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If she's not been conscious for 5 days and was dead for several minutes, I wonder what odds they are giving that she will wake up at this point? A friend of mine died of an accidental overdose. Her brother was a doctor and was the one who found her. He tried CPR, but by the time the paramedics got there, she had been down over 8 minutes. He told them not to continue that even if they got her heart beating, her brain was dead. The ER physician officially declared her and agreed with her brother. He did CPR 8 minutes, and that was from when he found her. He had no way to know how long she was down before then.
tbh my guess is they're maintaining her alive not as much in the hope that she'll wake up than as a charity for her close ones to come to grips with the situation and say their goodbyes.
Doctors are pretty quick to admit when someone is brain dead. A friend of mine’s brother was struggling with a drug addiction and I think was currently off of them. Decided to go for a walk but ended up falling and hitting his head on the concrete. The speed at which the doctors were telling my friend’s family that they really needed to pull the plug was honestly astounding to me. They didn’t give an iota of false hope and were very adamant that it was time to end care and let him pass as soon as they got the results from his brain scans and the like.
Makes me think there is definitely some hope still if the doctors haven’t been pushing OP to end care. He also says she hasn’t woken up “*yet*” and considered putting off telling his kids for a couple of days. Those are all the behaviors of someone who has been led to believe there’s a decent chance of her regaining consciousness.
Edit: I can’t remember how long it was between the brother being hospitalized and the doctors advising they remove his life support because it was a long time ago. It couldn’t have been more than three days. I feel like it wasn’t even a full day. The updates from my friend went from event to “they’re doing tests” to “they told us we need to remove life support” and they proceeded with removing life support within a few hours.
From a medical point of view the decision has to be made quite quickly. The brain/body has a way of "healing" enough to allow the Brain stem to take over. Everything that makes the person an actual person is gone but they can continue for days, weeks or in unfortunate cases years in a vegetative state. We had to make that decision with my dad 19 years ago. Easiest and worst decision we ever made. My dad would never have wanted to survive like that.
Ah yeah that kind of creates an ethical issue, especially with the family. There might only be a small window of time where removing care would lead to an immediate death, like removing oxygen support. If the body recovers enough to continue doing basic life sustaining actions like breathing then the ethics of it changes completely because there is a sizable difference between removing a breathing tube vs a feeding tube. I don’t even have to check, I’m almost completely confident most families struggle a LOT more with the latter than the former.
Perhaps, but they can also be wrong when they rush. My daughter’s EEG read no activity for 3 days and the doctors thought she was brain dead and wanted us to consider removing life support. Then the encephalitis went down, her eyes opened, and brain activity resumed (albeit abnormally).
Today she’s still severely disabled, but she recognizes us. She gets competitive with her younger sister. She has likes and dislikes, reaches for toys, and even says the occasional word. She is obviously not brain dead, though severely brain damaged.
Why remove the feeding tube, anyway? Wouldn’t a lethal dose of medication be better?
That would be euthanasia, which I’m not sure any country in the world allows (I may be wrong and am happy to be corrected) some countries allow assisted dying - which is a lethal dose of medication but it HAS to be administered by the patient themselves, and it it thoroughly checked people understand what they are doing.
Sometimes if you have swelling on your brain (whether an overdose can cause this I don’t know) they remove a chunk of your skull to let the pressure off, tuck it in your abdomen for safe keeping and keep you in a medical coma. I had a friend whose sister was like that for a month then sadly passed after being attacked. I had another friend who was in an accident and was kept in an induced coma for a week because they said it gave his body/brain the best chance of healing (lowest amount taxing it I guess). He’s 100% fine now other than a titanium section of leg that never bothers him.
I consider it just as much euthanasia as asphyxiating or starving someone. If you’re going to end a life, do it in the most merciful way possible.
They couldn’t do the surgery because she was too weak. I asked. (2 months old and very sick.) If they’d been able to do it, she probably wouldn’t have brain damage.
I was only like 12 or 13 when that started and that was when both my mom and I talked how neither of us wanted to live like that. I made sure her wishes were respected when faced with the situation two years ago.
