Lawsuit #2

The sting, frustration, and yes embarrassment, of the first lawsuit was barely a blip in life’s rearview mirror when the second one reared its ugly head.  This one started out with a bit more promise because it was a workers’ compensation claim, but once again Jane overplayed her hand and it went absolutely nowhere!  Yes all the while she promised an end to our financial struggles.

At this point in our life, Jane needed to be working to cover the costs of our life and have anything left over for a family night out at the end of the week.  Unfortunately, she wasn’t then or now very good at working.   Her employer at the time this lawsuit took seed was a national gas station/convenience store chain.  I think it was her first job after her longest running employer fired her.  I could tell this job wasn’t going to last much longer.  She bitched about it and her boss more and more every day and managed to steal a significant amount of money from them without getting caught (I will expound on this in a later post), it was time for her to leave.

I got a call from Jane one afternoon while she was at work.  I knew as soon as I heard her voice that something was amiss.  I could barely understand her because of the pain and tears in her voice.  What was clear was that she needed me to pick her up and take her to the ER.  I don’t remember why I was available to do this; for the most part Jane worked at this job during the same ours I worked.  Maybe it was a weekend; her new supervisor wasn’t too concerned with what arrangements Jane had when she was hired.

At this point in my marriage to Jane, experience taught me about Jane’s ability to get hurt, real or otherwise.  I knew from the minute I heard her voice this was all a ruse.  Jane either wanted to get access to pain medication, or use sympathy to avoid blame for something she wasn’t sure she got away with…yet.

When I arrived at the gas station, Jane was in the little office with her supervisor.  Her supervisor was filling out the accident report and trying to get Jane to sign it.  Jane was pouring on the “I am in so much pain I am unable to function” act.  Three times her supervisor had to ask her to sign the report while Jane pretended to be in too much pain.  Finally, she scribbled some undecipherable crap on the report and we headed to the hospital.

The story was that she was on a ladder, a rickety old ladder that no one had any business being on, getting something from the upper shelves.  The latter teetered and she fell off hitting her right side on something on her way to the floor.  She had her shirt pulled up and was rubbing the part of her back and side she claimed to have hit.  There was some minor redness but nothing that looked like it was the result of falling off a ladder.

They checked her out at the ER, did x-rays, told her to take a couple of days off and see her regular doctor at the earliest possible time.  The usual crap you get from ER doctors if there is no real bodily damage.  I’m sure they gave her something for pain as well though I cannot recall for sure.  I took her home and waited for the fallout.

She was sent back to work with some restrictions by her doctor.  It wasn’t more than a week or two before she claimed they were not meeting those restrictions and quit going to work.  I think she claimed they sent her home.  We could ill afford for Jane to go without any income, but that never mattered to her.  Whether they sent her home or she quit showing up, they were not going to pay her.

Jane contacted a worker compensation lawyer and they took her case.  Within a few days of her attaining the lawyer she started getting worker compensation payments.  This was a relief to us financially, but the thought of another lawsuit didn’t exactly thrill me.

This one went much faster than the previous one.  Her lawyer kept encouraging her to go to the doctor for anything that ailed her.   Before I go further with this line of thought, I need to fill in a little back-story.  I believe in one of these tales I mentioned that Jane has been grabbing her stomach in pain pretty much since the day we met.  However, over the years she tended to find new sources of pain.  Several years ago, she complained of pain in her hip.  She felt as though someone was shoving a knife into her hip joint, was how she described it.  At the time, I don’t think anyone found any reason for her pain and it finally gave way to another medical complaint.  I believe the source was her grossly overweight mother having a double hip replacement a few years before her and I met.  Whatever the cause of her hip pain, it was now documented in Jane’s ever thickening medical file.

With that said, early in the process she started complaining of pain in her hip even though it was not originally included in her list of injuries.  In fact, during our depositions her lawyer was going over her file as we sat out in the waiting area and noted aloud that her hip pain was the opposite side of her body she originally complained of injuries.  He gave this some moment of thought, then shrugged and murmured something to the extent that it shouldn’t matter.  At that moment, I knew Jane and her lawsuit were dead in the water.

To further drive home the point of how this hip thing was going to go nowhere.  We were at a family function with her parents.  Her mom, never afraid to say what is on her mind asked Jane, hadn’t she complained of hip pain in the past.  Jane looked angry and distressed then leaned into her mother and hissed for her to keep quiet about that.  Because in Jane’s world, denying those things that are clearly documented will make them go away.

