Bite Your Tongue: The Podcast
Did you ever expect being the parent of an adult child would be so difficult? Introducing "Bite Your Tongue," a look at exploring that next chapter in parenting: building healthy relationships with adult children. From money and finance to relationships and sibling rivalry, we cover it all. Even when to bite your tongue! Join your hosts Denise Gorant and Kirsten Heckendorf as they bring together experts, parents and even young adults to discuss this next phase of parenting. We will chat, have some fun and learn about ourselves and our kids along the way! RSSVERIFY
Bite Your Tongue: The Podcast
Season 3 Episode 76: Parents Hope in the Face of Mental Health and Addiction
What happens when your sweet, funny, smart, enthusiastic child turns out to have a mental illness? Where do you go for help? Who do you turn to for advice? And what if those institutions and experts fail you and more importantly, fail your young adult? What happens when everywhere you look for help or support you come up disappointed and alone?
In today’s episode we hear from a couple whose family, much like any of ours, has been turned upside down because of a drastic change in their son’s mental health, subsequent drug issues, and the failure of our mental health systems that we assume are trained well enough to handle these challenges.
It is a silent struggle we bring a voice to today. The Holtons bear their souls, recounting their son Patrick's descent from youthful athleticism to one ensnared by the clutches of dextromethorphan abuse. Sometimes called Robo-Tripping. The drug of choice is Robitussin, easily accessible over the counter to just about anyone.
Their narrative addresses the sometimes treacherous waters of the healthcare system, the cold reality of guardianship rights, and the isolation that so often accompanies mental health crises.
The Holten share their story in hopes that it will help other families with a young adult facing similar challenges. They suggest support networks such as NAMI and and the necessity of perseverance when confronting mental illness and substance abuse.
Their experiences shed light on the significance of seeking the right medical advice, staying the course despite heartbreak, and cherishing the moments of joy amidst the pain.
Links: https://www.nami.org
A big thank you to Connie Gorant Fisher, our audio engineer. Send your thoughts to biteyourtongue@gmail.com and follow us on Face
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Frustration.
Speaker 2:Isolation.
Speaker 1:Very isolated, very frightened that we were going to lose Patrick. He went to outpatient programs. He went to inpatient programs. He was in every psych hospital in the Denver area, all the way down to Colorado Springs. They'd keep him for 30 days. When that 30-day mark hit, they would discharge him. One time they never even called us and we were his guardians. They put him on a bus. He ended up somewhere up in Boulder, had everything stolen. It's just one thing after another.
Speaker 3:Without telling us after another without telling us.
Speaker 4:Hello everyone, Welcome to Bite your Tongue, the podcast. I'm Denise and I'm Kirsten and we hope you will join us as we explore the ins and outs of building healthy relationships with our adult children.
Speaker 4:Together, we'll speak with experts, share heartfelt stories and get timely advice addressing topics that matter most to you Get ready to dive deep and learn, to build and nurture deep connections with our adult children and, of course, when, to bite our tongues. So let's get started. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Bite your Tongue the podcast, denise, I have to say that I'm a little apprehensive about today's episode and also incredibly impressed with the resiliency of our guests and excited for our listeners to hear their heartbreaking but hopeful story. It's a story that we often hear about, not necessarily to this degree. You had read about this particular family in our local newspaper and you were very much affected by it, so I think our listeners are going to love what they have to say and also be sort of taken aback at the same time.
Speaker 3:I absolutely agree. I'm a little apprehensive too, and I should let listeners know it's going to be a little different type of episode. We're not talking to experts who are giving us advice. We're talking to a family who has endured a long journey with their adult son. We're talking about substance abuse and drug abuse, and every day we're reading new stories about overdoses and young adults dying from this kind of thing. I guess the other thing I just want to add is when I read these stories and hear them, I step back for a minute and always say there but for the grace of God, go. I and I'm hoping, as listeners listen to this story, they too will have empathy for what this family has gone through. Kirsten and I were lucky to meet with them before we did this episode, and they told us stories about their families disowning them, friends moving away, lots of things like that. So I encourage all of our listeners to listen with their heart to this amazing story.
Speaker 4:Well, I also think to add to that a little bit is I think sometimes we think that this is the extreme and unfortunately I don't know how extreme it still is anymore. To put some statistics to that, a new UCLA research study found that the rate of overdose deaths among US teenagers nearly doubled in 2020, the first year of the COVID pandemic, and it rose another 20% in the first half of 2021 compared with the 10 years prior to the pandemic. This is something that a lot of people, if it hasn't happened directly in your family, everybody knows somebody. I think today's episode is going to be valuable for a lot of reasons.
Speaker 3:You're absolutely right, Kirsten. I hope all of you who are listening will listen through this entire episode. At the end, these guests give the most amazing takeaways. Please stay and listen, you won't regret it. Let's get started. I want to warmly welcome Charles and Diane Holton started. I want to warmly welcome Charles and Diane Holton. You need to feel so proud that you're sharing Patrick's story, not only so others can learn about your journey, but so that you can help other families and also maybe make some noise that will change some of the systems that are in place that aren't helping the families that really need it. Let's start with you telling the listeners a little bit about who Patrick was before he started the addiction.
Speaker 1:Well, as a child, patrick was just very fun, very kind, very sensitive, extremely sensitive, I should say. He loved being outdoors. He was very athletic, he played soccer, he played hockey, he snowboarded, and then, as he got older, he became interested in parkour, which is also called free running. If you've ever watched this show, ninja Warriors, that's the type of exercise Pat liked to do. So he started that when he was about 13. And he just developed such a love for it and he would come home from school every day, take his dog, take off for four or five hours running, climbing, climbing trees, jumping, and it just became the most important thing in his life. It was everything to him.