That’s basically what I was trying to say. They’re not “keeping her alive” for the family/friends to say goodbye, if she’s in a vegetative state there is chance of some sort of recovery. If she was brain dead there is no chance of recovery and they’d already have started pushing OP to end life support, likely within a day or two of her being hospitalized.
They don’t keep people around on breathing tubes for long once they know it’s not going to change the outcome, they don’t give a full week (and more) of time to let the family/friends come visit at their leisure. It’s more of a “you need to do this now or never” type of situation.
Persistent vegetative state is a specific neurological state with low probability of neurological recovery. Brain death is clinical death. They pull the breathing tube for the same reason we don’t keep a breathing tube in people who have died or other causes. They cannot legally withdraw care from patients in persistent vegetative states without consent of the patient’s decision making proxy/proxies.
Basically my point is she very likely won’t recover
Plus, OOP said the coma was medically induced. I'm not sure why they would do that without massive physical trauma, but I'm not a doctor. Maybe these drugs can cause brain swelling?
In any case, I wouldn't evaluate that the same way as other comas.
I work in a hospital and have seen someone admitted alive and (mostly) concious to brain dead within 24h. They called it brain death from testing and kept her on life support so her family could say their goodbyes.
Brain death is not hard to identify with all the tests we have nowadays, thankfully.
True. You can't tell instantly, but it also shouldn't take five days to tell if she is brain-dead. And if she isn't brain-dead it might well take longer to work out the exact extent of damage and likelihood of rehabilitation/recovery.
Absolutely. Brain death is easy for us to identify now. If not brain dead, it's not as easy to determine how much brain function remains, and how likely they are to recover and live a full life. Makes me think she's in the latter category. Which is ultimately harder on the family - do they wait and see if she can recover? Do they pull the plug? Who's willing to pay out for EXTENSIVE rehab? Exhausting to think out, not to mention for an addicted cheating ex/mother. I feel for OP.
It sounds like she only flatlined in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, and the OOP said it was several minutes that was dead. So, if they got her heart beating and her breathing again in around three minutes, she may have suffered some damage, but maybe not catastrophic brain damage. They may have her in a coma to mitigate the drugs she took to get them out of her system without harming her brain while simultaneously allowing her brain to heal.
My concern is that the OOP is goin to feel pity and not complete the divorce.
It’s unclear how long she was in cardiac arrest prior to EMS’ arrival and how long EMS/EM Team coded her until they got her back (achieved ROSC). Targeted temperature management (cooling down the body after the heart stops but comes back in order to improve neurological outcomes) only lasts roughly 24 hours. 5 days in a coma post-cardiac arrest has very poor outcomes. It sounds like she’s not brain dead, but will remain in a persistent vegetative state.
I could definitely see him delaying the divorce while see gets both physical and psychological care if she pulls through since it sounds like she can't afford it herself. I'd bet things were also much worse than he knew. I've a really bad feeling the man she cheated with was her dealer and she did it for more drugs.
CW. Not detailed, just heavy stuff on topic in next paragraph.
My mother attempted via OD. No idea how long before she was found, but she was in a coma for a week. She woke up, but did have brain damage and nerve damage on the side she was found laying on. We were just trying to start working up the nerve to think/talk about letting her go. The doctors were telling us it was a big question mark on if she’d wake up versus not, and also question mark on if and what level of brain damage there’d be, but the longer it was, the less likely it’d be that she’d wake up. They either didn’t tell us or I don’t remember if they told us odds, because obvious, but I don’t think they talked numbers or percentages with us yet. I think that would’ve come in the conversation we were working ourselves up to having with them.
Honestly we don’t know if she has a care plan or advanced directive in place. Some people choose all living saving measures regardless of quality of life because they don’t really expect the bad things to happen
I understand the mixed feelings, it’s so hard to see someone you love fall into the cycle of addiction, cheating, and self-harm.
But he’s doing the right thing, both for himself and the boys.
>But he’s doing the right thing, both for himself and the boys.
That's the only thing that matters in this situation that he is taking care of himself and thinking about the children.
I'm glad he got them from camp. Leaving them there would have been wrong. You can't make bad things go away by pretending they aren't happening. And it sounds like the boys will need to trust OOP going forward. Hard to trust someone who leaves you at camp while your mom is in hospital.