I accompanied her on several trips to meet with her lawyer.  Every one of those her hip came up, by now her doctors decided that she needed a hip replacement.  At the end of every one of those meetings with the lawyer he would say, “Go ahead with the surgery, everything will be fine.”   Jane would thank him and we would be on our way.  I wasn’t so sure “everything would be fine.”

We were a family of very limited resources.  This whole process probably was a much bigger drain on our limited family resources than the previous lawsuit.  Endless trips to doctors, some referred by her doctors, others by her lawyer, and a couple by the opposing lawyers for their evaluation.  These trips to the doctor seemed further and further from home.  Eventually she settled on a specialist that was based forty plus miles from our house.  I was taking unpaid time off from work for many of these trips because she was sure she wouldn’t be able to drive after the visit, or she was scared and wanted me along.   As with any of Jane’s medical issues, the drain on our resources was crippling.

One of those trips to the opposition’s doctor was but another nail in the coffin of Jane’s hopes of a big payday.  They have the right to examine her and see if there were legitimate claims.  Of course, no matter how legitimate her claims were, or anyone else for that matter, this doctor’s job was to debunk them.  As was Jane’s wont, she overplayed her hand.  She was in too much pain for her condition and suffered to severe of symptoms as a result of the doctors poking, prodding and pulling.  I wasn’t in there with her, but saw her when she came out.  She carried on about how much the doctor aggravated her already sore hip and of course how much of a dick he was.  Anyone who didn’t see life the way Jane did was a dick, including me.

Hip replacement surgery is not small thing.  Not only are there repeated trips to the doctor for consultations, you have to spend money to buy things insurance won’t cover to prepare for when the patient comes home.  Her stay in the hospital would be three days and I would need to be there.  In addition, and I knew this before hand, the several trips to the ER for postoperative complications that were fabricated in her mind.  All this without the benefit of her former employers workers compensation payments…those were done by now.

Jane got her new titanium hip, but that was all she got out of this mess.  The end was a hearing before some sort of administrative judge.  I was not in on the actual hearing, but the look on the lawyers face when he and Jane came out did not look promising.  It wasn’t, the judge ruled in the chain stores favor and awarded Jane no more compensation than what she received to date.  There was no appeal, and Jane once again got to rail about how unfair life is as well as how she never received justice.

In the end, we were more broke than ever, Jane had one more thing to complain about physically, and I wondered what was next.  This was just another fiasco in a long line of fiascos because if there were any guarantees in life with Jane, it was that Jane could not be happy unless she was miserable.

In addition, there is the whole hip recall thing to look forward to.

Chain gas stations/convenience store = 1

Jane still = 0

Twitter

This coming weekend I am going to ad a plug-in that will show tweets posted on my Zero Options Twitter account.  I am doing this because hardly a day goes by that Jane doesn’t pull some stunt or say something cruel and hurtful.  Twitter seems to be the best way to accurately document these events.  I created the Twitter account a couple of weeks ago but I only verified my email last week and set it up to tweet with my phone at the same time.  Therefore there are some tweets from last night that may not make sense unless I explain the last six or seven years.

I alluded to Jane’s need to visit the doctor and emergency room in Darvocet and Four Abortions.  The Darvocet tale is about a quest for pain pills and Four Abortions about a revealing trip to the emergency room.  Those two stories only document a small fraction of all the trips Jane has made to medical facilities.  Over the last ten years doctors have removed every non-essential internal organ with the exception of the second lung and kidney.  Based on my life with her, most of these were unnecessary procedures.  Her appendix was healthy at the very least and definitely not infected.  Both Jane and I were sick the day they removed her appendix, the difference was, I went to work, and she went to the hospital.

When she ran out of disposable organs she created one.  A few years ago she went to the ER complaining of acute abdominal pain.  An ultra sound suggested something was there so they did surgery.  The doctor removed a mass of blood and tissue, something he never saw before that day.  His theory, a capillary broke in all the scar tissue Jane accumulated from all her surgeries and started to fill the scar tissue with blood.  This was not the first or last time I heard a doctor say whatever was going on with Jane was unusual.  I literally have been watching Jane clutch her abdomen in pain for sixteen years.

After the doctor removed the mass of scar tissue and blood the trips to the ER for abdominal pain became a regular thing.  Within a year a second surgery followed for a bowel obstruction…probably real and then a third surgery, again within a year to correct chronic bowel obstructions.  It was after this last surgery that things became ridiculous.  Jane’s obstructions became more frequent and doctors became more puzzled.  Often times they would recommend a specialist and she would not follow up.  It was like she didn’t want to get better, despite her pleading otherwise.

The trips to the ER gradually became more frequent, first every few weeks, then two weeks and finally every ten days.  When it became this frequent her doctor opted to do one more surgery to take down the scar tissue.  The surgery lasted hours and the doctor said he was very thorough and that no one ever suffered another obstruction once he was done.

