What was it like for you before? You know…before the desert.
Sad. I lived with my mom my whole life, because she was sick and Dad wasn’t around. Eventually she’d see me and not know who I was, wouldn’t recognise me. I’d say, y’know, ‘Mom, it’s me, your daughter’, and then she’d get upset, because she couldn’t remember me. Thought she was thirty-two years old most’ve the time. It got so I’d just let her believe it. I mean, imagine, someone telling you you’re fifty right now. Like you blinked and twenty years passed by.
A few years before I bailed, she died. We didn’t have a lot of money and they offered us this treatment for her, this medication they were trialing. It was free because they wanted to see if it’d work or not. I mean, me, they offered it to. She wouldn’t have known what they were saying.
I said, yeah, let’s try it. I thought it was gonna be alright but it wasn’t. At first she just got all hazy, y’know, tired and lethargic, hardly ever knowing where she was. She lost weight, too, ‘cause she never wanted to eat. I wasn’t gonna forcefeed her, not that I didn’t try. She’d spit it back out, get all scared, so I stopped.
I went by the hospital and talked to one of the doctors who dealt with us, told him it wasn’t working out and asked if we could stop giving it to her. He said that wasn’t allowed, because we signed into some contract. Over the next few weeks she got worse. Looked real old and skinny, and never got any better. It was almost a year she lasted on that stuff before it killed her.