Speaker 1:As time went on, he went through high school, had a big group of friends that did parkour with, and he did a lot of videoing and editing all the videos that they made. And then, a couple months actually about four months after he graduated from high school, he had just a freak accident in a gymnasium where he did a flip off some high bars and he landed where two mats had come apart and he ended up breaking the joint in his left leg and ankle. So it's not actually an ankle fracture, it's actually the joint which is called the talus, and he broke it into six pieces. Initially they told us that it was not broken, it was just a sprain, and Patrick was so happy and we went home and then the hospital called and told us to get right back there.
Speaker 1:We went back the next morning at six o'clock and they did an MRI and after that we were walking to our car. Pat was on crutches and they ran out to our car and got us and said he needs to get back in here right now and go up to the orthopedic floor, which we did. When we got up there we found out that he had a very, very severe break in that talus and that he had a very high risk of losing that foot and the blood flow to the foot. He ended up having a major surgery that was several hours I want to say eight hours a lot of screws placed in that ankle and in his lower leg. We had to take him back for that first year several times so they could do Doppler studies to make sure he had good blood flow to his foot, because there was a large chance that he could lose his foot. That's where our story kind of begins.
Speaker 4:During that time, he had obviously been prescribed a number of things. Do you believe that? That's kind of that? That was the catalyst? Was the injury the catalyst? Where do you think things started to really go?
Speaker 1:wrong. Actually, you know, he was prescribed a lot of pain medication that he was supposed to because that surgery was very, very, very painful. He ended up staying an extra day in the hospital just because his pain control was so bad. He took pain medication and then after a while he didn't want to take it anymore and he had me flush it down the toilet.
Speaker 3:So I don't think those medications had anything to do with him starting you said to us when we met that some of it was he realized after this surgery, because every time I've told this story, people say exactly what Kirsten said oh, he got addicted to oxycodone. And this isn't Patrick's story. What you said to me and I want to make sure I'm right is that when he realized he would never be able to do parkour again, he became very depressed. He was looking for something to make him feel better, and all of us have heard of oxycodone, methadone, fentanyl. But why don't you tell us what he found? Because I was shocked at what he started with.
Speaker 4:And I also want to clarify, before you answer that question, that you're a nurse. You both are in the medical profession. They're both nurses, yeah, right, and so you have some insight as well. You're not newbies to all of these drugs and all of the things that possibly you're seeing, and I think it's important for our listeners to understand that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and he went through a period where we tried sports medicine doctors with the massage therapy, acupuncture pain, specialized pain clinics that didn't use narcotics and that because he really didn't want to take those, because he was like this ultra athlete who you know, none of his friends, this young group of guys and girls, they didn't take drugs. They were highly trained athletes. I think as time went on and he realized that you know it wasn't going to really get better, where he could participate or at a certain level, you know he needed to do something else. I think that's where he started doing searches on the internet and ends up experimenting with dextromethorphan, robitussin. People always say, wow, I never heard of that. It's not a new problem. It's been around for a long time.
Speaker 2:Back in the 60s and 70s. I mean football teams would do a robo-tripping party and that, but we don't talk about it, we don't know about it. And Robitussin, dextromethorphan, it's actually classified as a disassociative drug. What kid who had their life crushed wouldn't want to disassociate from that because he was not getting any relief any other way through all the other therapies? It has a psychoactive effects, disassociative effects, and it has. It has like different levels of effects with the dose increasing in that from euphoria to extreme euphoria. Things like that where they don't even feel. They feel like they're floating in space and that, or in the air or crawling through a wormhole, things like that it can be very hallucinogenic.
Speaker 1:It's a disassociative, which I think that's what Patrick liked, because it just took everything away for him.
Speaker 3:Any young person can walk into Walgreens and buy this. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Yes, they walk into Walgreens, they take the bottle, they stuff it in their shirt, they go to the bathroom inside of Walgreens and they chug it, and then they're set.
Speaker 1:I would like to expand just a little bit more on the Robitessin. So prior to us discovering that Patrick was using Robitessin, we noticed that he quit eating and he became very isolated from our family. He wouldn't come to dinner and have dinner with us, he quit talking with us and he always had sunglasses on. I suspected that he was doing something, but he never left the house. All of his friends had gone off to college so at that point he really didn't have any friends. He didn't have any money. He wouldn't even come in the same room with us or have anything to do with us, which was very unusual because he was such an outgoing, friendly person and we thought it was probably because he was depressed.
Speaker 1:Once we discovered he was doing Robitussin and we searched the house for it, we found it down inside the couch, underneath the couch, we found it buried all over the backyard. We found it in window wells. We found it in the tank of our toilets. We found it in the rafters in our basement. Even years after he was gone, we were still finding bottles of that. So when Patrick used Robitessin I think the normal dose is one to two teaspoons Patrick drank three full bottles at a time Now the ingredient is dextromethorathan, that is, it's DXM.
Speaker 1:That's the ingredient that causes the hallucinations and the euphoric feeling. But some of those medications also contain Tylenol, which is very important, I think, for parents to know, because if they drank two or three bottles of Robitussin with Tylenol in it they would go into liver failure and most likely die. Patrick was very careful about picking the ones that he used. He would look for the ingredients in it, but I think there are children out there that don't know about the Tylenol in it. I also wanted to say Robitussin. In all the studies they've done it causes encapsulated lesions in the brain of rats. Now they haven't done that with humans yet, but in all the reading that I've done, robitussin can. If you use it in the amount that it makes you hallucinate, it can actually send you into a permanent psychosis and you can end up with chronic schizophrenia from it. So I really believe that this drug is very dangerous and I think now they have put it behind the counter Some of it not all of it but that was my mission was to get it behind the counter.