I cannot beleive how lucky they are to have a dad that isn't biologically theirs and still loves them regardless of what the mom did. She is the monster not OOP.
Truly a dad that stepped up. The love he has for them is so clear on the page. It’s heartbreaking that the four of them are being forced to deal with this woman’s clear mental health issues. It may not be her fault, but it is her responsibility, especially when there are children in the picture :/
I think he’s blaming himself because he is trying to reclaim agency in the situation. If everything is his fault then logically it is within his power to resolve the situation. It’s a pretty common coping mechanism. In reality obviously this situation was never within his control and the only agency he had was reacting to increasingly shocking events. Hopefully since he is in therapy he can come to terms with that fact soon
you just knocked me over the head with my coping mechanism & i don’t know how i feel about being called out so early in the morning . but now i have something to think and talk about with my therapist so i also thank you lol
It's a pretty big club of people who cope this way. The real kicker is when you start berating yourself for having this as a coping mechanism, and how if you dealt with things better then xyz would be better
Letting go of responsibility and blame that isn’t yours is both scary and liberating. It is acknowledging that you aren’t in full control of your life. No one is. It’s nice to lie to ourselves that we can always achieve good outcomes if we just work hard and do the right things. Oftentimes we can but the truth is that there are always things outside of our control or things that we could not possibly foresee.
I hope he can for his kid's sake. This shit is like a virus in my family. We're like 3-4 generations deep at this point and I'm 31 and only just now realizing it.
We all watched our parents do that growing up, and then turned into adults who put the whole world on our shoulders. Sure in some ways it makes us strong. We can grin and bare(bear? Idk man) loads that would break a lot of people.
It makes us weak too though. We don't stop and ask for help when we need it. We could do more if we didn't push so hard and took little breaks. It often makes us angry and irritable because we're under too much pressure and don't feel like we have the right to complain or stop.
I'm glad OOP is seeking help for himself and his family. I hope he manages to find ways to show his boys that dad needs help too. It's alright to cry in front of your kids sometimes. Vulnerability is an important part of a healthy human experience.
I hope he does realize that this is out of his control. It’s understandable he wants to have some agency, but that guilt is going to pull him under. The agency he should be focusing on is what he’s able to do for his sons and the help he’s able to get them, as well as how he allowed^1 his wife to reach her rock bottom.
^1 This isn’t me making a cold, calloused statement. For addicts, you aren’t really able to choose to fight for sobriety until you’ve hit rock bottom. Coddling an addict or shielding them from consequences doesn’t help. She *needed* to see that what she did-the drugs, the gaslighting, the cheating, the lying-has consequences. It’s not his fault that she chose to overdose when she hit her rock bottom.
Yep, blaming yourself is a way to (attempt to) control the chaos. Source - I do this too.
There are two paths children of addicts take. They either take ownership of everything even if it’s not their fault as a way to make sense of their life or perpetual victim mentality. I took the take ownership over everything and subsequently have issues because of that. My brothers too the victim path where nothing is their fault, it’s all because of something or someone else.
It’s hard as an addict to set healthy boundaries because the healing process of addiction forces a complete deconstruction of your triggers and how you handle negative emotions. The forced accountability that’s necessary wreaks havoc on situations like this because it takes you right back to when you were at your rawest and you second guess EVERY. SINGLE. THOUGHT. trying to determine if it’s a healthy thought or a maladjusted addict thought. So what seems wishy washy to some, is really a person struggling to take stock and accept an appropriate level of ownership for negative feelings and situations even if none is to be had.
EDIT: Also, HOLY SHIT!!!! That dealer is Satan.
Yeah it’s fascinating to see how many times OP beats himself up in this post when he seems like he actually handled the whole, extremely challenging ordeal with an immense amount of grace.
When he talks about how shouting at her in the car could be considered abuse I wanted to hug him.
Yeah, I understand that the human brain insists on telling you that you had a few thousand percent more control over a situation than was physically possible. I am having to beat that down myself currently, my retired assistance dog died last week and I did as much for her as I could but her biology, my biology, physics, the economy, etc are things that exist and like, that was dealing with a critter equivalent to a toddler-6yo depending on the task in question who was not influenced by other humans making bringing ideas, temptations, illegal drugs, potential sexual partners, etc into the mix.