Jane made it less than a month before ending up back in the hospital claiming yet another obstruction.

I feel as though I need more evidence as to why I don’t believe many of these events were real medical conditions.  Time and time again doctors would tell her that no particular food would cause bowel obstruction, yet Jane has a list of foods to worry about and every time she would eat them, an obstruction would occur.  That list happens to be the same list doctors tell patients who are recovering from gastric bypass to avoid.  Jane’s sister in-law underwent one of those procedures a year or so before this nightmare started.  When Jane suffered real obstructions the symptoms were very real, puking bile, runny stool, and she always agreed to overnight admission and it was fifty-fifty on the NG tube.  Yet when the attack was not real, there was no vomiting and she never allowed them to admit her.  Also, in the early days, some pain medication brought relief, yet as the months and episodes went by it seemed there was never any relief, not until they hooked her up to the morphine pump.  During some of those occasions when it seemed as though no amount of Dilaudid could relive her symptoms the ER doctor eventually told her no more without admission.  Suddenly she was comfortable enough to go home, one minute it wasn’t working, the next, voila!

It went further than that; she would pull her own IV and walk out of the hospital if she wasn’t getting the drugs she wanted.  It didn’t matter if she was in the ER or if they admitted her to the hospital.  Jane would call me and tell me to get there as fast as I could, they were discharging her.  At five o’clock in the morning!  I knew when she would be waiting by the front hospital doors what was going on.  Her own doctor finally threatened to quit seeing her if she didn’t stop that stunt.

Finally after he last surgery Jane was claiming obstructions every three or four days.  They came on suddenly and she rarely allowed the doctor to admit her.  Jane would coax so many narcotics from the hospital staff that she could barely talk.  Between the Dilaudid and the Ativan, Jane came home from these trips to the ER a complete zombie; she would sleep for the next eighteen to twenty-four hours.  To this day I don’t know how she avoided an overdose.  Then an ER doctor said enough is enough.

This doctor told Jane that she was addicted to the narcotics and her attacks were the result of withdrawal.  For the briefest of moments I felt triumphant, then Jane asked me if I thought she was addicted to drugs, my answer, “I don’t know.”  Not the one Jane wanted to here and I was dog meat for a few days.  Jane tried again to get treatment for an obstruction that wasn’t there and again the same ER doctor said no dice, not unless you go for treatment.  Jane initially agreed but then reneged once she received a dose, that didn’t sit well with the doctor.  The doctor black listed Jane and that was the end of the Dilaudid train for a while.

Jane’s doctor set her up with suppository morphine and oral Ativan to help Jane cope.  Since being black balled Jane has tried a few times to get the narcotics she used to enjoy, but all the ER doctors could give her was the morphine suppositories and a dose of Ativan.  For a few blessed months the regular trips to the ER stopped…that is until a few weeks ago.

I think I mentioned this before, because of me Jane works for the same school district I do.  Someone from her building called me a few weeks ago to say that Jane slipped on a grape and hurt her knee pretty bad.  I knew right away what was up because Jane talked of slipping on grapes weeks earlier and twisting her knee.  I don’t think either incident was real, but if one was, it was the first.  The second one resulted in our employer taking her to the ER to have her knee looked at.  Did I mention that they were not serving grapes in the school cafeteria that day?  By the time I talked to Jane she was already high.  I don’t know what they gave her, but it was what she wanted.  Mind you, I have tore ligaments in my ankle, received dozens of stitches and various other x-rays for possible breaks, not one time did I receive anything for pain.  A week later Jane was again in the ER because of abdominal cramps, I left work early to pick her up and take her home, she was again feeling no pain.

Now last night, more of the same, a sudden onset of pain, she tries to tough it out and eventually looks so miserable I have to “make” her go to the ER.  The difference, the doctor who called her bluff appears to be gone and all the quick to inject doctors are still there.  Oh and by the way, last night’s prognosis, she was constipated.  One enema and a huge fart and we were on our way home, she was high, and I was and still am extremely tired.  I desperately wish I could call her bluff.  However, doing so means leaving which I cannot afford to do or living in more misery than I already do

I will take the lesser of all evils, as I usually do.

Chilling Frustration!

New stuff in this family is a rarity, especially for me and the boys.  My oldest son, number 1 wore my old winter jacket for a year before his mom finally purchased him a new one, but that was three or four years ago.  Last winter his grandmother gave my youngest son, number 2 a coat, she found it at a thrift store.  I finally purchased number 1 a new coat on black Friday.

