eponis' Friends

Sometimes the good and bad are tightly intermingled
So, some short background into the family Vincere before I relate this weekend's events.

When I was 15 (any my brother and sister 13 and 10, respectively,) my dad had a heart attack at age 50 and died instantly. This was bad for all of us, but especially my brother, D, who was going through a rough patch at the time, and who was the one to find my dad. He went 'round the twist and spent the next several years in and out of treatment for drug and alcohol addiction. It's been a recurring theme in his life, every few years he falls off the wagon in one way or another, sabotages himself and ruins things for others, then gets his life in gear, again.

Then, he had a child.

Since my nephew came along, he's really been good at keeping things together. For the most part. He cares too much about my nephew R to jeopardize anything. This summer, he got main custody of R; since my brother lives with my mom right now while he is going back to school, R is close by all the time, and very much a part of all our lives. D has been going back to school and is just about to apply to nursing schools.

My broth out of all of us knows how hard and how horrible it was after my dad died. I never thought he'd be stupid enough to risk doing to R what our dad had inadvertently done to us.

R found his dad yesterday morning on the bed snoring away, tried to wake him, and couldn't. After a good long time shouting at him and hitting him in the face, he was able to wake him enough to get him up the stairs onto the main floor, where my mom called the ambulance. It turns out he Oded on methadone and Soma, which he said he got from a friend of a friend. Of course, we didn't tell the kids about it. He was reeeeaaaaaallly out of it so they decided to keep him in the hospital overnight because of that, and because his potassium levels were dangerously high. After some more testing, it turns out he had a mild heart attack, too.

He's in the hospital until Tuesday; I've got R with me until then. My mom and I sent the kids out to play and went down to his room and cleaned it out. We found the drugs, along with a passel of other non-prescription make-you-sleepy things like antihistamines. I ground them all down the disposal. Probably not the best thing to do with them, but if we threw them out they'd just end up in a landfill, anyway.

I'm ready to kill him. How dare he risk putting R through what we all went through as kids? How dare he risk R never seeing us again? (There's a long story involving R's mother.) I'm so mad I could spit on him. But the ironic thing is, if he hadn't done this to himself, they would have never found the heart issues, and he could have ended up having another heart attack later, one which would have been far more likely to be fatal.

Current Mood: infuriated