Trainwreck update.

[gottawonder]

Her three sons drove to her place in the middle of the night, and convinced her to go to the hospital.

She makes me so angry, because about four other people tried to get her to go to the hospital this past weekend, and she wouldn't go. Nope. Just locked herself in her suite saying she'd rather die alone.

I don't doubt that she would have died before too long. Being very jaundiced, vomiting, and incoherent means that her liver is shutting down.

What makes me angry, is that even when she could be dying, she's manipulative. I knew that what she wanted was for her sons to come see her. So, she literally risked dying than just go to the hospital with any of the other people who wanted her to go.

Her sons live a few hours away, don't have a lot of money for taking time off of work or travel, and two of them have families. They do visit her several times a year. It's just never enough for Trainwreck.

So, she got her way, and the cavalry rolled in to save her.

She was in very bad shape. I'm not saying she wasn't. It's just that anyone else would have just TAKEN THEMSELVES to the hospital like a damn adult, not created a whole week's worth of drama that shook up everyone she knows who was worried about her. Locking herself in her suite and not letting anyone in, then letting it be obvious that she was very, very sick but not allowing anyone to help her. Just basking in the attention of everyone standing outside her window and door begging her to get help. Letting her friend John cry himself dry trying to help her.

Honestly, it's such a load of bullshit. Addicts are the most selfish damn people.

So, she's in a hospital in the closest small city, and that's all I know. Her kids are exhausted, they went back to her suite to throw out all the hoarded rotten food she's been stockpiling (and she can't eat, so why is she buying it in the first place?). Then they had to drive several hours to go home, and they missed a day's work, etc.

So there you go. Another dramatic event to keep her believing that people care.

Comments

[cf2princessawnw]

Wow. I'm sorry to hear all that.

[gottawonder]

Addicts/alcoholics are just very selfish. The demands the addiction puts on the people around them is incredible. People end up trying to "save" them ALL THE TIME, and no one knows if it's even real or not after a while.

We all know that she is very sick, and she will likely die from this before too long.

That said, it also feels like she's been sick forever, needed help for this, money for that, can't deal with anything as long as I've been alive. It's ALWAYS about her, and most of the time you really don't know if her "need" is real, or manufactured, or if she just doesn't want to be an adult.

[cf2princessawnw]

💖

[sherlockishere]

Gotta, I came back here because I didn't realize what had happened. I'm so terribly sorry. If it helps at all, I completely understand your anger-- Addicts are just incredibly toxic to all of the people around them. I find it infuriating. I'm glad you keep your distance. I'm convinced that I survived my childhood because I kept mine.

[gottawonder]

I'm not sure how much keeping my distance has helped, maybe a bit.

There are still times when Trainwreck's issues just sweep over all of my family like a wave, no matter where we are living.

I suppose it would be a lot worse if I lived anywhere near her, because she would want me to visit her a lot, and any time I actually see her in person it's often overwhelming to be around her, and in no time you get roped into her drama.

She wants you to take her somewhere because your vehicle is in good shape, or go pick up a couch she bought somewhere and has no way of getting home on her own, but then you also have to help her get it inside, or to store stuff at your place, or she gets an animal and can't take after it.

Sigh.

[sherlockishere]

Oh, I understand. This kind of family member is always there, in the background, and you know that at any point the whole thing can erupt again. It's not easy to live with that kind of tension. Even though both of my brothers have been doing ok for the last 7 or 8 years, I figure my older one will relapse at some point. He just has such a long history of addiction that it's difficult to believe he won't do it again. I try to just focus on the moment now, because I know I can't prevent it.

[gottawonder]

She's always on the brink of crisis. Either its that she doesn't have any money, or the endless drama when her partner was alive (they were always breaking up or fighting), she would stir up drama by sleeping with someone inappropriate (married or half dead, or someone who wanted to be with her and she didn't care about them but she'd use them for money or whatever), she'd be forced to move a lot because of her hoarding and that was always an ENORMOUS problem and our whole family would be called in to deal with it (you've likely never heard of anyone who could fill several dump trucks with moldy ruined stuff, who would still move several horse trailers of "good" stuff, and still have to burn truckloads of stuff that they couldn't take with them).

When she was younger, the crisis was abusive baby daddies, and her sleeping with pretty much anyone who would agree to it. She had three kids all by different men, and those grown kids are not particularly functional people.

My whole life I've kind of tried to stay away from her mess, but you hear about it, and you talk to her about it, and you get stressed out about it. She's ten years older than me, so I was around her when I was younger, less so after my now husband and I moved away.

You think it's important to keep talking to her out of compassion, but it takes a toll on your own mental health to do so. It takes up a lot of space in your head and your heart, and I wonder how different things might have been for our family without this drama.

[sherlockishere]

Oh, wow. How incredibly stressful for you and everyone else in the family. It's an utterly impossible situation, in which other people tend to think there's something you can do to help (Give them money? Food? A place to stay?) but at the same time, you know that nothing you give will lead to anything good.

There's another hazard as well: I grew up feeling like I would eventually make some critical mistake and fall into that kind of behavior, because surely I had inherited the same genetics. I felt like if I made a single wrong step, I'd land in the world of addiction and everything that implied: Poverty. Rage. Failure. Jail. Abusive relationships. Death. After all, I'd seen the consequences of it up close. I knew how point A led to point B and so on.

You know how we were talking about my drive a few days ago? Probably some part of it was my attempt to never, ever put a foot down wrongly, for fear of sliding into that horrible lifestyle. It always felt just one bad decision away. When every single one of your immediate family members have been involuntarily stuck in psychiatric hospitals, you grow up trying really hard not to be like them. I was terrified of what might happen if I ever stopped trying.

Sigh. I'm relieved to be in this phase of life, when I know that danger isn't out there for me anymore. But I feel for everyone who has a family member going through this. It's just so terribly hard.

[gottawonder]

Yes, that fear has been part of my life. When I was younger I wouldn't even touch alcohol, and I felt uncomfortable with my husband even drinking A beer, since his Mom is/was an alcoholic (though it has not been officially discussed as such, she sure as heck was, even if she was a cleaner, more functioning one).

Before I met my husband, I was not really "winning" in life, but what I clung to was that I didn't get pregnant, and I wasn't an addict, and lots of days I felt like that's all I had, but it was something.

I still have dreams of "going back" to places I used to live and being poor again, and it's unpleasant to say the least.