Putting all that aside, it has been a battle to keep number 2 out of shorts and dressed properly for the weather.  Hell it’s been snowing since mid November here and the temperatures have been such that global warming is a bit tough to believe at this point.  Yet with enough griping and bitching it seems number 2 was making an effort to dress for the weather…sort of.  He will leave in the morning with his pajamas over his shorts only to strip them off when he gets to school.  In the afternoon when he comes through the door, it is once again shorts.  Well his mother finally put a stop to the shorts outside the house.

Then there was this morning.  I failed as a parent with this morning’s little confrontation.  Number 2 headed for the door dressed in a hooded sweat shirt, his mittens, and stocking cap…oh and jeans.  It was minus 14 degrees outside!  I pointed this bitter little fact out to him and his quick response was, “my coat has a hole in it, right about here.” He said contorting his body to show me an area about where his shoulder blade was. “The cold air comes inside anyway.”  All I could do was give him an icy glare and told him he better not go crying to anyone about frost bit or hypothermia.  Did I say it was negative fourteen degrees outside?

I carried on about how a hole let in a lot less cold air than no jacket at all, and about how first its shorts and now no coat.  My ranting was much more subdued than usual because his mother was still in bed.  Number 2 may have heard some of it while he put his shoes on in the breezeway, but I doubt he cared.  His brother, who was staying home sick, heard every word.

I failed as a parent for letting him out the door dressed that way in the first place and for letting our life get into such a mess that I could not buy him a coat when he needed one.  It is the holidays and we are neglecting other bills to provide a Christmas for the children.  Not my strategy, but the one we have been using for years.  Yet, if Jane wasn’t so nuts, especially about money we could pay for Christmas like all families, with our good credit.  Then take the next nine months to pay it off.

It so frustrates me when things like the torn coat happen, or a blown tire, or any of the other dozen or so mini-emergencies that come up and we can’t respond.  I had two hundred dollars in the bank the Monday after payday.  My intention was to make that last to cover those little emergencies, a second tank of gas for the wife’s gas hog, and cigarettes and flavored water for Jane if she didn’t plan ahead, which she never did.

Jane took my debit card when she went to pick up her prescriptions (drugs).  I didn’t know it until I checked my balance; I was down one hundred dollars.  Twenty bucks for her legal fix and eighty bucks cash.  I cannot account for any of the eighty dollars because she sure didn’t buy cigarettes or gas.  The final hit was Friday when she hit me up for my card at work.  “I am right outside the door and forgot my wallet, I need cigarettes.”  I did what I always did and gave her my card.  I used to put up a fight, but what’s the point.  She sucked sixty-five dollars out of the account, again without any accountability.

Here it is, three days before payday and not a single penny to my name.  Until this morning she had no cigarettes and was smoking butts.  She scrounged money up somewhere, but I don’t know where.  That is how she operates, spend it all now, then sell stuff or steal it when she is flat broke and needs her drugs or cigarettes.  This evening Jane bugged me about the sixty dollars I have coming for fixing a computer, doubt I will get to spend it.  She cannot save for tomorrow, cannot stand to see money sit unspent.  Even though it is as clear as the two feet of snow that blankets our state that if she spends it all today, she won’t have any tomorrow, she still does it.

Well I have to get up early, need to make up for the three hours I am short at work.  Jane went to the emergency room today for a non-existent bowel obstruction.  They get you really high when you come in with abdominal pain and little or no bowel sounds.  Did you know narcotics slow your bowels, nice racket heh.

 

Darvocet

Jane is obsessive compulsive and because of this, she never gets over any of her addictions, she just moves on to the next one or transfers it to some other behavior.  The whole cocaine thing was a fast and furious episode that impacted the rest of the family only minimally.  Well in the short term anyway, the long term financial implications were life changing.

What came next was a never ending dance with drama and disruptions in the daily routine of the family.  I spent some time thinking through the events of this post and cannot seem to remember what event triggered Jane’s use of Darvocet.  This started after the first bout with amnesia, but I don’t think her doctors prescribed any pain relievers during that time.  As I write this, I think her taste for the pain reliever was prior to her first foray into amnesia.  Jane was always in need of attention from the medical field, whether it was a doctor visit because she did not feel well to two or three trips to the ER or urgent care for some unfortunate accident.  By the time we reached this point in our life, I was quite used to scrutiny by hospital staff suspicious that I was the reason for Jane’s visit.

Prior to us moving to the town we now live in, Jane managed to receive a diagnosis for Lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, back issues, Limes disease, and several other ailments.  She also underwent several surgeries to remove non-essential internal organs.  By this point in her life, Jane was a hollow shell who was very familiar with an array of pain medications.  To this point however, whatever they prescribed her was enough to make her happy.

