Races

I grew up knowing prejudice before I ever knew the word. Especially growing up around military bases not long enough after WWII! I would see it mostly in the adults and then reflected in their children. My elementary school teachers looked at me like I was dirty or something and never stopped the name calling at recess. I remember sitting on a friend’s porch and hearing her parents arguing about whether or not she would be allowed to play with me. The mother was defending me saying I was the smartest friend their daughter had. The father was repeating over and over how THAT dirty little Jap wasn’t coming near his kids or home. (The Mom won but I sure avoided Dad!)
I remember when I was seven I noticed that if I soaked in the tub a long time I could scrape off a layer of skin with my nails and I did this regularly trying to get rid of the dark skin and I prayed every night to a God I eventually was sure couldn’t hear me that I would wake up blond and blue eyed. I remember sitting in the sun in the back yard looking at the tiny blond hairs on my arms, inherited from my father who was almost albino, and thinking why can’t anyone else see the little blond hairs and know that I am a little white, too?


I had to leave home when I was very young. My father had died and my mother didn’t think her chances of finding an new husband were as good with me around. The first white family that took me in pretended I had no color but I know that their relatives looked down on me and them for having me around. Then when I was 17 I stayed with a family where the man of the house, Red, was a real prankster and he teased me mercilessly about being Japanese but in a funny way. On December 7th he ran into the kitchen and bit me on the shin and ran out or the room whooping and yelling, “Remember pearl harbor!” We would play fight and if I bit him he would scream “Oh no! I’ve got Yellow Jaundice! I’m dying of Gookemia!!” Just insanity until I learned to lighten up and laugh with him. That was a huge turning point for me.
So was finally growing up. Then things changed the other way and I found myself being sought by men because I was Japanese. Once when a young man proposed and I asked him why he wanted to marry me he actually said, “Because You’re Japanese!” (No, I didn’t marry him!) I had heard something about it, but was surprised to find the reverse discrimination no better. Not that the outright discrimination ever stopped. My first husband was terrified to tell his father (who was an alcoholic in prison on murder charges) that he had lowered himself to marry a Japanese woman!
I don’t see myself as being of any bad color nor anyone else. The world I live in today is better, there are a lot more Asians in America now! But I don’t know if we will ever reach the dream state of colorblindness. In some ways we can’t. I tried to raise my girls to be colorblind and told them from birth how everyone was the same even if they were of different colors. Then they went to a school that was mixed when they were in third and fourth grade and came home shocked because the black girls didn’t want to play with them. They kept trying and finally made friends with sisters their own ages who they invited over but I found out that I had missed something in my teaching them. That was that sometimes different colors come with different cultures. We learned these things together and I believe my girls are colorblind as you can get. My youngest has a black boyfriend and her older sister married a Mexican mixed man. I have another daughter five years older than them who had an early boyfriend who was mixed although her husbands were both white, but the thing is that it finally doesn’t matter, at least to them. And, bless them, they’ve never been ashamed of their Japanese heritage like I feared they would. My youngest is the only one who inherited my dark coloring and she goes to tanning salons to darken her complexion even more!I live in a predominately black neighborhood where I and my family are accepted. Everyone warned us NOT to move her but my neighbors are wonderful and I’m very happy here. I wait for the day when we have all blended to be a nice pretty light brown color. I may never live to see the day but I was born that color. :-)

Meet Me at Two

My mother was always reading. She just loved to learn. She also enjoyed studying different things mostly to do with life after death experiences and mental telepathy. Not long before she died she told me that when she died that I should look for her at two o'clock in the afternoon and that she would try to contact me. That was one of our last conversations before she became gravely ill and couldn't communicate with me any more.
The day after she died my brother and I had decided to meet at the funeral home at noon to make her arrangements. My brother, Mike, and I had sadly had to go through this together several times for friends and family we had lost in recent years and Mom had asked to be buried next to where our stepfather and brother were buried. Neither of us had a lot of money left so we were forced to make inexpensive arrangements but someone had pity on us because the casket we reluctantly picked out wasn't in stock so they upgraded us to a much nicer one for the same price.
Mike and his wife, Terry, and my boyfriend Jeremy and I left the funeral home walking out into a bright sunny day. It was a busy day there. It looked like there were a few people like us there to make arrangements as well as at least one funeral in progress and we solemnly worked our way to the car when I heard some one yelling , "Hey! Excuse me! Yes, You!" and we all stopped to let the man catch up with us. He handed me my deceased brother's driver's license and explained, "I found this in the Lobby and thought maybe one of you had dropped it."
I stared at the ID in shock. Herbert had died ten years ago and I carried his driver's license with me and I pulled it out of my wallet then staring at two of them. I looked at all of the people milling around and was amazed the man had chased us down in particular. Then my heart started to thump and I asked Mike what time it was and he replied, "Two p.m. Why do you ask?"

