"HELP! I NEED SOMEBODY!"

"HELP! I NEED SOMEBODY! HELP! NOT JUST ANYBODY! HELP! YOU KNOW I NEED SOMEONE. HELP!" -THE BEATLES

I HAVE HAD ALL I CAN TAKE.  I CANNOT HANDLE THIS ANYMORE.

I just can't.  Call me weak.  Judge me a selfish person.  I FOUGHT with my son to get his life back!!!! And I watched him do as he was told and get labeled by doctors and people as an "addict" and a "drug chaser" and a "doctor shopper" all because he went to the doctor's he was told to go to and took the medicine he was told to take.  I held him and cried with him when nothing seemed to be working and nobody seemed to know what was going on, and then when they did and all the painful procedures he had to endure.  I exhausted myself and pushed myself out of my own comfort zone at times by standing up to nurses and doctor's who were making very big mistakes.  Yet I live with not catching the biggest mistake of all, the one that cost him his life.  I let him down.  I let down my son who had also become my best friend because we were always together, and we talked about everything.  Our "social life" was watching tv together or discussing politics.  We didn't know much of what was going on in the world outside the hospital rooms and doctor's offices and those in the outside world really couldn't understand ours like only we could because we were the only two living it every day.  But this one time I didn't research this medication.  I DID ask his doctor about it's safety because I had been given it in the hospital and when I was moved to a regular room the nurses on that floor were afraid of handling it but he reassured me and I just trusted him and now my son and friend is dead.

Add to this just after Andy's death one of our cat's, coincidently Andy's favorite, gets hit by a car and killed.  I know not all people are animal lovers but I am.  My "pets" are part of my family.

THEN we are told by the funeral home that our insurance company is denying our claim saying that Andy didn't sign a statement of health.  Mind you at no time were I or Andy ever sent a statement of health to sign, it was never mentioned in my husbands message box in his online profile in other words we were never told anything about it, they simply began taking the premiums for the higher policy out of my husbands pay check after he inquired about (Didn't even say he wanted) larger life insurance policies on all of us.  Their own website says they will not make a policy effective until all statements needed are recieved and ours was made effective obviously, they were taking out the money for the larger policy and they told my husband the day we made the funeral arrangement on the phone from the funeral home that everythine was fine and good to go for the larger policy.  Then AFTER the funeral (and money is spent) they deny the claim and paying anything at all because Andy hadn't signed a statement of health.

Add to that his father who everyone is giving all the sympathy too is refusing to pay a dime for his son's funeral while my husband has shouldered paying to raise Andy since he was 4 years old, parenting him, keeping the insurance on him, nurturing him when he was sick, paying for all his medical bills despite my divorce decree stating that his father is to keep insurance on him even if I have it on him and pay all out of pocket medical expenses. He never paid a dime and was so far behind on child support that when our son died and he came into a healthy life insurance claim he was able to pay up his large back child support which HE thinks is his part of the funeral costs.  Soooo...let me get this straight...he was not paying his support as a savings account for our son's funeral when he dies at the age of 20??  No sorry...So my son's body may end up in a cooler until we can afford to bury him and pay for his funeral.

Unless an attorney can help us.  We have found out that businesses including lawyers and charitable foundations can break contracts with you it's you that can't break contracts with them.  We went to one attorney who said he would take our case and told us what he was doing and we were under the impression we were waiting...and waiting until finally we thought "Boy we sure have waited a long time" and tried to contact our lawyer and got no phone calls returned so my husband went up there only to be handed our folder and told sorry he was just to busy to take on this case. WHAT!!!????  Ummm...shouldn't that have been what you said two months ago when you said "don't you worry mamma we'll get your son's name up there where it belongs" referring to on his tomb. When you told me not to worry anymore to let you do that?  Shouldn't you instead have said "I wish I could help you but I have no extra time at this time."?  Really wasn't signing those papers about how much your part would be if you won the case a bit misleading?

