The Horror of Mold and Parental Neglect

There are always those experiences that leave us unable to consume a certain food. One of mine is Salisbury steak. I ate it just before I got stomach flu, and I have been unable to consume it since. Even the smell makes me sick. Once you see Salisbury steak thrown up and know that it turns white in your stomach, you’ll never eat it again.

Alcoholic Drink

 The same thing happened to me with alcohol many years ago. No, I did not have too much to drink, I simply drank the wrong drink. It all happened one Saturday evening years ago, when I decided to have a rum drink to relax. I went to look in the refrigerator for something to mix with my rum, but the only thing available were two jugs of Kool-Aid. One was tropical punch flavored, and since I thought this flavor tasted like baby diapers, I went for the watermelon jug instead. What I didn’t realize was that jug of watermelon Kool-Aid had been in the refrigerator for two months. My mistake almost cost me my life.

Everything seemed normal at first. I mixed my shot of rum into the Kool-Aid and sat down to drink it, but almost the minute I started drinking the liquid, I started to feel light-headed. I passed it off as the effects of drinking on an empty stomach and didn’t think much of it.

By the end of the evening, my tongue had swelled to twice its size, and I could feel swelling in my throat. I was unable to see, as my vision had faded. I remember fumbling with the remote control to turn off the TV set, then my head became too heavy to hold up. I fell to the side as vomit flew from my mouth like a volcanic eruption. I was in trouble!

I clearly remember my mother saying “Oh, okay,” though I couldn’t see her anymore. The next second, I hit the floor in a puddle of lava-like vomit. I lost consciousness after that, and I have no idea how long I lay on the floor before I awakened again.

It was a terrifying thing when I woke up. I couldn’t move my body, no matter how much I tried. I could breathe, but only if I consciously forced myself to do so. It felt like there was a cinder block sitting on my chest. The roughness on my right cheek told me that I was still laying on the living room floor.

I don’t think my mother realized how serious the situation was. She as playing computer games in another room while I lay there. I told her that I couldn’t breathe and I needed her to call 911. She simply told me that I’d had too much to drink and I had to wait for it to wear off, which is odd, since I’d only had one drink. I begged her to call an ambulance, but she refused. She wouldn’t even bring me the phone when I asked for it.

It was about this time that the monks showed up. That’s what I call them, anyway. They had no faces, but they were cloaked in black cloth, so it was hard to tell for sure. I could hear them whispering as they pointed to me laying on the floor. As they whispered, they came closer and closer.

At this point, my mental self-preservation system kicked in. I remember one of my characters taking over my mind, taking my place because I could no longer operate. She tried to tell Mom that I needed help, but Mom refused to call 911. She kept insisting that I drank too much, that I did this to myself, and that I just needed to wait for it to wear off.

It was clear to me that my mother was in complete denial of any medical emergency. I had to get to that phone and call 911 for myself, but it was too far away. I was not in control of my body and was unable to get up, much less dial the proper numbers to get help. I was at the mercy of this stupid woman who refused to acknowledge that there was a medical emergency right under our roof.

It was around this time that Omayra Sanchez showed up. If you don’t know who that is, just Google the Armero disaster. The thirteen-year-old girl was left to slowly die for three days. No one could help her, they just took pictures while she slowly suffered and died. Now suddenly here she was, pushing through the monks surrounding me, to reach her hands out toward me.

I started screaming her name. My mother just stood there watching me, unsure of what to do about it. This was far more than any alcohol or drug stupor she’d ever seen in her experiences of the 1960s. I’m not sure what happened after that, because I passed out again. I guess seeing the lahar-dead was too much for me.

When I woke up again, it was light and I was still laying in a puddle of my own vomit. Mom had taken the time to turn me over so I didn’t choke on my own vomit, but she didn’t do much else. She says the vomit was just flowing out of my mouth, sort of like the film footage I’d seen of Erta Ale erupting from its lava lake. The vomit had soaked into my hair, leaving it crusty and crackling when I moved.

I had enough strength at that point to pick myself up off the floor, but I had to crawl to my bedroom. I managed to pull myself into bed with no help from Mom. She did, at least, respond when I asked her to bring be my nausea pills, because I had severe nausea at that point. I ended up going through the entire package with no relief.

I went to sleep for I don’t know how long. When I finally woke up, I had enough strength to get out of bed and go to the bathroom. My urine was red, obviously containing blood. When I looked in the mirror, I could still see pieces of vomit in my hair. Suddenly my face morphed into that of Omayra Sanchez, the source of childhood nightmares. I screamed and tried to wipe away the image, but it wouldn’t go away.

I had enough strength at this point to stumble into the shower, in an attempt to wash away the vomit and the face. It took four showers before I realized that the vomit smell was not coming out of my hair. I ended up having to cut most of it off. In that whole time period, I leaned against the wall, because I didn’t have the strength to stand up.

As expected from that female dog, Mom had left the vomit puddle for me to clean up. I spent much of the afternoon on my hands and knees scrubbing up the puddle. This is, of course, despite the fact that when she had food poisoning a year before, I cleaned up all her vomit and diarrhea that ended up on the floor. That is one thing I always remember about her. She made me clean up any mess that was made in the house, no matter whose it was.