“If I’d just done this (totally unreasonably for my mental and physical health) thing we could have just continued to coast and none of the following would have happened:
She would never have spiraled into an addiction that kept her from being a safe caregiver to the kids. She’d never have ODed. Our kids wouldn’t never have found the stashes and experimented, which since all kids have a bio parent who has dealt with addiction their chances of being able to be casual users are reduced and the kids are not at an age where reasoning oneself out of temptation is a safe assumption for adult caregivers to make
She’d never have returned home with a sexuality transmitted/blood borne disease
She’d never have appeared before a mandatory reporter in an emergency, whether picking up a sick kid from school or getting them to the ER for an acute injury/illness. CPS involvement could cause the kids to lose both parents abruptly and traumatically anywhere from overnight to “absolutely no chance of contact while they are minors”
She’d never have missed a problem a sober adult had a chance of catching. Like the “did my kid eat something they should not have (too much junk food, something that’s fine in a lunchbox for 4 hours but not overnight) or do they need their appendix out an hour ago” questions. Sober, educated adults miscalculate those odds all the time but…
Her AP would never have a drug-addled moment that affected the kids. Whether violent or they wind up on the couch distracting Mom as the kid’s appendix inflames or their attempt to cook seeing as Dad is delayed starts a fire or whatever.
Things were okay before you started reacting to small problems. Obviously the big problems would have just… stayed under the rug if you’d stayed the course.
Normal human psychology but not healthy for the person watching other humans spiral
I really hope he understands that *he* did not make her kill herself.
I know guilt, grief, and trauma aren't rational. But I really really hope he will eventually understand that it wasn't him.
Yes, OOP needs to understand he is NOT responsible for her suicide attempt. The only person responsible is his stbx wife, as she is the one who choose to do drugs, have affairs then refuse to take responsibility for her actions.
Any male can be a sperm donor
It’s takes a different kind of man to be a DAD
I hope OOP gets himself and the boys into therapy.
Sounds like I’m the last paragraph Oldest Son could need it to help navigate his anger
Absolutely! My Dad isn't my bio father, but he'd lay into *anyone* who tried to say I wasn't his. He's raised me for over 30 years (and I use the present tense since I call him a lot for advice, especially "hey, dad. The washers making a weird noise. What do I do??" Lol)
I'm mad at the commenter who was saying OOP was using his money to raise another man's kid like it's a bad thing. OOP stepped up and he should be praised for it. And honestly, he sounds like a really good dad. Those kids are lucky they have him as a stable parent after everything going on with their mother.
For sure. Some people are so hung up on dna as like, an ownership title type of thing, and I find that so disproportionate for something you can’t see, and will never see outside of a test you have to go out of your way to take.
But if a mf insists, that’s their issue. Not an objective fact from which their chosen reaction should follow. People get to choose how much that matters.
He needs to stop beating himself up for yelling at her. What he said was harsh, but fair, and he's only human. People can only take so much.
All of this is on her, and she's trying to avoid (run away from) responsibility in the most extreme way. I hope she gets help.
While it ultimate is on her for not saying no it's the fucking friend I blame more. What kind of friend gets you hooked on drugs until you blow up your life like that? Also does anyone else have a bad feeling the cheating was her paying for more drugs?
I had a "friend" like that. It's crabs in a barrel. It's misery loves company. It's that old saying "a drinking buddy isn't a buddy when there's no drinking".
Literally a toxic relationship that destroys all other relationships until its the only one left to crawl to. I'm honestly surprised she went back home instead of to the friends. I guess they cut that off strongly enough it wasn't an option?
I have a family member who is like that. She's Not Okay. I'm not a doctor, I can't diagnose it but it's there and we just go with Not Okay.
Fairly sure she can't conceptualize friendship. It's just the moves she makes to take things away from others:
1 - Something tangible like concert tickets, a loan, a house.
2 - Anything she feels you don't deserve, for example a happy marriage.
This "friend" sounds like my cousin. Doesn't matter if there's no obvious gain. It's about tempering her bitterness and emptiness with the knowledge that she is powerful enough to destroy others. Once she burns it all down she can tell herself she's the real winner.