The Desertion

I was living the American Dream. I had a wonderful husband, three daughters, one granddaughter, a two hundred thousand dollar home with a swimming pool right across the street from where my granddaughter went to school, and my husband and I had nice, new, cars. My husband Steve was a salesman for a temp agency making a six figure income and he was able to work from his office at home and we really had it made. But then, you always know there will be a "but then" when it starts with "I had", then Steve started hating to actually go to work preferring to stay home and hang out with me by the pool in the summer and sit by the fireplace in the winter and smoke pot. At first I thought, OK, he needs a little break but he was turning in more and more false work reports to his boss and I could feel Russell, the boss, getting suspicious, and I started getting scared. I just wasn't so sure what I was supposed to be scared of. I tried asking the girls to ask their dad to take them out to work with him to encourage him to go but they were teenagers and not too interested and that wouldn't have done much long term. Then it happened. He got fired. I stood by him writing to all of the many creditors breathing down our necks and borrowing money from my friends to keep us afloat plus I started a home daycare to do my part. He finally got a much lesser job with another temp agency in town but he was pretty miserable with it. I should mention here that Steve never took blame for anything in his life and this was no exception. He hated Russel now with a vengeance and his main goal in staying in the temp business was to try to bring Russel down. He did underhanded things like selling information about Russ to other companies and even giving it away if he had to. I was still his cheerleader as he became weirder and weirder. And smoked more and more pot and got more and more drugs from the doctor for anxiety.
We had a spat one night and I woke up the next morning after he was gone sick and vomiting. I called him at his office and asked him if he could bring me some Pepto on his lunch break (my car had already been repo'ed) and he said OK but that he was very busy. I fell back asleep and when I woke up again and went downstairs there was a bouquet of flowers in the huge kitchen on the counter with a card and a note that said, "I'm leaving the car here so you can do some running today and walking back to work." I was thrilled that he wasn't angry with me about the night before and rushed to get dressed so I could take him out to lunch. I got to his office at noon it was locked and dark. I called the main office and found out that they were looking for him, too. Then I got really worried, sure he had been mugged walking the two miles to work. I called the police who of course first asked if we had been fighting and when I told them about the spat and then showed them the flowers and the card and note they decided to put out a missing person's report right away instead of waiting the usual 48 hours. I myself started searching for him, too. It was dark and sleeting all that day and I drove the route to where he worked and back every way I could think of and then started walking it. I looked under every bush I passed for his body and kept going back and forth sometimes stopping at the house to change clothes and go again. Then I thought maybe he killed himself and when I next got to the house I searched the shed and was trying to pry open the trunk to a broke down car we had when I started hearing my oldest daughter's voice distantly calling out to me, "Mom... Mom... MOM!" and I turned and looked and she was reaching for my arm and I looked at the door way to the house and noticed that almost everyone we knew was standing in the doorway to the house as Jami continued, "Mom, come inside, please! Mom. he's not in there. It's all a joke on you. Call the bank, Mom. See if there is any money there!"
I numbly followed her into the house and someone handed me a phone and the bank automated service answered and I hit all the right buttons to find out the bank account had been emptied that day.
I remember walking to the fireplace and sitting on the floor by it. A friend, Carrie, came and sat beside me and I whispered to her, "Please, tell everyone to leave. Just you stay" and the house slowly got quiet. I stared at the fire for hours, chain smoking. Carrie sat by me until she grew too tired and moved to lay on the couch. I don't remember when I started putting the cigarettes out on myself. I know I didn't cry a tear or have a thought to think. The next morning Carrie called for help and I was committed to a psyche ward. I went without any resistance. I only remember that when I walked into the place with it's locked doors I felt safe. It was like a ca-coon wrapped around me. No phones ringing or people chattering or freezing sleet. I was safe.

I May Grow Up to be a Junkie

I remember seeing a commercial once that said something like "No one decides they want to be a junkie when they grow up" and, even though I am "grown up", I have found myself contemplating having to choose turning into one.

