Wednesday, April 27, 2011

My Sister

Posted by Anonymous.

The world as I know it ended on a cold December night in 2006. At 10:15 pm. my baby sister, who I had watched for over ten years fight the nightmare that is Leukemia, died. It was like my own death was taking place; I shut down, I became withdrawn, severely depressed and angry. It wasn't just her death that haunted me, it was the way she died, full of pain and anger, not wanting to accept her fate. It was the cruelest experience of my life.

I had spent the months leading up to her death in denial. In all the years that she had Leukemia, I never once thought that she would die. I always knew that she could die at any moment, but i never really believed that she would. I know it was naive of me to be so optimistic, but in those ten years that she battled with the cancer, I thought my sister to be invincible - countless surgeries and infected ports, serious life-threatening circumstances never stopped her from fighting. Even when an irresponsible doctor botched a surgery and left her fighting for her life in what would be months of recuperating, she never lost hope, but she never fully recuperated either. She died of complications due to that surgery and from the cancer.

She was my everything. I lived and breathed for her and for all of a sudden for my whole world to be torn apart was more than I could bear. For months after she died, I would wake up in the middle of the night and tell myself that she was still in the hospital waiting for me to go see her. When she came home to die after they told her she only had four months to live, if that, she was in hospice. They had a nurse that would come to the house to make sure she was comfortable and wasn't in pain, but it didn't matter that they gave her medicine - she died in pain, it was never painless.

When she came home from the hospital to die, she was angry to say the least. She would cry and scream, she didn't understand why she had to die, why at sixteen her time was up. She who had never had the chance to have a real life because of her illness, who hung out with my friends who loved her because the kids at school didn't want to be friends with the girl who had cancer. Even though she was two years younger than me, she always seemed older. Maybe it was the fact that she never got to have a normal childhood that made her seem wise beyond her years. She didn't have time to think of petty things that other kids at her age thought of, not when she was constantly trying to stay alive.

I took a leave of absence from work to be with her. I withdrew from all my classes at college. I tried to keep going because I knew she would be proud of me. She looked up to me so much, and the last thing I wanted to do was disappoint her, but I couldn't stand to be away from her even for short periods of time. I always felt that if I left her, that she would die, and I would never be able to say goodbye or forgive myself for not being there. I became an insomniac; I was too worried and scared to go to sleep, I never knew if I was seeing her for the last time. It was torture to see her die slowly everyday. I couldn't stand to see it, but, at the same time, I couldn't stand to look away. Time was so precious, every moment i spent with her was precious.

She started to get worse - her body started shutting down, her organs began to die, she could no longer sit up in bed by herself. My mother and I would help her to the restroom. Years of steroids for pain had left her first using a walker and later in a wheelchair. If she would have lived, she would have needed a hip and both knees replaced. Three days before she died, a priest came to read her her last rites. We had to hold her up so that he could bless her. She was deteriorating so fast, the day before she had stopped talking. The last thing she ever said was my name and till this day, I don't know what it was that she wanted to tell me.

I know that my sister loved me, and I loved her more than anything, but losing her is something I will never be ok with. I've spent the last 3 1/2 years being depressed and unable to let go of the one person who truly understood me and who I couldn't live without. After her death, I became in a way a zombie. I stopped going out, I didn't want to go back to school, I kept working hoping it would take my mind off the pain, but it never did. I went back to work a month after she died, but I wasn't ready to go back. Everyone I knew was just sorry for me, but I didn't care, I just wanted her back. I just couldn't live in a world where my little sister didn't exist.

The worst part was dreaming of her every night. It would always be the same dream: me hanging out with her doing regular stuff like shopping or watching tv etc., normal things. And, to me, it was like she never died becuz I believed her to be alive. To everyone else, she was dead, but not to me -- she was alive in my dreams and how I wished that my dreams were reality. It wasn't until years later that I had a dream of her telling me that she was sorry that she had died and that she was ok that I realized that I had stopped living. I had become so depressed that I didn't know how to be me anymore. It was this dream that made me realize that all this time that I had spent dreaming of her, I was, in a way, preventing her from letting go, and I knew that by her telling me those things in my dream that she would never be able to if I didn't let go. As much as it pained me to not think about her everyday and miss her, I told myself that it was the right thing to do. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt her in death, and I couldn't allow my depression to get in the way of her being happy and at rest.

It was complete torture those four months after the doctors told us she wouldn't be here for christmas, and they were right. She died five days before xmas. It was the worst day of my life. After ten years of fighting, you'd think she would have won. The hardest part of losing her was not knowing if she was ok, where she was, whether she was still in pain. As someone who has never been religious, albeit somewhat spiritual, it was very hard to believe that she was ok. How could she be ok if she was dead?? There had to be some sort of explanation!! Why was she taken from me when she who was always so devout in her faith yet had suffered beyond her wildest dreams, how is it that god had allowed this to happen????

