MRSA Resources

Hi. My name is Rhoda and I am the mother of three beautiful daughters and five granddaughters and one grandson. My oldest daughter is 30 years old and has been a Military wife and a junkie for most of the last ten years. Until she gave birth to an addicted baby two years ago and her husband divorced her to get the girls back. She left his house and went on a downward spiral that ended with her in Jail for one year for changing a doctor’s prescription. She was released September first 2006 and came out saying she was going to stay clean of drugs but horrified that she had gained a good fifty pounds while in jail. I know she started doing meth again thinking it would get the weight off of her and that she would keep it under control and quit after losing the weight. She started out smoking Meth and then slipped back into shooting it up and heroin until she was headed right back to where she had barely gotten out alive before, going from flop house to flop house, where ever the drugs and her boyfriend were.

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!