And I won't even get into the ridiculous thinking that must have been put behind lawyers who would have any trouble proving medical malpractice or wrongful death or even how the entire thing was just wrong.  First of all that "doctors" for an insurance company who have never seen, spoke to, examined or anything my son make decisions about his life for instance that it is wiser to keep a 19 year old young highly promising college student on strong addictive (dare I say these words together and risk encouraging the misconception so many have that the two go hand in hand) narcotic pain medications as well as addictive benzo's for a long period of time, possibly a life time in which case he would eventually hit a point where he would have to live with taking the medications and still live with intolerable pain as if he had taken nothing for it.  As our bodies naturally produce opiod pain relief and sometimes the pain is so severe our bodies can't keep up so addictional is needed (prescription).  When we take medication because it's needed we do not feel an "high" from the medication we are simply lucky if it decreases our pain.  The thing is sometimes the body, if taking those medications long enough, comes to rely on them.  This is called a dependence.  And you could say the body gets lazy since this isn't something that is normally always needed and starts allowing the artificial medication to do more and more work...requiring a higher dose.  This is called building a tolderance.  These are natural and not to be confused with addiction.  When we think of addiction we think of someone who does it for the high, then comes to need that high, CRAVE it.  Most pain patients would gladly walk away from their meds if they weren't necessary.   Anyway...eventually he would have reached a point where the amount of , where his body could not handle the amount of medication necessary for him to not suffer, it would have killed him as basically it did.  The wise insurance doctors found this the better choice than to allow a minamally invasive surgery that his specialist doctor has personally had excellent success with and many other sports doctor's around the country have as well? Or no lawyer can prove medical malpractice when a doctor gave a 19 year old young man known severe sleep apnea, who is still in such pain that he can't get comfortable so he can't sleep any reasonable schedule therefore can't know when he might fall asleep to put on his bi-pap mask, a dermal patch for the most powerful pain medication that also coicidentally has been recalled already 3 times and caused over 129 deaths.  A medication that's insert states clearly not to be prescribed to patients with sleep apnea.  Central sleep apnea is the most extreme type of sleep apnea and the kind Andy had.  It would only help the lawyers that he started getting sick pretty much as soon as he started on the patch and his doctor knew this and just said it was from getting out around people more, that he had picked up a bug.  Shouldn't he have thought twice about that bug when Andy went into respitory failure within a month of going on the patch?  Oh well maybe he thought it was because of Andy taking a cold pill that added to his sleepiness but then why would he prescribe Klonopin?  And as his symptoms progressed or didn't go away and being a pain management doctor shouldn't he have recognized them as symptoms of too much fentanyl and put him not getting better together and thought "HEY WE NEED TO GET HIM OFF THIS PATCH NOW!"?  Is it really extraordinary to expect a pain management specialist to have done these things?  Or to have told him not to use the heating pad or hot tub?  or to have realized that his fever would increase the amount of medication that was being released?  THIS IS ALL IN SIMPLE ENGLISH IN THE INSERT AVAILABLE TO READ ONLINE!!!!!  I blame myself for not having looked it up.  For having trusted this doctor.  But shouldn't the law blame this doctor?

Annnd...my dog is very sick and possibly dieing.

And that's not all...before knowing about the life insurance, we committed ourselves to forming an ANDREW HENSLEY MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP FUND for students from his high school.  You'd think that GIVING money to help students to further their education would be easy and a nice thing to do right? HA!  WRONG!  And the president of the foundation we have to go through has been trying his best to swindle us from the get go and we are about to go to have to either go to  court about that if he doesn't make things right real soon or let all the money we and others have worked so hard for and so generously donated for this particular scholarship go to His pet projects.

All the while it's like the world has literally turned upside down.  We were seeing a grief counselor and for me at least she is sitting there hearing how I want to die and telling me how these episodes I experience are "disassociative fugues" and could last a year or longer and I might want to talk to my doctor about upping my anti anxiety medication (while with Derek they have him see a doctor there) and how she feels we're ready to see her less often!  For the most part I've been completely surprised and a bit confused, the people I THOUGHT would have been there for me through all of this haven't been around much if at all, not even a message on the computer, while other's who I either would have least expected it or who I didn't think knew me to where they would have really cared that much have been the one's who have been amazingly supportive.

IF I do give up this fight I don't want those of you who have been there to think that this is any failure on your part.  I'm the one who is failing.  I don't know how much longer I can stand the pain.  I mean ALL of the pain.  The emotional pain is the most excrutiating ever and if one more thing is added...I don't know that it will even take one more thing because emotional stress makes my physical illnesses worse and my physical pain is off the charts but to do anything about the emotional I have to stay busy and if I rest at all...welll....but physically I can't go on like this.  One way or another I'm going to break. :(  And as I see it, either way I break I'm likely to be going home myself.  I bet you thought I was going to take my own life!  How about that...I'm not going to have to.