I don't think I'll ever understand why she had to die. There's no reason or explanation that's ever going to be good enough. I've come to terms with it in my own way. I'm glad that for 16 years I lived and got to be in the presence of an angel, and, even though she is gone, she will always be with me. I deal with my depression every single day, but I am no longer crippled by it. I take it for what it is, and I no longer feel like a zombie. For the first time in a long time, I feel like me again and that's something I will continue to work on everyday. I've been back to school for a year now. I'm going to be a nurse someday so that I can help all those children who suffer like my sister did.

To lose someone you love, whether a sister/mother/father/brother... is extremely hard, but I found that letting go is harder to do, and until recently, I never felt strong enough to really talk about her without breaking down. Hopefully this will inspire if not help others to do the same with their loved ones. It sounds very cliche, but life goes on whether you want it to or not, and what better way to honor the person that you've lost than by allowing yourself to move on as well.


I love you my vito.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Stalker, Sexual Harasser, and Cult Leader

Posted by Anonymous.

I am a quiet person. I am divorced - twice, from the same man both times now. I live like a nun - in fact, I took silent vows to live like a nun.

That being said, I was none-too-happy to start getting anonymous voice mails from an unknown throaty man's voice telling me, "I love you, baby, I love you." After about 4 of them, I called back the number on the caller ID, and left my own message, "You have a wrong number. You don't know me. You don't love me. Please stop calling me." The messages got more intense. I called back, got a v.m. mail telling me I had reached "O--- and Darlene," and left another, firmer message, "You don't love me. You don't know me. Stop calling me." "This guy's married?" I thought, "Poor Darlene!" The next v.m. was from a different throaty voice, started with, "Hey, baby," and told me in no uncertain terms exactly what he wanted to do sexually to my body. Then I got a Christmas card in May with the nastiest insults you can imagine on it, my plants got cut down, my flower beds got dug up, my favorite windchime got cut to pieces...and on and on.

Fast forward 14 months from the first phone call, and a new man got hired on where I worked. Somehow, my supervisor got the mistaken impression that I knew him. It took him 3 days to start trapping me in small places while he came on to me and insulted me. It took him about 5 days to start lying to our supervisor about me to get me in trouble. Within the first two weeks, my cat disappeared and he guaranteed (his word) me twice that my cat was dead. He let me know he knew exactly where I lived and named the street, and he had seen me in 2006, tried to get me to pay attention to him at the time but I wouldn't look at him, and it had taken him that long to find me where I worked again. Within the first three weeks, he started talking to me about "romance" in the same throaty voice as the man who had left the "I love you, baby, I love you," messages on my phone. I told him very plainly the subject was off limits to him, but he persisted. That constituted the third complaint I made against him to HR.

My complaints to HR went unheeded. By this time, the lies he told our supervisor had painted me as a flaming bitch I was not, and she, for some unknown reason, decided to cast her lot in with him rather than look at my excellent work record and defend me. I started getting reprimanded for things that never happened based on his reports. I'm not talking about things that we perceived differently. I'm talking about incidents that never occurred. I avoided this man like the plague, and he manufactured complaints against me about things that never occurred when I hadn't even seen him for 2 or 3 weeks at a time.

He started forcing himself on me at lunch. He was cold. He convinced the kitchen staff I wanted to eat with him. I would be sitting with a table full of women coworkers, there would be no space available, and he would pull up another chair and force his way into the circle of chairs to sit next to me. Everyone else would get up and leave. He complained to our supervisor that he was "uncomfortable" because I didn't want to eat w/ him. I told her I was the one who was uncomfortable, and she relegated me to eating alone in my office. He would sit next to me in staff meetings and make inappropriate comments of endearment to me under his breath. I told him directly that I would not tolerate it, and he loudly laughed at me.

The same kinds of things happening to my home property started happening at work. My plants continued to be cut down, one by one, whole flower beds were removed, soil and all, trenches left where there were rows of flowers. The wooden border around one flower bed was set on fire, and another stomped down to the ground. Air was let out of my tires, one by one, at work. The back of a condom package was thrown in through my barely cracked open back car window by someone whose hand was big enough to twist off the wind guard. This guy was enormous.

Eventually, I involved an attorney, and after 10 months of on-going sexual and professional harassment, he and I got a behavior contract. Our supervisor took his side, helped him counter-grieve against me, and I had a heart attack (myocardial infarction, no joke). I was informed I could no longer call him "stud." Stud? More like Stunned! Remember, I live like a nun, I took a silent vow to live like a nun. I have never, in my life, called any man stud! When I was married - twice to the same man - I never called my husband Stud!

I was, nonetheless, relieved to have the behavior contract because having to stay 10 feet from one another meant I didn't have to worry about him sitting next me. Well, he only kept to it when we were under camera. In the back hallway, where my office was located, there were no cameras. If we were walking down the hallway at the same time, he would walk across the hallway to all but brush up against me.

Things started disappearing from my locked office. One night, my keys were laying on top of my purse instead of inside it. I didn't want to believe someone else had had my keys, so I told myself I must have thrown them on top of it instead of inside it when I put my purse in my desk when I came to work. I didn't believe that, but I tried to convince myself of it. Then things started disappearing out of my locked house. I went home late one night, was going to do a load of laundry before going to bed, and neither first floor light switch would turn on basement lights. I figured both bulbs were burned out, and I went to bed. When I went to the basement the next morning to throw in a load of laundry, I discovered the two bulbs controlled by the 2 upstairs light switches were gone! They were not burned out, they were no longer in the light sockets, and nowhere to be found!