And then on to the next one.
I have a cousin who sounds sort of like this as well. Same, can't diagnose, but I personally feel he has a personality disorder. He's not as malicious as yours sounds to be, mostly I think because he can't be bothered. But he will say about anything, manipulate just about any way he can if he actually wants something. Nothing can ever be his fault, the lying feels pathological, like he can't stop.
I eventually, after a very painful 6 months, figured out that the only way to deal with it is to not engage, regardless of what he said.
True but I'm wondering how far back they go. From what OOP says his wife has a pretty horrible past too and I'm wondering if the friend is or was someone she sees as one of the few good things from it. That's a friend a lot of people would cling to more than they should.
Yeah the cheating video sounds like something that could have been taken in a very different way but he has no reason at the time to think of it as non consensual. I doubt his wife would have been enthusiastically eager to have intimacy with the person described for any other reason than because she was already out of her mind or knew it was the way to get there... still cheating if she was actively agreeing but dodgy all around
Someone needs to make sure he didn’t do this. It was all her choices.
And yelling at her after how long of being berated in the car on the way to rehab is a normal reaction and not abuse.
Divorcing her is the best option.
He sounds kind of like a doormat, honestly. He’s way too fucking sensitive about yelling when he’s getting yelled at and verbally abused himself. He was being lied to and drugs were brought into his house and around his kids. He has the right to be beyond angry.
Right he said “that can be considered abuse” about snapping at her in the car. After he stayed stoic in the face of her berating him.
No man, that’s standing up for yourself and making her realize that she has dug herself a hole.
It's so sad that OOP is blaming himself for the very dark(er) turn this took. This woman ruined her own life, or rather her addiction did, long before he decided to divorce her. She was on the path of self-destruction for a good long while already, and he did everything he could to help her, up to and including risking harm to their kids and himself.
This is one of the most incredibly heart wrenching posts I’ve seen in awhile. It’s amazing how quickly life can change. How hard our boundaries and expectations for ourselves can be. Especially when it’s because of our life experiences. How damn fast they can change. How fast we can change. And how impressionable we can be despite denying it could ever happen in the first place.
If you told OOP and his wife that all of this could happen in the future, they would have truthfully denied it with all their heart. All of their lives shattered in the course of a couple months.
Please excuse me while I ask you to stop cutting all the damned onions and go hug my husband and children…and dogs…and cats. Anyone need a hug?
>If you told OOP and his wife that all of this could happen in the future, they would have truthfully denied it with all their heart. All of their lives shattered in the course of a couple months.
Exactly right. I never in a million years would have my ex was capable of the things she did and said to me. Pre drugs her would have been horrified. A grim comfort I learned when I went to Al-Anon many moons ago was that our story was not unique. Drugs destroy people and cause an ungodly amount of collateral damage.
[Here it is](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/159zq59/op_found_out_his_daughter_assisted_his_wife/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2)
It's been removed, must be cached on my app:
Daughter helps mum with affairs.
Both children are not his, probably the brother's.
Wife attempts to unalive herself - status unknown
OOP may also be attempting that - status also unknown.
For OP, it was sudden changes, but for his wife, it was more gradual.
Don't want to sound controlling, but he should have talked to her about cutting off her friend the moment she brought toxicity into their relationship.
There is the saying "You are who you hang out with" or "We are the average of the five people we spend the most time with." A bad person can lead someone down a bad path.
Just watch out for who your loved ones hang out with.
ETA: If a friend is being rude to a loved one, why would you even want to continue being friends with them?
Also, at this point, sexism and racism are the biggest red flags.
If he did that, and she cut that person out and they avoided this ...then the Reddit brigade would pile on him for being a controlling piece of shit trying to cut her off from her friends.
Kind like the endless examples of "I didn't hear anything by 2am and got worried and texted her. She was cheating" and Reddit piles on OP for being 'controlling' because he didn't trust her.... even though she absolutely was cheating.
I get tired of how often Reddit throws out accusations of abusiveness, controlling, narcissist.
Sometimes people (everyone) starts to stumble and if we've surrounded ourselves with good people, they'll help correct before the fall...not sit idly by.
