coming home, packing dinner and riding up to the hospital with my parents.  Today is a little different.  I left work at noon and got to the hospital early because my father and my aunt are discussing my grandmother’s condition with a team of doctors.  The blood infection seems to be gone so of course I hope for the best.  Unfortunately that is not come into fruition.  There are so many things still wrong with her, and her organs are beginning to shut down.  The best we can hope for is that she will get well enough to go into a nursing home with a respirator and a feeding tube.  From there the chances of her getting any better are slim, and amount of pain she is in will most likely remain unknown because of her lack of ability to communicate.  Options are discussed, and the one that seems the most humane is the last one I want to hear. 

I go in to see her with my father, aunt and grandfather.  We talk to her and hope for a response, and she tries her best to appease us.  It’s amazing, her body has taken such a beating in the last few weeks, she is exhausted and in pain, yet she still tries to make us feel better with a blink or a nod.  It has to take all her strength, but I’m sure she doesn’t even think about that.  My aunt tells her “Mom we love you and want you here with us, but if you have to go, it’s ok to go”.  Tears begin to slide down my cheek knowing how much it took for my aunt to say that.  I look around and everyone is softly crying, trying to suppress it, yet not able to.  It is then that the most gut wrenching thing happens.  Looking at my grandmother it appears that she is crying with us.  There are many reasons for why she could be crying.  She could sense that her life is coming to an end and is afraid.  Sorrow at the possibility of not seeing any of us again may be overwhelming her, or it could be pain.  In my opinion a different reason all together comes to mind.  I truly believe she hears us crying and does not want us to be in pain.  She hates that her condition is bringing us any sorrow, because as her life has shown, she is always thinking of others welfare above her own.  I realize in that one moment what an amazing woman my grandmother is, and what a wonderful role model she has become.

Tomorrow her respirator will be removed, she will be given pain medication with something for anxiety, and most likely fall asleep to never wake up.  I am saddened because I will not get to share my wedding day with her.  I am glad I was able to share the details of my engagement with her before she became ill.  In my heart I know she will still be there in spirit, she wouldn’t have it any other way.  I am even more grief stricken over the fact that my children will never have the privilege of knowing this amazing woman. 

She was not a CEO, a movie star, a platinum artist, or anyone you would find on the cover of a magazine.  No, she was a wife, a mother and a grandmother.  She found happiness in the simple things in life, and made every one around her feel loved and accepted.  Her needs always came after the needs of others, and her legacy is her family.  She is the kind of role model I pray my children will be able to look up to.  It is what I hope they will one day find in me. 

Artist: Martina McBride
Album: Martina
Title: She’s a Butterfly

She remembers when she first got her wings
And how she opened up that day
she learned to sing
Then the colors came, erased the
black and white
And her whole world changed
when she realized

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A few days after I had taken her to a little blue house in west Council Bluffs to spend the night with her boyfriend and others there she called me and said that she had some big spider bites that were freaking her out. She came over and when I saw them I took her to the ER. They were all on her backside and huge with a raised white area in the middle where there was a dark dot. The ER doctor took one look and backed up pretty quick and said Yep! These are spider bites! Notice the dark spot in the center where the bite took place…they will soon start to drain… and went on with spider bite information and he prescribed four weeks of bactrum.

I drained her bites over the next few days while we were hearing that everyone who had stayed at that house had been bitten. People were talking about burning the house down but then Jami got another one right in the middle of where the others had been while still at my house. No blue house full of invisible spiders. We drained that one ourselves without thinking too much about it although it was nagging at me that she would keep getting bit in the same area.

She returned to Council Bluffs and called from time to time telling me about different people talking about how to lance the bites and that she was draining them for her boyfriend.

Then one night her father called me from an ER in Council Bluffs and said that she had been diagnosed with CA MRSA. He was extremely upset because he already knew some about it being spread by needle sharing and that it was considered an STD, too.

And of how deadly it can be. I hung up and started doing searches on the internet until I was crying too hard to continue. Her case is made worse by several factors. One, of course, her drug use doesn’t keep her in good health or good financial condition. Also, I found from several sources that things like having an autoimmune disease makes you even more likely to catch it, and she has Graves Disease and Fibromyalgia already.