Now things were getting out of control…again.  I think the first trip to the ER for an injury was just as she was recovering from her amnesia.  Jane was cooking, a responsibility she was resuming as she regained her faculties.  She was boiling water, I think for scalloped potatoes and I was doing something else in another part of the house.  As was the norm with incidents like this, I heard a commotion from the kitchen and hustled in the direction of the ruckus.  Jane was grasping her arm, her face contorted in pain.  The pot was lying in the sink steam rising from sink, the counter, and Jane’s arm.  She somehow spilled boiling water on her hand and arm.

As I write this I realize that the aforementioned incident was the third, or fourth such incident in a succession of accidents in our home that lead to trips to the ER.  Yet for some reason I cannot recall those that came before this.  There is one other that stands out in my mind which I will include later in this post.  The reason I know this is not the first trip to the ER for an accident in the home is because we used to go to doctors that are a part of a different medical system in our part of the country.  However, as these trips to the ER became more frequent, Jane changed which ER she wanted to go to.  The reason, she was becoming concerned for me.  With each trip to the old hospital, they became increasingly suspicious that I was the cause of her need for medical care.  It got to the point that when we reached the end of the road I would ask, this one or that one, and Jane would hiss her preference through gritted teeth.

The scalded arm and hand was one of the first trips to the new hospital in a town south of the one we lived in.  I think most anyone reading this has experience some sort of a burn from boiling water.  There is no denying that the pain is intense, especially at first, but it usually subsides.  Unless you’re unfortunate enough to spill the water on clothing or you submerse yourself or a body part in the water, then the burns tend to be worse and the pain longer term.  Jane’s burns were first degree burns and she should have been content with a burn cream, a bandage, and a few aspirin.  After all, that is what a sun burn is, first degree.

It was embarrassing to see her carry on the way she did.  I watched as the doctors offered looks of bewilderment as to the level of pain Jane was displaying.  There was no blistering, no peeling of the skin, just some reddening.  Yet she acted as though she spilled boiling acid on her arm and it continued to eat away at her skin.  However, as was always the case, the doctors gave her what she wanted, a dose of Darvocet and a prescription to take home with her.

The incident I mentioned above may have been prior to this one.  We were both getting ready for bed when for no reason she could explain Jane spilled water on the linoleum kitchen floor.  It was like she just tossed the water on the floor.  She acted surprised and confused but could not tell me what happened.  I went to clean up the mess and she stopped me saying it will dry up on its own.

Do you ever get that nagging sensation that something is not right and you should go with your gut?  I knew that that water on that linoleum floor was trouble.  I could clean it up with just a couple swipes of a towel.  Even more nagging was Jane’s dismissal of the mess.  This was during her clean freak period and messes out in the open like that were intolerable.  Yet, I was driving truck during this period and sleep was essential for me to do my job safely, so I ignored the nagging, no screaming voice in my head, listened to my wife like a good husband and we went to bed.

I just settled into the air mattress, pillows fluffed properly, and all the covers just right when Jane leaped out of bed and said she needed to get something.  The voice started screaming louder than ever and sure enough there was a loud thud from the kitchen.  Jane slipped on the puddle of water she just created minutes ago and was writhing about in pain on the floor.  As was the norm I asked if she was alright, she acted surprised as to what just happened and we debated for way to long about whether she needed to go the hospital or not.

The trip was inevitable, by this time we made dozens together.  There were several more after this one including the scalding water incident.  If I counted up all the hours I spent in a hospital for myself and all the other people I have known in my life, it would not total a 10^th of the time I spent in them on Jane’s behalf.

Before the whole Darvocet drama was over I listened to Jane rail against our insurance company for restricting her supply.  The letter from US Customs telling us they intercepted her Internet order of Darvocet and that they were not going to forward it on was interesting.  That was another $60.00 down the drain and me fearing a knock on the door from the DEA.

All this may have taken place prior to the cocaine thing.  I knew Jane was having issues with pain medication before we moved and this was just an extension of that.  The frequent trips to the ER were the coming to a head, so to speak.  I say this because I don’t remember this issue resolving itself on its own.  I think this dovetailed into the cocaine habit and both were curtailed by her one day trip to the drug treatment facility.  All this would have been about a decade ago, so please allow me a little memory loss when it comes to the details of the timeline.

She is still an addict, but she has found ailments and a doctor that allows her to receive a regular supply.  It’s not Darvocet anymore, based on the some of my Internet searches while writing this, Darvocet has fallen from favor.  Jane has moved to an old standby, morphine.