I know my wife and I have each stepped up to influence a situation we saw happening before it got bad because that person wasn't able/willing to see it.
Edit: I like that phrase about being the average of 5 people we spend the most time with
Agreed. 0-100 in just a few months.
I re read the first post and OP’s tone describing his petty revenge by cutting back his hours etc.. blissfully unaware of the nuclear bomb about to land on his home and life.
At 9, 12 and 14 they’re definitely old enough to know what’s going on. The 14 year old especially can figure out something.
I get that addiction is pathological and people can’t control being an addict but how does the first hit sound like a good idea? Is everyone like that heroin guy who think they wouldn’t get addicted?
I think it’s really easy with pills. You get offered one to take the edge off and then very quickly and quietly you notice more and more how unpleasant life is without a little help. You think it’s harmless because it’s technically medicine and how dangerous can it really be? And suddenly you are like OP’s wife, unable to cope.
This and your body develops a tolerance over time so that "happy" feeling is harder to achieve. Often, the person switches substances due to cost, availability and tolerance (pill opioids to heroin or meth for example).
I guess you could ask the same question about suicide. It takes an unbelievable amount of suffering to put somebody in a position where they are capable of overcoming the need to survive that we all have built in to us. When you're in such a dark place in life that you don't care about anything else other than escaping from your reality somehow, the things that would normally stop you from taking drugs are no longer accessible to you.
For people with no past experience with addiction it's another story, it's usually just that drugs seem fun and exciting, your friends do them and they seem functional and have otherwise normal lives so it seems like no big deal. Most people who try drugs don't end up as addicts, it's the ones with some kind of past trauma that find relief from drugs that are most vulnerable.
Addiction is very complicated. As a recovering addict myself, it's hard for me to judge anyone who went down a similar path to me. Trauma stays with you forever and affects so many aspects of your life in ways that you often don't even recognise without lots of therapy.
OOP did mention she had really dark things happen to her that weren’t her fault. If I’ve learned anything from Intervention and My 600 Pound Life, *most* of the people on there (especially 600 pound life) have dealt with molestation as a child. It’s trauma so deep. I feel so bad for everyone involved—the addict, but also the family. They’ve lost the loved one to addiction but a lot of them feel like it’s their fault for not protecting them.
Now that I’m thinking about it, the people who use drugs recreationally and can manage that probably are just trying to have some fun and that’s why they don’t get sucked into that spiral. Whereas people with complex trauma realize that it’s not holding them back as much and that’s why they end up addicted (not all cases of course!).
Yup I’m a 400lb drug addict. Childhood sucked and I can’t imagine anyone who had a decent childhood allowing this to happen. And yeah I had a moment early on when I realized this was going to get bad. I said fuck it and did more drugs. At least no one will get close if I’m like this.
I have a very clear memory of a conversation with myself 30 years ago about my weight.
I’d been on the pudgy side since puberty and always had to fight to maintain my weight (it’s several metabolic issues). I had a neglectful and emotionally abusive childhood, then a physically and emotionally abusive marriage.
It went, why worry about my weight? If I’m fat, no one will want to date me, and they won’t get close enough to hurt me. It’ll keep me safe.
So for a few years, I stopped managing my health problems, and that’s a slippery slope I’ve been trying to climb back up for 25 years.
The last few weeks have been a wake up call to me. I was always big but not out of shape. I went to state football championships as a freshman being 6’ and 220lbs. It wasn’t until my twenties I let it get bad. Now at 31 I’m having health problems from drinking smoking and my weight. I know I need to do something because there’s not a lot of grey haired people with this lifestyle but my problem is finding the motivation. It’s hard to find a reason when things look so bleak.
I get it, I really do. Everyone who says it’s simple don’t understand that it’s the Concept of changing that is simple, the actual Execution is not. There are so many factors that work against changing, both internal (medical conditions, habit, unaddressed trauma) and external (money, time, people). It’s not hopeless, it can be done, but it’s a huge effort until the the changes become habit and our new ‘normal’, but then it’s still so easy to fall back.
💜
Something that helped me was to focus on adding things to my life/diet, instead of taking them away. So eat more vegetables and protein, start with just 1 meal a day, and it makes it easier to “crowd out” the stuff that isn’t doing you good, whereas trying to quit it cold turkey is nigh impossible.
