Tales of the Crazy

by Charles L Cole

  One of the members at our church owned a florist shop and offered Jess a job at ten dollars an hour. Instead of her feeling good that someone wanted to hire her, Jess’s pride took over again, and she felt greatly insulted that they did not offer her a higher starting salary. I tried to put a positive spin on this and told her that she had an opportunity to show just how good she was and that she could ask for a much higher salary once she proved herself. I even told her that with her talent, she could end up being the manager of the store in a short time. Nothing I said gave her encouragement, since her outrageous pride had taken hold. She just sat around the house feeling depressed instead of making positive changes with her life.

  In 2012, Jess went back to Thailand, again by herself, from January to February to take care of more issues with her mom. Suda’s Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease worsened, and she could no longer live by herself without help. Suda wanted to stay in her home, but we knew that other arrangements eventually had to be made for her long-term care.

  After this trip, Jess’s emotional and physical health were dramatically better. She had a purpose in Thailand, and it was to help her mom. Just like her last trip, her pain levels were much lower since she had a sense of direction in her life. Now she started talking about selling the inventory, saying she had got over her emotional block. Finally!

  Jess came up with a new idea of wanting to buy a foreclosed property to start up a new store. She even tried talking me into buying a house that was zoned for commercial use, saying we could sell our home to pay for it. Her proposal was for us to live in the upstairs with her business on the lower floor. No way was I going to do this.

  The thing was, Jess hadn’t learned from the past; she still kept repeating the same old mistakes, didn’t follow through, and another disaster would surely happen if she opened up another store. In addition to all this, I still had serious trust issues with her. I suggested starting up an online discount website so that she could sell the inventory without the cost of a storefront. This would not require any large financial investments on our part. The cost of a website was minimal, since I could do all the website work. Jess thought this was a good idea.

  I registered a number of domain names for her that she wanted and did all I could to get her to start. Just like so many times before, she lost interest and did nothing. She only talked about what she was going to do for a while. Sure was glad I hadn’t agreed to sell our home to fund another store.

  Shortly after this, Jess had the idea she wanted to make jewelry, so she took a jewelry making class. She wanted me to help get her tools, so I helped her get a bunch of specialized hand tools along with an acetylene tank, regulator, and jeweler’s torch. After she finished the class, she did nothing with all these tools, and they sat unused. I thought that Jess would never make anything of herself and would never have a meaningful career. She had the talent and incredible potential, but no drive. She was just lazy, and for her, it was too easy sitting back and having me take care of and pay for everything.

  Jess’s new idea to help with her neck pain was to buy a neck brace. I only saw her wear it twice at home. She wore it to church a few time, and the interactions she had with people were very bizarre. She seemed to feed on their sympathy. I saw the expression on her face when people asked what had happened, and she truly loved the attention. Instead of being a loving, caring woman who helped others and gave of herself, Jess became the opposite and took from the good intentions and emotions of others. People soon learned not to ask her how she was doing, because Jess would go into a long diatribe on her health issues.

  I asked Jess why she wore the brace at church but not at home, and she angrily replied, “You don’t see me wearing it since you are at work.” Her anger ramped up more, and she accused me of not understanding.

  Jess also began to develop some very strange germ phobias. There was one bizarre incident after I got home from work. I went upstairs to change clothes and set my shirt and pants on the bed before putting them in the laundry hamper. Jess asked me not to do this because of germs. What? This seemed nuts.

  I asked her why she thought this, and she said it was because I’d been in contact with all sorts of stuff out of the home and now I was bringing all the germs to the bed where we sleep. I asked her about Diva and Sasi walking through all the stuff in the yard, sometimes rolling in animal poop, and why it was OK for them to sleep in the bed.

  Jess said that was different.

  “Different?” I asked.

  I asked her, “What’s worse: my clothes on the bed or Sasi sleeping on your pillow all night with her butt against your face? Her fur is still holding all the nasty stuff picked up on her walks, and she has not been bathed in two weeks.”

  Jess was frustrated at not being able to give me a reasonable reply and did not bring up the subject of my clothes on the bed again.

  In late August 2012, I got a couple of bounced check notices and notifications that automatic payments did not have sufficient funds from my checking account. What? I always had more than enough to cover bills. After going online and looking at my checking account, I saw that there was a levy from the Michigan Department of Treasury for $3,207 and an additional garnishment fee from the bank for $125. I had no idea what this was and hadn’t received any notices from the bank.

  I asked Jess if she had received any notices, and she said no. I talked with the bank, but they were of little help. The only thing they could tell me was that it was an authorized garnishment. They did tell me that multiple notices had been mailed to Jess. I asked why, considering I was the primary account holder and Jess was only a joint user. Notices hadn’t been sent to me.

  They said the levy was in Jess’s name, so notices were mailed to her only. I searched the house looking for letters from the bank, and then I found a very large pile of unopened mail mixed in with a box of Jess’s stuff and found four letters from the bank. Jess hadn’t opened any of the mail, and the garnishment notices were there. Damn. Once again I was taking hits due to her ignoring issues and not following up. Jess claimed she hadn’t seen the letters.