There is a new terror in town touching every doctor for miles. Doctors are losing their license to prescribe narcotics, and some of them losing their license's all together, because of drug abuse. I applauded the first doctor to fall because he was very obviously dealing drugs with a license and he is the only one I know of who actually went to jail for it. But then my doctor was next. He was a very caring, professional doctor who helped me a great deal with the long list of things I have wrong in this 48 year old body. I was in a wheelchair when I first started seeing him with Fibromyalgia, Interstitial Cystitis, and a herniated disc on the sciatic nerve in my back and I was extremely suicidal. I was terrified of strong pain meds because I have a daughter who is a junkie and I didn't want to join her. Dr. Blair stayed after work one day for an hour and a half talking to me about it and explaining that I wouldn't get "high" or anything in my condition but that he could give me back my life. I decided to trust him and started on a regiment of pain meds that he adjusted until he had kept his word. I was not only out of the wheelchair but I was going places, cleaning my own house, playing with my little grandchildren, and never once felt "high". I also knew that there were a lot of people in town who abused him because my daughter's friends would talk about him. And sure enough, I showed up for my appointment one day and his office was surrounded by police cars and he was refusing to go with them until he finished seeing his patients for the day. We had grown fairly close by then and he told me that one of his patients had gone home and taken a deadly over dose to kill himself and that he happened to be the son of a very prominent man in town. Dr. Blair went to court and lost his license to prescribe narcotics a few months later but did manage to get me and four other patients accepted at a different pain clinic in Omaha. Then it was like dominoes, doctors falling all over until there isn't a doctor for miles not terrified to prescribe a narcotic. I take Valium for Epilepsy, have for years, but had to fight to continue to get even it because Blair's replacement was afraid to prescribe it. My new pain doctor is very cautious, prescribing me just enough Methadone and Oxycontin to take the edge off of the pain. I no longer can take care of my home or myself and am dusting off the wheelchair. I'm just old grandma to my grandkids again. I think a lot about dying again. My new doctor, Dr. Youngblood is one of two pain doctors I know of left around the Omaha/Council Bluffs area. How long until they manage to shut them down? The people like me are just suffering more. The junkies weren't affected as much because they just switched to real heroin which is the biggest new booming business around right now. No one seems to care about shutting down the drug dealers unless they are manufacturing meth. I know that for a fact because a friend once thought he could save my daughter from being a junkie by turning in all the drug dealers he knew of in the area and absolutely nothing happened. Who cares? Junkies and the diseases they carry are just swept under the rug and most of the dealers are just supporting their own habits. The big guys actually making the money aren't doing the heroin and are walking around in suits blending as businessmen. But back to my future, I wonder what I will choose if the time comes when the last two pain doctors are gone from here? Will I go back to living in misery with a caregiver wheeling me around and lay in bed every night praying I don't wake up the next day? Or will I do like many, many others in my position are doing and turn to the streets for help. What would you do???

Do I have a better solution to taking care of doctors being able to prescribe pain meds without fear? Yes. I used to wonder why doctor Blair wasn't more careful when I would see someone come in his office that looked like they might have a drug problem. I think pain doctors should check their patients all over for needle tracks. I think they should random test their chronic pain patients for drug levels in their systems as well as drug test them for use of illegal drugs like meth and marijuana and terminate services to that patient if they 'fail' the test.. I think patients on regular narcotics should have to sign an agreement to that effect before receiving treatment. Shutting the doctors' doors just opens more illegal dealer's doors and causes unjust suffering for those truly suffering needlessly with the wonderful advances we have made in pain management in this country. I think more people need to think.

Did my Brother Kill My Mother?