It was very hard to adjust to living with this thing in our midst devouring my daughter in front of my eyes! Every time I saw her she was thinner and more depressed. She lost custody of all three of her daughters after the birth of the last one but the father of the two youngest still looked after her and made sure she got to spend time with her daughters. Until the MRSA. He had been thinking about getting out of the Air Force after becoming a single father but really seemed to make the decision after the MRSA popped up and he moved to Minnesota last month with the girls. He had started carrying sanitary wipes and lotions and supplied the rest of us with them, too, once he did some reading online.

I tried and tried to get word out about this to the community around us and was stupefied that NO ONE wanted to even know about it. Even people who have it don’t much want to talk about it or do anything about it and a lot of them just don’t want to be treated like a leper. None of the local news stations were interested to know that I personally knew about ten people infected within a very small area who not only had CA MRSA but who all seemed to be ignorant of precautions they should take to protect others or even how serious it was to take the full amount of antibiotics prescribed. Even my daughter would split her antibiotics with her boyfriend until I realized I had to be able to treat both of them to save her.

For a long time I thought that my daughter and her friends didn’t warrant news time because they were only junkies perhaps considered dispensable to society like many “joked” about AIDS and gay people at first. Then I find more and more people online who didn’t get this through needle sharing and aren’t junkies but they are from all walks of life.

So, I still don’t get it but hope to change it even if just a tiny bit for a few people.

After about four months of dealing with this Jami called me and said that she had one that she couldn’t get to drain that was hurting her a lot so I went over there to help her. She sat up in bed and pulled her gown up and her robe down just exposing the boil under her right breast and I tried to get at it but her clothes kept getting in the way and I finally said,
“Look I know you don’t want me to see how bad it is but you are going to have to let me see if you want me to be able to drain this.” Be careful what you ask for!!! I don’t know how I kept on with what we were doing once I saw her torso. She was covered in bumps, boils, and scars everywhere. She looked at my face and met my eyes and we both just cried softly while I worked on her. It ended up being too deep to drain so she had to go to the ER and get it lanced.

Then another bomb dropped on us. Jami called two weeks ago and told me that she is pregnant. The ER had checked because of the antibiotics they were wanting to use.

A baby. What are the little baby’s chances of being OK with the drugs and the CA MRSA?? And I started praying to God, I can’t take all of this in! Help us please!!

But we were already being blessed. That ER trip changed everything. Jami is no longer sitting there doing the drugs and being eaten alive so depressed over losing her girls that she didn’t care enough to take care of her CA MRSA. I went to visit her for the first time since hearing she is pregnant and she looked wonderful. She has stopped shooting up the Meth, gained about ten pounds, and is taking the antibiotics and I didn’t see one boil on her. She knows she likely won’t be able to keep this baby because she used Meth during the first month of pregnancy and she already has a police record for this. And she is struggling to get off of the heroin which might be easier now that she isn’t in constant pain from the boils. She is pro choice but can’t bring herself to have an abortion but is comforted that I have the means and am more than willing to take custody of this child if she carries him/her full term. We still snuggle up together like she is a little girl sometimes and talk about the new baby and there is Life in my daughter again in the midst of this tragedy. Aren’t those silver linings carefully hidden sometimes!

I hope she stays free of the boils and can get off of all of the drugs. The Meth was her longest addiction and she did that so I think she can do the rest and she is willing to do it under a doctor’s care if necessary.

That is our story to date my friends. I know it is wordy and goes a long way into the problem of drug addiction but I think there might be more out there who have contracted this through sharing needles and maybe they will speak up if they see this.

My heart goes out to every one of you who write or read this website and thank you all for being here!

There have been times I turned my head
And tried not to notice
But it’s a crime to lie in bed
And close our eyes to this
With these victims among us
Who else will make a fuss?

Don’t let ‘em slip through the cracks
I’m here to share the burden
Climb upon my back
The road is long so we’ve got to be strong
To keep up the attack
Don’t let ‘em slip through the cracks

Now we parade other issues
That weigh on some hearts more
But a band air or soft tissue
Only covers the sore
The numbers grow everyday
We’ve got to find a way

Don’t let ‘em slip through the cracks
I’m here to share the burden
Climb upon my back
The road is long so we’ve got to be strong
To keep up the attack
Don’t let ‘em slip through the cracks

Nothing worthwhile is easy
But I’m willing to play my part
To reach the goals end
There’s got to be a place to start

Don’t let ‘em slip through the cracks
I’m here to share the burden
Climb upon my back
The road is long so we’ve got to be strong
To keep up the attack
Don’t let ‘em slip through the cracks

Words and Music By:
George M. Clancy
ecmusic@optonline.net
Copyright 2005