  The only reason Michigan garnished my account for her tax debt was due to Jess’s name being listed on my account. She also had another account at the same bank. Notices of the levy had been delivered to her for this account also, but the balance was only about twenty dollars.

  Jess and I tried to get the funds returned, and the people at the Department of Treasury told us that if I proved that all funds were from my job and nothing came from Jess, they would return the funds. I gathered up all the statements showing that all deposits were from my job, but they went back on their word and refused to return the money. I spoke with an attorney about this and was told I would probably win this case due to the fact that what the state had done was technically illegal, but it would cost almost $3,000 in legal fees to fight this in court. That’s why the state wouldn’t return my money—they knew that the amount of legal fees it would take to fight this would be close to the amount of the levy. The people I spoke to in the Michigan Department of Treasury had lied to me, and there was not a damned thing I could do about it. The money was gone. Laws apply only to peasants.

  With Jess in the same mode of not doing anything, her mood fell, and her pain levels increased. Narcotics had little effect on the pain. Jess asked me to come with her to a visit with her primary-care physician, and I agreed. Jess told her doctor about all her pain, and then the doctor asked her what she was doing with her life. Jess didn’t say much. The doctor told her that by sitting around with no purpose in life, she was focusing on what was wrong and pain instead of what she could do.

  The doctor said, “If I did nothing with my life and sat around all day, I’d start feeling pain also.”

  She asked Jess to get involved in a small charitable project as a start. I said that we both went to St. Paul and that there were many opportunities there available. Jess agreed that seeing what was available at St. Paul would be a start. After thi
s visit to the doctor, Jess still did nothing.

  Jess’s doctor finally gave her a referral to go down to the Cleveland Pain Clinic to see if they could help Jess.

  The doctor at the clinic ran some tests on Jess while I was in the room and when I was out. He also had an hour-long conversation with her alone and then talked with me alone. He called us both in after writing up a report with a course of suggested treatment. He said that Jess’s nervous system was hypersensitive. Over the years, she had trained her body to feel pain. Much of the pain should not be there, but it was due to her current psychological condition that she felt this phantom pain.

  He told us this was common with people with chronic pain issues who rely on narcotics. Jess’s treatment plan was for her to stay there at the clinic by herself for six weeks. Every Friday the family would come down, and we would talk together in a group counseling session. The plan also was to get her off narcotics, as her body had built up a tolerance to them. There would also be extensive physical therapy and psychological work done to remap her nervous system to get her back to feeling normal pain levels and not the exaggerated levels she was experiencing. It was going to be a very long road ahead.

  We went back home, and her primary care physician submitted the paperwork for the stay at the Cleveland Clinic to our health care insurer, HAP, which denied the request. They approved only four separate visits, not the full treatment plan. We made a second request appealing to their board, but HAP denied the appeal. Without health insurance covering this, it was impossible to pay for Jess’s treatment with all the past financial disasters. Instead of the six-week stay at the Cleveland Clinic, HAP enrolled Jess in the pain clinic at University of Michigan. Jess made no progress there. It was more of the same she had already done: seeing counselors, getting dosed on narcotics, and getting neck and feet steroid injections. I saw no improvement with Jess.

  In addition to getting neck and foot injections, Jess began demanding to get wrist injections. She began wearing braces on both wrists and claimed that she had pain due to carpal tunnel syndrome, but I didn’t see any confirmation of this on her medical reports. She told me the doctors did not know why she was feeling pain in her wrists. There were times when she hardly left the bedroom from being depressed and feeling all this pain.

  One Sunday when Jess and I were at church, there was a prayer list displayed on the projector screen of people requesting for prayers for various problems. No names were shown, only the first initial of their name. There was one person with the initial of J asking for prayers and guidance due to trouble he or she was in because of committing a crime.

  I didn’t think anything of this, but Jess was extremely agitated. After the service, she spoke to a couple of people, expressing her outrage over J being shown to everyone. Because Jess’s nickname was only the first letter of her name, she tried to convince the staff that everyone in St. Paul now thought that person was her and that she was a criminal. Any reasonable person would know this was not the case. But Jess’s pride had skyrocketed to incredible levels, and she was not being reasonable.

  Jess even went to the pastor and demanded that he inform the congregation at all services that this person with the J initial was not her. The pastor tried to calm her down and told her that bringing this up would only raise more questions. Jess still was not satisfied. She even went back to the staff and told them if there was a period after the J and all other initials in the prayer list, she would not be confused with the initials on the prayer list. It was an incredibly stupid argument. Jess wanted me to talk to people about this, but I tried to assure her that no one assumed that she was this person and that the pastor was correct in letting this go. She was very angry at me and once again accused me of never standing up for her.