I vacated my house. As I was preparing it to try to rent it as a specific type of boarding house, I entered it late one afternoon to find unflushed feces that was at least a few days old in both toilets. Odd things disappeared from my house. Odd, and some important things, disappeared from my office. He attempted to make me go into agreement with him that I would rent the rooms in my boarding house to only his clients. I told him that would be a conflict of interest and refused. He threatened me! He told me I would be sorry, and he would sue me!

In late April, he actively stole a client from me. I asked him to return her, and he refused. Our supervisor sided w/ him. In early May, our admissions department reassigned a client originally assigned to him to me. He became furious and yelled and stomped and threatened to get even.

Mother's Day weekend, our grown son disappeared. His car was in front of his apartment, and his apartment was empty. His father had the police enter his apartment, and there was no sign of him. None of his friends had heard from him in 4 days. His father filed a missing person's report. When I returned to work on Monday, after having not slept at all the entire weekend, our HR department confronted me w/ computer print-outs supposedly written by me (but not) brought in by this man, after informing me that "unbeknownst to" me, his son and my son had been good friends for about 10 years. It turns out many things were done to me, my finances, and my reputation via computer that weekend, and I am still discovering them. HR went on and on and on about this man and my son, and I left her office sick that I had just been through one of the worst weekends of my life, and when I returned to work, this man's name was right smack in the middle of it! Just like his name was right smack in the middle of every work problem I had! Then I found 1/4 of a denuded small animal skull (my cat?) ritualistically placed under a pyramid of bricks in the back yard of the house I was not yet able to rent. I ended up back in the hospital with severe chest discomfort and very unstable vital signs. Since I couldn't get any protection from the administration at work, I reported the situation to our licensing board.

When I went back to work, I walked in the door being accused of things he had lied about me to our supervisor. When I told her I didn't know what she was talking about, she got very sarcastic with me. About the third day I was back on the job, and the fourth time she reprimanded me for one of his accusations of something that never happened, I thought I was going to have a third heart attack, and I turned in my resignation letter, stating, "I have a right to do my job without O---'s sociopathic abuse!" and I quit.

End of story, right? Oh, hell, no.

My son did not speak to me for 7 months. On one occasion he accused me of all kinds of horrible things on his blog, things I never did and never would do, and called me every kind of bitch and whore he could come up with. Prior to early May of that year, my son and I had an OK relationship with a lot of humor in it. Although we are on speaking terms again, we are no longer close, and there is no humor.

I could not find another job, and I could not get residents in my specialized boarding house. I had really good experience at that job, I didn't want to lose it from my resume, and I didn't know how else to account for the time. But, unbeknownst to me, the supervisor was telling potential employers AND referral sources for my specialized boarding house that I was psychotic. The supervisor also reported me to the licensing board for things that were not true, and alleged to the licensing Board that this man never did anything to me, that I did many things to him, and that I am psychotic. The licensing Board, never pausing to consider that she was one of the two people I reported, threw their towel in w/ her allegations, prohibited me from practice, then ordered me to have a complete psychiatric evaluation at my expense, and proposed to revoke my license! This is all in retaliation for my reporting on-going sexual and other harassment. By this time, I had no money, no credit cards, was in foreclosure on my house, and filing bankruptcy.

I continue to get nasty phone calls and things continued to be done to my car. I was informed by another person that his wife's name is Darlene - fascinating coincidence - and by yet another ex-co-worker that the word was out there that he was the father of my grown son! I posted a link to Worksite Bullying Institute after receiving unsettling e-mails from a couple of ex-co-workers referring to this man, and within 12 hours, received a v.m. from the same voice from 3 1/2 years earlier, saying, "Hey, baby," and then it sounds a whole lot like he's masturbating. When I moved my things from my locked garage into permanent storage, I found that not only were some things, like my professional licenses, selectively missing, but bins were broken, bins turned directly upside down (not fallen over or knocked over, actually flipped over on their lids) and bins of Christmas stuff filled with foul water.

Of course, the licensing Board, for whatever its reason, is discounting all this. They're calling my stalking log, copies of my many police reports, photographs of bizarre events "delusional" because the supervisor said they are delusional. And they reported me to the OAG as being psychotic. WTF?

My life has been destroyed by this man who entered it with a phone call telling me he loved me when I didn't even know who he was. He has retaliated with extreme vengeance against my every attempt to set limits and boundaries. He has invaded my life, my property, my career, my family - and why? I have no idea.

Recently, I was informed that this man is also a pastor! I looked up his "church" on-line, and it is absolutely a cult, manifesto, prime directive, and all. AMC, for short. I would love to give the whole name and warn people, but I'm literally afraid I'll end up in prison if I do! I don't think this man will stop harassing me until one of us is dead.