Speaker 1:So I did a lot of petitions over the years to have it put behind the counter and wrote the drug companies but I really never heard back from anyone. Patrick had over 30 admissions from Robitussin use into hospital admissions and then coupled with his mental health admissions he had probably over 70 hospital admissions. But I really coupled with his mental health admissions he had probably over 70 hospital admissions. But I really believe the Robitussin was the biggest thing that caused all of his problems and led to where he is now.
Speaker 3:I remember when I talked to you I'd love you to tell the story and I don't know which one of you it was went around to all the Walgreens in the neighborhoods with signs and telling every Walgreens pharmacist watch for kids stealing this. Put this behind. And everyone sort of looked at you like you were they did but I just did about a 10 mile radius.
Speaker 1:in our home I took a picture of Patrick and I wrote that he was stealing Robitussin from all the stores in our neighborhood. I just left that with all the pharmacies. I actually had the manager at Safeway called me back and they did have him on camera stealing it. They did and they actually caught him once and they tackled him in the parking lot, which we were not aware of until I found a ticket that he had received from the police. But yeah, he would just get an empty grocery bag and just fill it with Robitussin and walk right out the door.
Speaker 3:I have mentioned this again to so many people since I met you. Not one person has heard of it. When you go online, you can read so much about robotripping To believe that your young adult child can walk into a Walgreens and have a drug that took him down this path. So let's go down this path. Now, when do you realize that he's not himself?
Speaker 1:Patrick's birthday is December 27th and my birthday is New Year's Day. So on December 27th we were celebrating his 21st birthday and I just noticed something wrong with him. We were upstairs and I looked at him and his pupils were about the size of the colored part of his eye. That's how we always knew he was on Robitussin is. He got a completely different look to him. He almost looked I hate to say it, but almost demonized, because his eyes just looked pure black. I looked at him and I said why are your eyes so dilated? I called Charles to come upstairs and look at his eyes with me. He didn't say anything. But so then, three days later that was on my birthday, new Year's Day he overdosed that morning and he had taken 80 triple C capsules. What he was throwing up and overdosing on is a guifenicin. The coating on the capsule that's what they overdose on. The DXM or the dextromethorathin makes you hallucinate and stuff and it's extremely addictive. That was the very first time he overdosed was on New Year's Day in 2012.
Speaker 3:Just turned 21.
Speaker 2:I always describe it as when you looked at him and his eyes were so blown and dilated, it's like the lights are on but nobody's home, because he just wasn't there.
Speaker 3:What was your next step? So when he overdosed, did you take him to the hospital?
Speaker 1:Immediately, charles threw him in the car and took off with him, and I was getting my clothes on and I followed behind him in the car, because at that point we didn't know anything about DXM or what it did. We got him to the hospital and his heart rate was very, very high. His blood pressure was high. All they did was monitor him throughout the day and then they discharged him with instructions about substance abuse. After that he overdosed almost weekly, almost weekly after that.
Speaker 2:Well, in part of the hospital visit, they do test for drugs, right, they do a tox screen, but it doesn't show up as dextromethorphan, it shows up as PCP or an opiate and that. So then you're sent down a different pathway, thinking, well, we have to get a different problem. It's really a false positive, is what it is, but that's what you're left with.
Speaker 3:Do you feel like the hospitals don't even know what they're doing when these kids come in? And I guess I should say your journey is so long, it's 15 years.
Speaker 2:These are emergency room doctors, they're emergency room nurses and that, and they can't. They don't even have a clue about it, they don't even know it was. And when it comes back as PCP or whatever an opiate well, that's the path they go down, but it's really not the true thing.
Speaker 3:At this point you had hope. Okay, he's addicted to something right now, but we're going to take care of it. We're going to get him the best help. 15 years later, I want to let the listeners know Patrick is alive. You'll hear a little bit more about what's happened, but when we met with Diane and Charles Diane, I've never seen anything like this. The most dedicated, loving parent had probably a 15-page document of every doctor, every session, every drug prescribed and continuing to try to trust people. I know we can't go through all 15 pages, but I'd love you to just talk about a few of the highlights when you would go to someone and they tell you to do this and then that would happen. Just give us things.
Speaker 1:People will learn from some of the ropes and hoops you jump through that you think people need to know Immediately right after Patrick's injury he had talked about jumping off a building downtown and what he said to me is he said Mom, he said I found a sport and something that I love so much. I am so blessed to have found that there's people in this world that never find that and if I can't do that, I don't want to be here anymore. I don't want to be here anymore if I can't do what I love. He truly meant it. From that day on he just has gone downhill. Immediately I was thinking he was suicidal. I took him right away to a specialist at University Hospital that he I'm so sorry he diagnosed him with a major depressive disorder and sent us to another doctor because that doctor was out of network. So we went to another one in network. Basically, denise, what happened is every psychiatrist we had which we saw, everyone in network with Sidna they ended up firing Patrick. They would take him on as a patient and then Patrick would be non-compliant and he would be using Robitussin in conjunction with psych meds, and so the psychiatrist would say he's a liability to me, don't, don't bring him back.
Speaker 1:I actually had one doctor that I took Patrick to see. He had seen him several times and we went to our visit and he opened his door and he said your son has called me I don't know how many times this weekend. And I was at work all weekend because I did 12 hour shifts and Charles, I think, was at work but we didn't know Patrick had called him but he'd been calling him. So when I took him to his appointment he actually threw the prescription in my face and he said do not ever bring your son back here. He has called my office over and over this weekend. And I said can you refer me to somebody else? And he said your son is going to die. And he slammed the door in my face. That's one incident.
