How Others’ behaviors can become a Serious Health Hazard
And I mean really serious….
Today, after Eric's class, I walked outside to ask him a question, and something stopped me cold. My rose bushes. All five of them. I swear they were pinks, yellows, reds, and peaches just days ago. Now they look like they belong on one of Eric's Sci-Fi posters—shriveling petals, black-spotted leaves.
How did I not notice they were this bad? That’s the thing about neglect. It doesn’t show all at once. But one day, you open your eyes and boom, the blinders are lifted and you finally see it.
Kind of like my current need for pulmonary rehab... again.)
As you know, my lungs are in Stage 4—the last stage. I was born with this disease. There is no cure. Every day, I have rounds of treatments I need to keep up with—the vest, nebulizers, exercises, medications—or I pay the price in how I feel the next day.
But since last August, I apparently let things slide. Not intentionally or even noticeably at first, but because I was inadvertently consumed by someone else’s mental illnesses. Yes, that’s plural. Basically, it started the day my 80-year-old mother-in-law moved in.
Now, physically, she’s running laps around both of us (well, definitely me anyway). But mentally? Let’s just say she brought a different kind of tornado warning to Middle Tennessee and set up camp in our guest room. Her multiple mental illnesses took center stage. Actually it was more like she demanded center stage. Everything revolved around her — her appointments, her episodes, her instability, her lists, her daily fictitious ailments, her lying and sneakiness… there’s a lot I will share later. But I didn’t even realize this was even happening, but little by little, my own physical illness stopped being the priority. I even wound up in the hospital a couple of months after she arrived. I was there for a week. And while hospitalized, she called the police. And Eric woke up at 4:00 am to a Sheriff’s deputy standing in our bedroom. Apparently, she was upset that Eric wouldn’t wake up and show her how to log on to her bank accounts. Yes, this is typical behavior for her. So I thought I was just taking it in stride but really, that’s not what was going on.
Now did that wake me up? Of course not. Because I was back to being too busy managing her projects to cheer her up and also, unfortunately, the breakdowns too, not realizing I would be close to having my own. Instead, I returned home to being the support staff in someone else’s psychological circus. Wait, wrong word, I loved the circus as a kid!
Slowly, I started skipping doing my vest, and then I was too tired to do my evening nebulizer treatments, and I definitely wasn’t eating well. Doing my exercises? Only if dragging my tired body across the kitchen floor to fill up the pets’ water bowl counts. But maybe I can count all the ‘steps’ I got from chasing her down the driveway to flag down passing cars. Months and months of this were causing so much havoc, plus damage, and I wasn’t paying attention. My oxygen numbers dropped. And I lost my strength. It was not good.
Only after her fourth major episode, when the professionals convinced us that she was way too much to handle and moved her into a facility, were Eric and I finally able to see the toxic fog we were stuck in. And only then was I clear enough to see how much I painfully neglected my health.
So, today, as I struggle to repair the damage Ms. Chaos caused, I snapped the current state of my roses to visually see a reminder of what happened. It didn’t occur overnight. But toxicity — whether from disease, neglect, or distraction — spreads when you’re not paying attention. You become almost blind to it. My flowers did not get their daily care. And unfortunately, neither did I.
So now I’m back in pulmonary rehab. Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’m not thrilled about it, but I’m going. I have to put this pain-in-the-ass disease back at the top of the list, where it desperately belongs.
When you live with a chronic condition, there’s no room for neglect. NONE. You don’t get to shelf it and deal with it later. It’s every day, or it’s decline. No escaping it. And it’s not just the lungs — it’s the whole picture. Everything took a backseat to the storm living in our house.
So if anyone else is currently experiencing something similar, too — feeling like you're vanishing inside someone else’s illness—I get it. Make sure you don't get lost and concentrate on yourself first!
It really sneaks up on you!
***** Note: I plan to write more about this situation. The more Eric and I open up about what we’ve been through, the more we hear from people who’ve gone through something eerily similar—or know someone who has. But no one talks about it. Maybe if this kind of thing were more out in the open, the people who enabled her—the professionals responsible for everything except her medical care—might’ve actually listened when we said: She is mentally ill.
What happened to her wasn’t right. She needed help. Real intervention. And if she had received it, maybe Eric wouldn’t have had to endure so much for so long. I still want to share more of our experience—we just need to figure out the best format and timing. But one thing is clear: no one should have to go through this simply because non-family “experts” refused to listen. In the end, they didn’t protect her—they failed her. And they hurt the very people who were trying to help.