I recall my childhood. Mom would throw her sanitary pads in the garbage and the dog would pull them out and chew them to pieces. Guess which nine-year-old kid had to clean them up. Yep, that was me, even if I didn’t have a period. The same thing happened with her myriad of snot rags that she dropped on the floor rather than throwing in the garbage.

Back to the story, later that day, I had enough strength to investigate exactly what had happened to me. I found the Kool-Aid container still sitting in the sink, where I left it the night before. When I lifted the lid, I discovered a hug round, slimy thing of black mold. Apparently I’d had a severe reaction to the mold, which explained everything that happened the night before.

The next day, I was still sick, but I had a doctor’s appointment, so I had to drive myself into town, an hour and a half away from home. Mom, of course, refused to drive me, and she insisted on staying in the car when I went to see the doctor, despite the fact that I know she saw me struggling to get up the ramp and into the doctor’s office. She still insisted that I’d had too much to drink.

The doctor took my blood pressure and discovered it was lower than usual, but not enough to send me over to the emergency room at this point. He asked my quite bluntly why no one called 911 when I collapsed, and I said it wasn’t my call, it was my mother’s. He said I likely had an anaphylactic reaction to the mold, which explained everything, including the hallucinations of monks and Omayra Sanchez.

I don’t think my damn mother realized how serious the situation was until I returned to the car with the doctor’s report. Writing in clear lettering in the report were the instructions, “Call 911 if this happens again.” I shoved the paper in Mom’s face and made her read it, along with the official diagnosis.

“You still think I drank too much?” I demanded.

Mom apologized, saying that with her experience from the 1960s, if someone collapsed like that, you just waited until the drug or alcohol wore off. This does not excuse the fact that I was gasping like a goldfish out of water, said I couldn’t breathe, and asked her to call an ambulance. Also, how many Boomers died of alcohol poisoning or drug intoxication because of that attitude?

It’s a scary thing when you realize that you can’t depend on your parents, but one that is very common among Generation X and Xenials. I knew after that day that I better take care of myself, because she certainly wasn’t going to watch out for me. I don’t know that my mother ever realized that it was this event that made me stop trusting her, though I know she noticed it had happened at some point.

I didn’t return the favor of her poorly-judged response to my emergency. A few years after this point, she developed cardiac valve stenosis and ended up on supplemental oxygen. She was unable to walk and had to be pushed around in a wheelchair everywhere. After her surgery to replace the valve, she suffered a stroke and was paralyzed and left bedridden, then bound to that wheelchair whenever we went out.

I took care of everything over those two years. This included sleeping with one ear open for the alarm from her oxygen machine. I cleaned up her pee and diarrhea on the floor, and her crumbs on the living room carpet, because she scraped them onto the floor whenever she ate rather then putting them on her plate. I cooked for her, shopped for her, bathed her, pushed her around in a wheelchair, read to her, and dealt with the irritating oxygen company when they played games with her supplies. I drove her all around two different states for her doctor’s appointments, even when my own health started to fail and I ended up in the hospital myself.

Her response? “Well, I wouldn’t have gotten sick if I hadn’t had you.” I don’t know why I was so shocked when I heard it, after the way she left me to die on the living room floor years before. I trusted her, and she proved that she was not to be trusted at all.

To make this worse, I recently learned that she said something similar about me to someone behind my back. I can’t even describe how sick it made me feel, not to mention angry. I hate to say it to people who liked her, but my mother had some parts of her that were not very nice. One of them was her tendency to blame other people for her problems, her kids, in particular, and especially me because I was there.

When she and Dad were fighting because he was abusive monster, she said it was my fault because I was a “little manipulator.” She once told me that the reason she was fat was because she got pregnant with me. When our moving van broke down in Beatty, Nevada, she said it was my fault. When her house flooded during the 1995 100-year flood in Portland, it was, apparently, also my fault. And, apparently, her death is also my fault.

This is not the first time I had a medical emergency that Mom didn’t respond. I contracted meningitis as a child and she never sought medical care. I once developed cardiac symptoms and a fever of 105, and she wouldn’t call for help. I once contracted such a severe case of strep throat that my neck swelled up like a grapefruit, but she never sought help, even when the dog was begging her to do so. This incident was no different.

I often wonder to this day what would have happened if I had been just a little bit sicker. Would she have just stood there and watched me die? Was this what she actually wanted? After what she said to me when I was taking care of her, I have to wonder.

You can give me all the excuses you want for her behavior that night, and over her last two years. All I can remember is that a woman stood over me, blamed me for my illness, and just watched me breathe like a goldfish out of water. She then went into her room and played computer games while I lay in a puddle of vomit. I have a hard time forgiving her actions, nor what she said about me later.

I thought at least one of my parents loved me. Apparently not. Just remember, people, if you’re going to hate your child, just don’t bother to have them. You shouldn’t be having children because “it seemed like a good thing to do at the time,” like Mom said. It never ends well. Parental neglect is only one possible result.