  To compound Jess’s medical issues, there was a large fungal infection outbreak in 2012, with many people dying from contaminated steroids. Eight hundred people got fungal infections, and sixty-four died. One of the steroid lots Jess was injected with in her ankle was identified as possibly contaminated. Jess looked at the symptoms others had and was sure she had a fungal infection. During the course of diagnosing this, Jess had two spinal taps, which showed no signs of infection. Getting these spinal taps was horrible for Jess with her needle phobia.

  She also had multiple MRIs of her ankles and neck, but these were inconclusive. The doctors thought that they saw a mass in her ankle but were not sure if it actually was a fungal infection. Jess insisted she had the infection by telling the doctors that her symptoms were the same as other people who had it. At one time one of her ankles was swollen and looked bruised, but the doctors had doubts that this was caused by a fungal infection because all other tests were negative.

  With Jess describing all the symptoms she had of the infection in detail, the doctors didn’t want to take a chance and instead admitted her to St. Joseph Hospital in October 2012. An entire floor was dedicated to treating this fungal infection, due to the large number of people in Michigan affected by these steroid injections. The doctor put Jess on an IV drip of Itraconazole for a week. She was there for about ten days and then released. To this day, I doubt that Jess had a fungal infection, but I could be wrong.

  In late 2012, Jess joined in on the class-action lawsuit against the New England Compounding Center. They were responsible for the extremely unsanitary conditions that caused this disaster.

  In 2013, Jess started seeing a neurologist. Jess had been Googling medical symptoms and browsing medical websites, and she was convinced that she had fibromyalgia. She thought that her symptoms mimicked others with fibromyalgia. I didn’t believe this latest claim of hers. How could one person have so many problems? Over the next few months, Jess had numerous doctor visits to diagnose this. She didn’t talk about much else and was happy seeing many new doctors. Some doctors said she had it; others did not.

  It was very tiresome for me to hear more tales of her newfound disease and medical procedures. I’d heard enough stories of medical misery from Jess to last multiple lifetimes. It had been an unrelenting, constant barrage of issues, and I’d been driven to the point of not wanting to hear about medical problems from anyone else.

  Nine

  It Hits the Fan

  In May 2014, Mom and Jess went to Kansas for my niece Elizabeth’s graduation from high school and to help my other niece Victoria move back to Jane’s house from college. There was a big blowup between Jess and my sister. Jess called me and claimed that Jane had threatened and assaulted her, but according to Mom and Jane, that did not happen.

  The series of events that led to this blowup was complicated, but both Mom and Jane said that Jess was interfering with Jane’s family and trying to manipulate people to make herself look good and Jane look bad. Jess told Jane that she needed to treat Mom better and to stop Mom from cleaning the garage. Jane told Jess that she did not need to be told how to treat her own mother and that Mom was an independent woman and knew her limits. Jane also told Jess that Mom was very smart and knew what she was capable of doing. Mom was only helping to get things ready for the graduation party by cleaning the garage with a Shop-Vac and had done some sweeping.

  Mom told Jess, “I don’t want to be taken care of.”

  After Mom said this, according to Jane, Jess walked over to the couch with a dazed look; she was smiling as if she were in a daydream. She was completely disconnected from everyone else and reality.

  A few days before Jess called me about being assaulted, she sat on an exercise ball and fell off and hurt her neck. She claimed that she had wanted to do some sit-ups on the ball. This was not true. The truth was that she had been holding Elizabeth’s baby while bouncing on the ball to get him to sleep and had fallen. Jane told me they used the ball regularly to bounce the baby to get him to sleep, and Jess was doing the same thing. After Jess fell off, she demanded to be taken to the emergency room, but the ER staff didn’t see anything wrong and released her. Jess called me and said she needed her neck brace, so I mailed it to my
sister’s house via next-day air. Jess claimed that her injury was Jane’s fault because the ball was too soft and that Jane was negligent by not keeping it properly inflated. She was demanding that Jane pay the costs of the ER visit.

  To add more fuel to the fire, according to Mom and Jane, Jess was disrupting plans to help Victoria move home from college by calling Jane’s ex-husband to get involved. Jane had asked Jess not to get involved with the ex-husband and Victoria and said they could handle the move. Jess started yelling at Jane, accusing Jane of always jumping on her, and then Jane had enough.

  She told Jess that she was not jumping on her and that, ever since Jess had arrived in Kansas, she had caused nothing but problems with the family. Jane let loose on Jess with anger from dealing with Jess over the years, and this latest crap was the catalyst that pushed Jane over the edge. She told Jess exactly what she thought of her and even said that Mom didn’t want to travel with Jess, due to her issues. Mom was horrified at what Jane said, but it was all true. Mom would never have said those things aloud even though she thought them.

  That was the breaking point that started the shouting match between Jess and Jane. According to both Jane and Mom, Mom was between Jane and Jess, trying to calm Jess down, but Jess kept on. Jess was the aggressor, reaching over Mom’s shoulder and poking her finger at Jane while yelling profanities. Jane pushed Jess’s finger aside, sidestepped her, and told her to stop, and then Jess hit Jane in her chest with the palm of her hand. It was only a light thump.