Speaker 1:And then in one of the brain injury homes he had been there for a year and he had a very serious injury to his leg again a second time in the brain injury home. He ended up using Robitussin and alcohol. In that brain injury home the owner of that home called me and said that they were kicking him out. She said we're going to take him to a shelter over off of Colfax, which they did. But she said my advice to you is let him go and let nature take its course. And that's coming from a health professional. Let nature take its course. And that's coming from a health professional. Let NAKESTRE take its course. So they dropped him off, down or over on Colfax at 830 at night. No shelters are open. They did not put a referral in for him or anything. So here he is brain injury, mental illness, down on Colfax at 830, no place to go. And then those are just a couple of examples.
Speaker 3:What were you feeling at this point? I mean, you were feeling shut out by the people that were supposed to help you the most right.
Speaker 1:Yes, frustration.
Speaker 2:Isolation.
Speaker 1:Very isolated very frightened that we were going to lose Patrick. He went to outpatient programs. He went to inpatient programs. He was in every psych hospital in the Denver area all the way down to Colorado Springs, where they'd keep him for 30 days. When that 30-day mark hit, they would discharge him One time. They just. They never even called us and we were his guardians. They put him on a bus. He ended up somewhere up in Boulder, had everything stolen. It's just one thing after another.
Speaker 2:Without telling us.
Speaker 3:That's the other thing I really want you to talk about, because when I hear these situations and I'm talking to friends and say, well, get guardianship, then at least they can't just dismiss them or they have to call you. You're in charge of their medical world. Tell us about hiring the lawyer, getting guardianship and how that worked.
Speaker 2:It's almost a joke. We went through that with Arapahoe County. We had the piece of paper. It's a one sheet piece of paper a couple of paragraphs on it. It explains our rights, what we can do for Patrick and what we can't do for Patrick. We can't admit him to the hospital but we can take him there and that it's very limited because of the lack of knowledge of administrators of hospital staff. We had a nursing supervisor. They had discharged our son to well. It ended up to be a detox center and we said we need to know where he's at so we can contact him and be advocates for him. And she says I'm not reading that paper, I don't care about that paper, it means absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1:It's like oh, my God, she actually threw that paper back at me. She honestly did, because we got guardianship pretty much immediately when all of this started and actually the guardianship came out of a lawsuit that Patrick was in a mental health facility here in the Denver area and it ended up being a class action lawsuit. There were 30 kids in the lawsuit that had all been abused in this place. A lawsuit came out of that, so each child was awarded some. It's a small chunk of money not very much, because there were so many families in the lawsuit. Our lawyer said you need to become Patrick's guardian and conservator. We became his guardians and we had the most amazing lawyer. He's still our lawyer. I'm not sure if he would want me to say his name, but if I just could plug him I don't think I would be here without him. I could call him day or night Without that law firm, him and his secretary. They were amazing. They got us through a lot of really bad times. They're almost like family to us now.
Speaker 3:If you find out, if you can mention them, we're happy to put it in the episode notes. Okay, I will do that.
Speaker 1:So, after the guardianship problems, a lot of people don't acknowledge it. You say we're his legal guardians and they say he's a 25 year old man, he does not need a guardian, even the police. The police would not even look at the form I had. So I got to the point where my lawyer said Diane, if that happens, here's my cell number, call me immediately. I will talk to them and tell them what that paperwork means, because it's actually like Patrick is a five-year-old. That's basically what those papers say and that we are allowed to have any information. He'd be there in a hospital, we'd go back to see him and he was gone, and then they wouldn't tell us where they sent him. We'd bring out our papers, and that's the one time that the house supervisor threw my papers right in my face.
Speaker 2:That is one of the stories In California. That's when he injured himself and got a head injury. We faxed the papers to him and that and they wouldn't tell us anything. Here's my son in an ICU. With a brain injury, with a brain injury, you know, sodium depleted, all that and nobody will tell us if he's alive, dead or where he's going. It's like, okay, I have the documentation, but you just have to find a different way.
Speaker 3:Diane, at that point you then called the social worker at the hospital right.
Speaker 1:I did call the social worker when he was out in California. I waited days and days and days for her to call me back. And she called me back at work and I told her where I was and where my son was. All she said to me was once a mother, always a mother. And then she hung up on me. All she said to me was once a mother, always a mother. And then she hung up on me, and that was after waiting days and days to find out what was going on with him. I just you know what. And I was at work. I just sat in a chair and I started to cry and I think all my friends thought Patrick had died. But I was so upset because I thought this woman just hung up on me. I had been waiting a week to hear from somebody and then she hung up on me.
Speaker 4:I am blown away with the many, many failures of this system from beginning to end the hospitals, the mental health facilities, the court system and every other possible resource. And then you've got this added piece of the competency restoration treatment system. Can you explain a little bit of that to our listeners, because that was something I actually did not know anything about? But the article talks a lot about the delays and the challenges of actually providing a timely inpatient competency restoration treatment. How did those delays and failures affect his well-being?
Speaker 1:The first time that Patrick was arrested. He ended up being in the Arapahoe County Jail for two years and we tried and tried to get to him during that time and even as guardians we could not. I mean, once they're in jail it's like your hands are tied. You don't have any way except going through a public defender which is very hard to get a hold of, a public defender or the district attorney. Pretty much spent most of my days and nights on the computer playing with email addresses to find the right email addresses to get to the top of the person of Arapahoe County.
Speaker 1:And then I actually was connected with a lieutenant at one point and I said I'm very, very worried about my son. I haven't heard from him. He calls us all the time. I haven't heard from him in months. And then he called me back and he said Patrick is just fine, he's us all the time. I haven't heard from him in months. And then he called me back and he said Patrick is just fine, he's out in the general population walking around. He was fine. He was happy when come to find out he had been locked up in isolation for eight months and he was in isolation at that point, so that Wait, locked up in the jail in isolation.
