It is a story of Rhoda. She is the mother of three beautiful daughters and five granddaughters and one grandson. Her oldest daughter is 30 years old and married with a junkie soldier for ten years. Her husband divorced her after she delivered an addicted baby and to get girls back. Because of that she left her husband’s house and went to jail for one year for changing a doctor’s prescription. Not long ago after she was released from jail, she started doing meth to keep her body slim, she started out smoking Meth and heroin whenever the drugs and her boyfriend were.
After Rhoda had taken her baby somewhere in west Council Bluffs to spend the night with her boyfriend, she said that she had a big spider bites. Rhoda took her to ER. They all on her backside and huge with a raised white area in the middle where there was a dark dot. The doctor decided immediately that it was spider bite. The dark spot in the center will soon start to drain and went on with spider bite information and he prescribed four weeks of bactrum.
Rhoda drained her bites and heard that everyone who had stayed at that house had been bitten. People planed to burn the house but Jami didn’t agree. We drained that one ourselves without thinking too much about it although it was nagging at me that she would keep getting bit in the same area.
She returned to Council Bluffs and called from time to time telling me about different people talking about how to lance the bites and that she was draining them for her boyfriend.
Knowing that Rhoda had been diagnosed with CA-MRSA, her father was extremely upset because he already knew some about it being spread by needle sharing and that it was considered an STD, too.
She then started searching any info on the internet, and found herself cry so hard knowing the truth. She thought this was even getting worse since her drug addict doesn’t keep her in good health or good financial condition. As well as she has an autoimmune disease makes her even more likely to catch it, and she has Graves Disease and Fibromyalgia already.
It was very hard for her since she lived with her daughter. She was getting thinner and more depressed, she lost custody of all three of her daughters. Until the MRSA, her husband had been thinking about getting out of the Air Force after becoming a single father but really seemed to make the decision after the MRSA popped up and he moved to Minnesota last month with the girls. He had started carrying sanitary wipes and lotions and supplied the rest of us with them, too, once he did some reading online.
Rhoda tried isolate herself from the community, because she knew about ten people infected within a very small area who not only had CA-MRSA but who all seemed to be ignorant of precautions they should take to protect others or even how serious it was to take the full amount of antibiotics prescribed. Even her daughter would split her antibiotics with her boyfriend until she realized she had to be able to treat both of them to save her daughter.
Four months later Jami called Rhoda and said that her daughter had one that she couldn’t get to drain because it is hurting her so. Rhoda went there to help her daughter. Jami sat up in bed and pulled her gown up and her robe down just exposing the boil under her right breast and Rhoda tried to get at it but her clothes kept getting in the way. They worked hard on it and ended up being too deep to drain so she had to go to the ER and get it lanced.
It was not just that MRSA case shocked Rhoda, Jami told her that she was pregnant also. Rhoda then started praying to God to help them on this
Somehow they were already being blessed. That ER trip changed everything. Jami is no longer addicted to drugs. Rhoda went to visit her for the first time since hearing she is pregnant and she looked wonderful. Since stopping shooting up the Meth, Jami gained about ten pounds, and is taking the antibiotics and I didn’t see one boil on her.
She knows she likely won’t be able to keep this baby because she used Meth during the first month of pregnancy and she already has a police record for this. And she is struggling to get off of the heroin which might be easier now that she isn’t in constant pain from the boils. She is pro choice but can’t bring herself to have an abortion but is comforted that Rhoda has the means and is more than willing to take custody of this child if she carries him/her full term. Rhoda and Jami still snuggle up together like she is a little girl sometimes and talk about the new baby and there is Life in Rhoda’s daughter again in the midst of this tragedy.
All that Rhoda hopes is that Jami stays free of the boils and can get off of all of the drugs. She thinks of Jami’s Meth addiction and will do whatever she can to help her daughter, doctor’s care if necessary.
Rhoda thinks that this long story into the problem of drug addiction might be useful for people who have contracted this through sharing needles and moreover share the problems if they see this.