I have a brother named Mike, He is a chemist for a small fireproofing company, a "Honorary" Constable, and a self proclaimed doctor practicing without a license. His doctoring started about ten years ago when a friend of ours came down with Squamous Cell Carcinoma, and then right after, a childhood friend of mine came down with the same form of cancer, and we both started investigating natural cures. I mostly studied herbal remedies relying heavily on a book, Prescription for Natural Healing. He, being a much more voracious reader and researcher, and having a lot more money, went much farther including ordering every gadget he could get his hands on. Our friends both died of the cancer we were fighting although we did see some progress, or delay in the death of, my friend. At that time we were pretty basic in our ideas i.e. teas to cleanse the body, whole natural foods, etc. with only one real oddity, a Rife Machine. A Rife Machine is a bioactive Frequency machine that puts out about 400 frequencies similar to sound waves that run through the body differently according to how we would hook the person up to it and it was effective on some things like making Squamous Cell Carcinoma tumors smaller and sometimes disappear. I went back to my normal life after my friend Jackie died but still kept my Rife machine to use on pain and whatever anyone wanted to try it for and I still use herbal teas when I can afford them for different mild ailments. Otherwise I use doctors like every one else in spite of my brother's proclamations over the years of all the deadly diseases he is curing and how he can even make new teeth grow. His stories grow more and more outlandish and I grew farther and farther apart from him as a hobby turned into an obsession for him. Then we had a complete falling out after my husband of 22 years left for cigarettes and never came home. Mike as well as many other people couldn't understand how it devastated me just from the shock alone and I spent a year in therapy and inpatient hospitalization until I was stable again. About this time we heard that out mother was dying from COPD and or Lupus and she was in the middle of winning a settlement from Dow Corning for breast implants. Mike had been telling everyone I was insane for taking so long to come back around after my world crashed down and I lost everything, and I mean everything, and he started trying to have me committed at every opportunity trying to use his Constable status for weight on his side. He tried to have me sent to Rusk for The Criminally Insane once when I was about to be discharged from a psych ward I had checked myself into to get withdrawn off of prescription Xanax. The head shrink came to see me and told me that my brother was downstairs flashing a badge demanding that I be sent to Rusk and that I was a danger to the public at large. I was horrified and asked if she believed him and she said, "Of course not! I've never seen such a pompous ass in my life! WE are just hoping he will cross the line so we can commit him. But we are going to hold you an extra hour or so so you can safely leave here."
Pompous ass. I would replay those words for years with a little giggle. You see, many people actually revere Mike and believe his stories of his own greatness to the degree he is almost treated like a god by some. When he told our large family that I was insane none of them except my children have spoken to me since.
Then my mother became extremely ill with pneumonia while my boyfriend and I were taking care of her at her home. I called Home Health and they came and checked her and said that she needed to go into the hospital. I called Mike but she told me to call him back and tell him that Jeremy, my boyfriend, and I would get her to the hospital, she didn't want him around her. She had at one time joined Mike in the witch hunt against me and felt deep regret for it before she died and a deep hatred of him for putting the distance between us with his stories of fear of me.
My mother was hospitalized at Bayshore Hospital in Pasadena, Texas for about a month and then they said that she needed to be moved to a long term hospital, Kindred Hospital, where they mostly die and never go home.
The first night mom was in Kindred she wanted Jeremy and me on either side of her and she kept grabbing our hands and putting them together saying "Stay together" (which we have!) and then shortly after we left she told a nurse that she was ready to die and when the nurse returned to her room Mom had removed her oxygen mask and was dead. Mike had signed full resuscitation for her so they fought and "brought her back" but the person they brought back was no longer my mother. I firmly believe to this day that the essence of who she was died that night.
Mike fought to keep her body alive as long as he could because he said he believed that until she had a belief in God like his she would go to Hell. And maybe there were other reasons, but I'll get to that later.
Mike agreed to have a breathing tube inserted in her throat and then a feeding tube in her stomach so he could ingest whatever he wanted into her. He got permission to give her herbs and wheatgrass through the tube but put many, many more things in there including massive amounts of habanero peppers and DMSO. She became very ill and in pain from these things but he kept on. I know they hurt her stomach because some dripped on her skin once and sh screamed and they made her bloat terribly. I was furious but afraid of saying anything because he held having me committed over my head at all times with his little badge so I just did what I could like tell him I would ingest the items into her after he left and he agreed and then I would give her the natural remedies we actually had permission for instead whenever possible. Then one night the head nurse pulled me aside and said that something my brother was doing must be raising her potassium to a dangerous level because Mom had had heart failure earlier and had to be fully resuscitated again from too much potassium. I decided to trust her and said look, I need help. I told her that when my brother left packages for me to ingest in her after he was gone to please throw them away when I couldn't get there because I was coming down with pneumonia although I just knew I was feeling really sick at the time. She said, "Really, Rhoda, what is he doing? Dr. Stein is thinking that Mike is treating her more like an experiment than a loving son trying to save his mother and he wants to have your brother banned from seeing her," and right then Mike walked up and cut our conversation short. I told Mike what the nurse had told me about Mom's potassium and he shook his head in disgust saying, "These uneducated doctors don't realize that when there is too much potassium in the blood it means the body is actually depleted of potassium and the person actually needs MORE potassium!" I couldn't wait him out that night and left him with her praying he wouldn't hurt her.
Mike called two hours later and told me that our mother was dead. I went straight to the hospital to find Mike sitting in the waiting room holding his head in his hands muttering, "I was sure I was right! What went wrong?!" and he looked up at me and said, "I gave her straight potassium tonight and it killed her."
There was never any love lost between my mom and Mike. She was just an experiment to him. And he couldn't resist a chance to prove a doctor wrong and killed our mother in the process. I would have said and done more at the time but she was already gone. I truly believe she herself had been gone for the six months since she put my hand in Jeremy's and told the nurse she was ready to die. But her body still suffered greatly at his hands. No one would believe me any how. Not over him even though I could have easily proven she had illegal DMSO in her system I already knew he would blame me. The crazy one who had been in psyche units to get over a bad marriage.
My mom told me she wanted to leave me everything but that I would have to split the money from Dow with Mike. I didn't care. I had lost the dearest person to me. The only one who every totally believed in me. The only family I had left after Mike's destruction of my character.
But the day after mom died Mike pulled up in one of his Cadillacs and came in my trailer and told me that he was gong to have to sell his grand piano to pay for her funeral and it would break his heart. I had a seven thousand dollar vase mom had given me to make sure I could at least buy myself a car after she died and I gave it to him so he would bury her nicely.
He didn't even have her embalmed. Her cheap, closed casket reeked of death and DMSO and when I asked them to open it so I could see her I found out that unembalmed bodies just roll around in there. I could hear her sliding around when they lifted her to carry. I cried for two months reminding myself that she was gone, not really in that shitty box rotting.
It took me a year but I did finally get my children speaking to me again. That's when my middle daughter, Jeanette, told me that Mike was still trying to prove me insane so I couldn't get my half of Mom's Dow settlement. I could care less about it but am a bit tickled that after all the money he spent trying to gt it himself he hasn't yet that I know of and likely will never get it because Dow is asking for another physical on the patient to release the money! BUT it also makes me wonder about that last dose of potassium he gave her. He killed her body no matter how you look at it but the ugly question is why? Did he give up on reviving her enough to get her to sign everything over to him in her deliriums? I turned him in to the authorities for practicing medicine without a license but of course no one cared. Except me. Rest in Peace my sweet Momma