Speaker 3:Let me ask you something, because maybe this I don't understand. I watch TV and it seems like you can go into the jail and do visitation. What's the difference in his situation and that COVID?
Speaker 1:did a lot, oh, okay.
Speaker 1:It had not happened at that point yet, actually, because that was back in 2014, 15, 16. So he was always in suicide pods or something like that, so he was not allowed visitors. He could call us, but that's when we got worried, because the phone calls just quit. They just quit one day and then we knew that he was in trouble. Eight months later they transferred him down to the state hospital. It took us almost a year to have a conversation with him. He was completely checked out mentally, I think, from being isolated for eight months, but it took so long to get him back and bombarded with psychiatric meds which we could never figure out what they had put him on or whatever.
Speaker 2:They figured out that he had actually seizures from these drugs where he would just start spitting and doing like tardive dyskinesia, kind of things like that. And then finally he got to another unit where a nurse practitioner took him off of basically almost everything, and that's when he improved. And that's when he improved and that's when we finally got a chance to go down to Pueblo and visit him face to face. But it was a year of nothing.
Speaker 3:I want to talk about these drugs because there was another time when I was looking at your document, you'd been to all these. Everyone was changing take this, take this, take this. No, he has this, no, he has that. First I want to talk about how do you know who to believe? And second, wasn't there a time that a doctor said to you he needs to be off everything and you took like a month off work because he had to go through withdrawal of each of these drugs because I think they wanted to take a brain scan, right?
Speaker 1:Well, yes, he was on very, very many medications and, if I can say, there's a book. It's called DALS, which is spelled S-T-A-H-A-L-S Essential, s-t-a-h-l-s Okay, essential Psychopharmacology, but it's a prescriber's manual and it has every single psych med in here At one point right now I don't have any tabs. One point this entire book was tabs everywhere because every time they put them on a med I'd read about it, I'd read about the side effects just to make sure it could go with the other medications, because I worried so much and these medications are not benign. The side effects are terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible. That's all I can say. I know people do need them. But the amount of medication.
Speaker 1:At one point I did take a month off work because they wanted to do a brain study on Patrick. Which they? This is what they told us. I think the brain study was $7,000. Which they? This is what they told us. I think the brain study was $7,000. What they said what we'll do is get him off every medication. There's no meds in his system. We'll hook him up to this machine and it will watch his brain waves and then help us fine tune the correct medication to help him. It was a neuro place. That that's what their specialty was. But so they said he just had depression. That's all they said is the brain scan looked like he had depression. After that we started him on an outpatient program which he was fired from that. He didn't last long there, just because he just he has no motivation whatsoever and I feel like back when he told me he didn't want to live anymore, he couldn't run. He's been like this ever since. There's not anything that motivates him.
Speaker 2:Well, some of it comes from the dextromethorphan side effects of that. That can even lead to schizophrenia and bipolar disorders and other brain things. There's a term anosognosia. It just basically means they have no insight into their own disease and they don't realize that quote unquote they're sick or something's wrong. They don't need help. It's a symptom of all these disorders and the traumatic brain injuries too. I mean it's a brain thing, right, it's a symptom, it's not denial. And people don brain injuries too. I mean it's a brain thing, right, it's a symptom, it's not denial. And people don't recognize that A lot of times that part of the brain injury and the damage that the drugs do to the brain it just gets missed. And then they say, well, they're not motivated, well, it's part of the symptom of the diseases.
Speaker 3:Every time you went to a new doctor and they gave you a new thought, or, like when you did the brain scan, they said he's depressed. Did you have hopes? This is it. This is it.
Speaker 1:Every time, especially the place that he was abused at, because-.
Speaker 2:It was our last straw. It was our last straw.
Speaker 1:But if you read about their program on the website, which was pages of nothing but how wonderful this place was. It was a hard program, but if you and your family because we all had to go to that program if you stuck with it, your child would be well, that was the worst, devastating program in our lives. Misleading deceptive.
Speaker 1:The number of kids that killed themselves that were in that program. When they came out they took Patrick he was 20, but I think they usually took kids up to 18, but they went ahead and they took Patrick into that program, which I wish they wouldn't have at this time, if what I know now. But yeah, there were 30 kids in that lawsuit and several of them had killed themselves. Just from it was all physical abuse, some sexual abuse to the girls.
Speaker 2:Medication mismanagement. Because the doctor didn't have a license to administer medications, he had to defer it to a nurse practitioner.
Speaker 1:I had forgotten. Until last night I was looking at some of my notes and I remembered Patrick needed all of his medications refilled when we took him there. So when I called I said I'm going to stop and get his meds refilled. He said no, you don't need to do that, we'll fill them as soon as he gets here. I said, okay, that's great. So they never filled his meds and he had been on them for well over a year, went through withdrawal from all those meds. There were kids in there having seizures. Patrick would see kids having seizures on the floor.
Speaker 2:They withheld insulin from kids. Insulin, oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of bad places out there, but you don't know, and you're grasping for a miracle as a parent.
Speaker 2:That was after we had been through so much. He went to a wilderness program in Utah. He was only supposed to be there two months, I think he ended up being there three or four. He went to a residential program in California and he went to another inpatient facility there that he walked away from, and that's when he off a building. So it's like, oh my God.
Speaker 4:I'm curious what your support systems have looked like. I know that you had to move from one neighborhood to another I don't by choice or for whatever reason and I also know that there's been some family isolation. One of the things I don't know if our listeners are aware of is that in the mental health space, families are more isolated than they are for any other disease, whether it's cancer or anything else. So could you speak a little bit to that from your own experience, from my perspective it was the most lonely, isolating time of our life.
Speaker 1:Because the most lonely isolating time of our life? Because you know, we had this. I thought we had this perfect family that imploded before our eyes and our family. I'm sorry to say I have one brother in Louisiana that I didn't talk to a lot, but that was because I was so busy with Patrick. But the family we have here in Colorado basically left us Now Charles' family he has a brother that checked on Patrick and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:But as far as my family, first of all, they beat up on me a lot in the beginning and said I was doing everything wrong and they wanted to make sure that Charles and I were doing what was best for Patrick. Well, we're his parents, so and of course we would do what's best for Patrick. And then after a while they just they quit talking to us and basically this stoned us and since then my father has passed on, which is sad because I never was able to fix things with him. I have a sister and a niece and a nephew that Charles and I raised. Pretty much they will not have anything to do with us. They've blocked us from any sort of their life, and so we haven't had communication with them going on three years now.
Speaker 3:What do you think that's about? Are they embarrassed that you're their family or do they think you're not doing anything right and they would do it better? And what Patrick's going through is your fault?
Speaker 4:Or do they think it's contagious?
Speaker 2:All of the above.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, okay. You know, I think they just had so many. This is what you need to do. This is what you need to do. Why aren't you doing this, why aren't you doing this, why aren't you doing it? And then yelling at me all the time, and you know what I? For my mental health, the best thing for me to do was not talk to them, because I would end up in a fight with them most of the time. There was even a time my sister said send Patrick to my house, I'll fix him. So I sent Patrick to her and then within 24 hours, she called me and she said come, get him out of my house now.
Speaker 3:So and how about friends and neighbors? Where did you get support from anyone? My friends at St Joseph's.
Speaker 1:Hospital which maybe I can plug that they saved my life. If I did not have the group of nurses I worked with, I would not be here, I would not, which maybe I can plug that they saved my life. If I did not have the group of nurses I worked with, I would not be here, I would not. I can tell you that they helped me on days when I was really tired, when I'd get calls in the middle of my shift of something bad about Patrick, when I'd have to go sit and cry somewhere. They would take over my assignment for me, but they were always there. There was not a time that I could not have reached out to any one of them, my friends at my work. I credit them with me still being sane, halfway sane, and here.
Speaker 2:I would agree with that too. I mean, I always had a couple of three or four friends at work that I could talk to about anything and of course, I always listened to things that was going on in their lives. But I think the issues that we had, you know, they helped me more than anything else and I think that's a big thing. The biggest thing they did was just listen to me.
Speaker 2:Listen and not, criticize and not criticize and say did you do this, did you do that, even when family would say that, did you do this or that? It's stuff we had tried not, maybe once or twice, three or four times, and they knew that. But there's not an algorithm, there's not a step-by-step playbook. With this You're dealing with the human mind and that, and addiction and brain injuries and diagnosis your immediate family, your daughter.
Speaker 3:I bet you she got angry. All this time was being spent with Patrick.
Speaker 1:Where did she fit in All of this started her sophomore year of high school, pretty much. So a lot of the worst parts were during high school and Charles had a sister, karen, and she kind of stepped in and became a second mom for my daughter. When I was busy with Pat because we had appointment after appointment after appointment every single day I did everything I could not to have her feel like I wasn't paying attention to her. You know there were times when she'd tell me a whole big story and it would go right over the top of my head because I was so inundated with Pat. But I tried so hard to be there for her. Where I dropped off, charles's sister picked up and she was just like a second mom and she passed away. She passed away about four years ago.
Speaker 1:But she was an amazing support for us, amazing support, and our daughter is doing great. She got married last May. Didn't she have a baby?
Speaker 3:Not yet. We're waiting, oh not yet, oh, you're waiting. Well, I can't wait you better let us know when that little one comes, but he and.
Speaker 1:Patrick were joined at the hip growing up. They were always together. He worried about her all the time. He worried so much about Emily and then she has not talked to him in 10 years, maybe longer 11, 12 years. She doesn't want anything to do with him. She went through a lot of trauma. She had a deadbolt on her bedroom door. We slept with bells on our door so we could hear Patrick coming at night. So it was very, very, very hard on her. But she's done well. She went off to college and has a wonderful group of friends and is just. She's the sunshine in our life that keeps us going.
Speaker 4:Can you tell us what is Patrick's status at the moment?
Speaker 1:So he was transferred from Arapahoe County on February 7th to the state hospital in Quibble and I believe a lot of the reason they transferred him was that article we wrote For the Denver Post. Yeah, the court, everybody in the court knew about it. When we went to his last hearing, one of the liaisons there said it might help even just get him out of here, and sure enough he was moved within that. Next month he was moved to the state hospital, but he will not talk to us, he won't come to the phone, he does not want visitors. So that's a little difficult for me right now, because I was anxious to get him out of the jail so I could go see him and talk to him. But he does not want anything to do with us right now, which is unusual. So we're trying to figure out why. But he's been there for two months. We've not talked to a doctor, we've not talked to a therapist. We've called and we get a social worker that's filling in for his social worker. So we still have no information from there.
Speaker 3:How old is Patrick now? Oh, he's 33. Okay, how old is Patrick now? 33. Oh, he's 33.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:How did he end up in jail? Can you let people know what that journey was to jail? Because people are going to say well, what jail was that the? Last one.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, unfortunately I found this out after he was transferred to Pueblo. He let somebody shoot him up with meth, which he's never done. He's never done needles, he's always promised me that he would never, ever, ever do needles, and when he was coming down off of that meth, he wanted more and he wasn't able to get more. So he found big rocks and he got angry and he threw him through the windows of a department store and did a lot of damage.
Speaker 1:The police came and he was just pacing, talking to a wall. When the police picked him up, he had been discharged from the state hospital here in Denver. Oh, that's right, they just dropped him off right. Yes, he was not ready to be discharged.
Speaker 2:No discharge plan, no resources.