Rambling

I have a daughter who is a junkie. I through her know a lot of junkies. But I am not one of them. At least not an illegal one. I take a lot of the meds they abuse for chronic pain. My problem is being treated like I am a junkie just because I need these meds especially after doctor after doctor in this area are getting shut down for over prescribing drugs or for one of their patients overdosing and dying. I lost my first doctor, Dr. Blair, because one of his patients overdosed after going home with his meds although the correct instructions were clearly printed on the bottle. I don't get this at all. Now all of the pain management doctors in the area are terrified to take care of their chronic pain patients properly. My new doctor keeps me about half medicated so I am half functional when I know I could be fully functional with proper meds. THIS PISSES ME OFF. I don't get it at all. I knew some of Blair's patients who were abusing junkies. I could tell they were just by looking at them especially the ones covered with tracks. Why can't they just filter some of them out so the rest of us don't suffer for their addictions?? I thought Blair was an excellent doctor but always wondered that he didn't check for tracks on his patients asking for Oxycontin or check their records to see if they really needed the meds. And why doesn't my PC spell check work on DIINO?? I'm in a bad mood. I just spent the weekend without any pain meds because of a mess up at the clinic and suffered greatly. Tried to sleep away the pain thus missing Easter with my grandchildren completely. Back to the pain clinic thing. There are now only three pain centers that I know of in Omaha and one that might meet my needs who I had to fight to get an appointment with next month. But I fear he will be gone soon, too, since when I last saw my neurosurgeon who did the last surgery on my back said, "Oh, you're switching to HIM. Yea, that's what people like YOU do." Talking to me like I'm a junkie although he is the one cutting my spine open these days to work on it. And don't get me gong on the ignorance of all doctors about MRSA. Most have no clue what it is, none have a clue how to treat it outside of the Disease Control Specialist, but they sure have a lot of stupid advice and false information to pass along to you of you ask!!! I swear, MRSA will be a plague of Biblical proportions before any of the doctors get on the same page about even what it is. OK. I'm done bitching. Se ya.