Speaker 1:The most important thing is they dropped all of his diagnoses his brain injury, the bipolar schizophrenia, depression personality disorder. They dropped all of that and just left substance abuse disorder in there. So they were able to drop him off and as guardians, charles and I should have been the ones to sign his discharge paperwork. They let him sign it. They dropped him off over on Colfax again before we even knew that he was there. Six weeks later he's back in jail and we're going back through the company system all over again.
Speaker 2:He got beat up on the street, crushed his skull, his sinuses, all kinds of things, because he wasn't a danger to himself or others, but within weeks gotten in two or three fights.
Speaker 2:They let him out because they said he wasn't a danger to himself or others, and then boom when actually the week before they had called us and said no, patrick can't have visitors or phone calls, and that because he destroyed our TV room where there's chairs and stuff like that, he broke the chairs apart, threatened staff and that. And then a week later, on a Friday, I get a call we're dropping him off, we're discharging him on Monday to a place that they had never even contacted the Comitas Crisis Center and that they'd never contacted. They just dropped him off and they were going to supposed to call me Monday morning so I could meet him there. Did they call? No, patrick called hours later after he had already thrown away all his paperwork, everything else. It was just a disaster. No ID, no ID no medication no follow-up appointments.
Speaker 2:Zippo.
Speaker 3:We're sitting here now, 15 years later. What are your hopes for Patrick?
Speaker 1:Well, charles and I both are just praying for a miracle. We're not giving up hope. We'll never give up hope. We'll never walk away from him. We've been told by so many people. Move, change your address, abandon him. We've been told by so many people move.
Speaker 2:change your address, Abandon him.
Speaker 1:I can't tell you how many people have said that to me. If that were my son, I would kick him out. I would never let him in my house. I would have nothing to do with him. But he's very sick. He definitely has a brain injury, mental illness. He needs help. He needs help. He doesn't need to be thrown out on the street because he needs care. So our hopes are that they can hopefully find a long-term program that is locked until they can get him help somehow, and whether Patrick is helping or not, it's hard to say.
Speaker 3:That's. That's what's so hard. All that you know. You wonder, is he you know?
Speaker 1:if he's not and if he ends up institutionalized which I hope doesn't happen we will still be there for him, we'll visit him. But you know, the hardest part is is one day Charles and I will be gone. I mean, we're getting up there, we're not young anymore and we're all he has. He has no friends, he has no family that talks to him. That's the scary part for us right now. We're really hoping for a miracle and praying. We pray for him every day and we have people at our church praying for everything.
Speaker 4:So what an enduring love. I hate to ask this question a little bit, but is there anything that you would do differently when you look back on it, or things that advice you can give to any other families who might be going through something similar, because we know they're out there?
Speaker 1:I would say definitely. If you are going to, you know, check out your psychiatrist before you go. Get referrals from other people that have been to them. Make sure they know what they're doing.
Speaker 2:I don't know that we would have done much differently, but we tried everything, everything we could think of, and we took suggestions from people and that, oh well, maybe we will call this doctor and that's how we got referrals to different doctors and stuff like that. But you just have to keep active on it and you're going to hit high points and low points low points where you're immobilized and that you don't know what to do. Hopefully, being patient helps a lot. But I think the most consistent thing that we did and I would not change is we've kept at it. We've stayed on track with doing whatever we could. Sometimes we're at a loss and you just have to wait until something comes into your brain or you read something.
Speaker 2:We tapped into a lot of resources like NAMI. Nami has a great program because you are so isolated. So we did a family-to-family one there and you learn so much about you're so isolated. So we did a family to family one there and you learn so much about you're not alone. And I told this one guy he was telling the story of his son. I'm like, oh my gosh, we have the same son. He was on the street, he was in doing drugs, he had a mental health diagnosis and stuff like that. But I don't think deep down we would ever give up on that.
Speaker 1:Al-Anon is also very good Charles. And I went to Al-Anon, we got wonderful tools because we weren't sure if we should be going to NAMI for mental health or Al-Anon for substance abuse. So we did them both, but NAMI is amazing, their programs are amazing. Their programs are amazing, their support's amazing. And Al-Anon if you have a child with substance abuse, al-anon is a lifesaver.
Speaker 2:It's a lifesaver. They give you tools like acceptance. You know you have to learn to accept things. You just have to accept on that and you have to have some boundaries in that and it's very hard. But so they give you tools like that can you tell our?
Speaker 1:listeners what NAMI is. It's the National Alliance of Mental Illness. It's nationwide throughout the country. I'll put links to it in all our episode notes they have so many great resources for families.
Speaker 1:Can I touch on one more thing real quick? Absolutely. You were asking about how Charleston I have done. Well, yeah, that's important. I was a NICU nurse for many years and every year we would have graduate picnics and it was amazing how the families with very disabled kids they would come back and they had divorced Almost all of them had divorced with this very sick child.
Speaker 1:Initially we did pretty good. We went through a couple of very hard years where we wanted the same goal, but it's very funny how men deal with it one way. Women deal with it completely different and I think that's important for people to know, because I would get mad at Charles. But then once we started going to the mental hospitals and support groups, they just said men deal with it differently, they tend to isolate and they're more quiet and they don't talk about it as much, when all I wanted to do was search online and do this and do this and do this and talk, and talk, and talk. And I would get mad at Charles. But after a while I learned that that was just his way of coping with it. I'd say now our marriage is stronger than it's ever been. I wish you guys knew Patrick when he was younger. I wish we had a zest for life like no one you ever would know, and I'm hoping. I think that Patrick is gone, but you know what? I'll take him anyway. I can get him.
Speaker 3:Do you find joy in life now? Are you able to find joy now?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have harder times. I don't know why I feel like sometimes it's harder for a mom. I don't know why I know it's equally hard on Charles, but he doesn't voice it as much as I do. But we find joy together. We do a lot together.
Speaker 3:The enduring love that you two show is amazing. I want to say one more thing, and it's backtracking. When you said Charles, someone got up and told the story of his son and you said that's my son. People listening today are going to think Patrick's story is an anomaly. There aren't hundreds of Patrick's out there, but that's why this story is so important to share. You are not alone and you learn that. This is shocking, that we are so isolated from what's going on with so many people, because Patrick is a special needs child just like any. When you said, when you get guardianship and he's like a five-year-old, if he was down syndrome or displayed symptoms of cerebral palsy or other kinds of things, no one would put him out in the street.
Speaker 1:And I think an important thing for listeners to know too is that the diagnosis is not important, because you can never really for sure say they have schizophrenia or they have bipolar, because you can't diagnose it with the blood tests or something like that. But the thing the most important thing that one of my friends that has three kids that have bipolar disorder, she said, is finding a medication to make them feel well or feel better. The diagnosis doesn't matter. I remember when she said to me initially when Patrick was first diagnosed, she said cancer would be a better diagnosis and I thought, well, that's a horrible thing to say, but now, looking back over all these years, cancer would have been a much better diagnosis. Now I know what she meant At the time I thought it was a very mean thing to say, but it doesn't go away.
Speaker 3:Right. So we usually close asking our guests to leave our listeners with two pieces of information that you hope they take away from today's discussion. Can you share those with us?
Speaker 2:Of course I wrote down more than two or three right One of the things, and I don't know where I heard this it's a quote, I'm sure but where there's life, there's hope. He's still alive and I think our biggest success over all this time is he's still with us. He's still there, there's still a chance for him and we pray for that every day. Our spirituality helps us so much. There I have to defer to God's wisdom, and that another thing is well, and Diane and I had the swimmer said this never give up thing is well and Diane and I had the swimmer said this never give up, never, never, never, never, ever.
Speaker 2:So I think that's central to what we hope. And then and the things that happened when he was younger, hold those things dear reflect often on the good times and that cause that'll get you through it, cause we know who he was before all this happened and you know what? There's still a lot of that there. He's still there in some way or shape or form and we just hope that someday he'll have the balance and the stability to be a productive member of society, to be part of our family. Another thing I think about when you're talking to people and people you know give you the cold shoulder and they think things about you I said it's none of my business what other people think of me. You know. I have to just forgo that If you think that I'm doing the wrong thing as a parent, I should have done this or that, that's your opinion and that. But I know in my heart and that we have tried to do everything we can to help our son. And another thing that I wrote down was talk about the elephant in the room, because that's what's wrong with our politicians, that's what's wrong with our society, that's what's wrong with families we don't talk about family problems. We don't talk about family problems. We don't talk about the years of alcoholism and the generations of alcoholism in our families and drug abuse and things like that. You have let's do this, let's do this, let's do this. You'll realize after a while, after you network with people, you become pretty much the experts. You may not have all the answers, but you become experts and that and you become examples. I think one of the biggest things we've done is is be an example.
Speaker 2:Diana and I, we volunteer at our church. We volunteer at a homeless shelter where Patrick used to pop up every once in a while, and it's in my old neighborhood. People always say, oh, you're with the church. Well, not really. I said I grew up in this neighborhood. I feel like I'm serving my neighbors, the community, part of it too. Every time you drive down the street, you see a homeless encampment or a couple of people. We have several around our house. I don't think of them as quote, unquote homeless. I think of them as my unhoused neighbors. And so those are the things. Look at people, do what you can for them. You can't help everybody and just keep going.
Speaker 1:Yes, keep going.
Speaker 3:And just keep going. Yes, keep going. Gosh, those are so wonderful. Can you guys put your heads together just for a minute at the end? I want to see both of you, thank you so much. You guys are a light and I just pray for you, I pray for Patrick and I thank you with all my heart for sharing this story and hopefully we'll get together again at some point, because I really really enjoyed it, so thank you If there are any listeners out there that do pray?
Speaker 1:could they squeeze in a little prayer for Patrick?
Speaker 3:Absolutely, absolutely. Whatever your beliefs, whatever your God, ask them to think about Patrick. We will.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for having us. Thank you.
Speaker 4:Thank you guys for doing this so great.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Well, that's a wrap. I know it wasn't advice from experts, but I would say they were about the best experts we could have. It's hard to believe that this is an epidemic and people can walk into Walgreens and buy this drug. I just can't thank them enough for sharing this story. For those listening that might want to send Charles and Diane a message of support or even share their own story, you can visit our website at biteyourtonguepodcastcom and there's a little microphone in the bottom right. I think it would mean so much to Charles and Diane if you sent them a message.
Speaker 4:Yeah, denise, this was a tough one, and we knew this was going to be a tough one, but it's a really important one. We get a lot of questions about mental health, drug and alcohol abuse and their story is all of it and how everything just can go wrong. They had the most incredible intentions, they did everything right. They did everything and how they still have hope is amazing to me. Quite honestly, I have hope for him as well. I hope that there's that one person, the one thing, that turns this around for them and they can get their Patrick back.
Speaker 3:Boy. So do I, Kirsten. I think, as she said, if we could all say a little prayer. Thank you all for listening today. I know this was a tough one. Once again, thank you so much to Connie Gorin-Fisher and also, I guess, Kirsten, we have to mention we'd love you to join our subscribership. Biteyourtonguepodcastcom, support us, become a sustaining member. It's just $60, $5 a month, and if you pay in advance, it's only $50. And if you can't do that, just buy us a cup of coffee. Biteyourtonguepodcastcom, I hope you'll become part of our squad. Anyway, kirsten, we're on our way, but remember sometimes you just have to bite your tongue.