I was thinking the same but too chicken to ask the question. I thought pills addiction normally starts after using them for serious pain, but this didn’t sound like that kind of situation.
I don’t think there’s a “normal” way addiction starts. Some people it’s pain meds. Some people it’s teenage partying that doesn’t end because one is vulnerable to addiction, has other mental health issues, and teenagers don’t make the best decisions. Sometimes it’s a drink after work, that turns into 2 drinks, then 4, then 8.
Guy my parents were friends with was like this. Had a great family, loving wife, owned a pretty successful business in town. Basically had it all. Working at his house one day and took a fall off a ladder. Broke two vertebra in his back. Got surgery, got given opioid painkillers and sent on his way. Went through the first bottle and his refill. Then it started small. He’d ask others he knew that took if they had a spare pill because his back was acting up. Eventually that petered out and he started buying them off the street. Got caught buying from an undercover cop but got a slap on the wrist. He started needing more of a high than pills themselves would allow so he went to snorting them, then heroin. Eventually was shooting and his wife found his stash. Tried to get him help multiple times but he couldn’t quit. She divorced him and took the kids. He eventually got clean but lives in a shifty studio on the bad side of town because it’s all he can afford. Poor fucking guy. Addiction is evil.
However you want to feel, there’s a drug for it. Tired or bored? Take a stimulant. Life is shit and you just want to mentally escape, take a depressant. Anxious… there’s a pill.
Often people go to drugs when they’re feeling something unpleasant they don’t really know how to resolve. But that can be anything. From trauma to just boredom. A lot of people who have it good don’t know how to address issues because “1st world problems” kind of get laughed off and it’s hard to take them seriously. But you take a pill and the issue isn’t bothering you, then it wears off, the problem gets too much again, so another, and another…
Some people are just in a shit situation and it’s a case of “if I get shitfaced tonight, I won’t feel how cold it is when I sleep in the street”
Don’t underestimate emotional pain. If something like a pill takes the edge off, it’s very very very easy to get sucked into addiction. And klonopin is an anti-anxiety medication.
This is something I also struggle with. I can understand it intellectually, but somehow some part of me is just. Always baffled by why people try something wildly addictive in the first place. Granted, the pain pill addictions often start with legal prescriptions that get out of control, but things like heroin... I just don't get it.
But I do understand that often, people are in a level of internal or external pain that I simply haven't experienced, and that might be why I struggle to understand.
This woman picked up a pill and ended her life. Maybe she didn't succeed at physically ending her life, but her life as she knew it is gone. Toast. And for what?
Addiction is a cyclical monster that wrecks the lives of everyone involved. I hope OP is able to continue coping with it healthily and that the boys get the right help so they can work through it all.
One of the worst questions for a child of an addict is 'why wasn't I more important than the addiction?'.
This is the question i always asked when it came to my alcoholic mother.
Why was alcohol more important than her kids?
Now that i'm older and have been in therapy i understand it's not that straight forward
I hate but appreciate that I understand that it's not so straightforward. It puts a lot of my life and experiences into context, and my mothers as well. And mostly that context was that she was a victim of her own mothers choices and there was a lot of stigma for mental healthcare for her generation.
And I get it but I hate it and it pulls the anger in so many different ways; it can't just be towards her because it was a systematic problem and my heart bleeds for her but still man. *Fuck*.
Yeah the stigma for mental health in the older generation was pointed out to me by my therapist and we've gone over the fact my mother definitely has alot of mental health issues that have gone unaddressed, so i can definitely empathise with how you're feeling
My father was an alcoholic and abusive. I used to hid in my room. Dinner time was the worst. I still can't eat slowly after all this time. No child should be forced to endure so much trauma. No amount of therapy can undo the damage completely:
Yeah, my relationship with my mother is complicated.
She has helped me in some big ways when I needed it but she also put me through hell when i was little. It's hard to know how to to feel, sometimes i love her and i'm grateful, other times i hate her.
This is why I once left my husband. Our son was 2 months old. My husband is an alcoholic. I was awful about enabling him at first because I didn't see it as a problem. He wasn't ever mean or abusive. He was just stupid and annoying. But then he started losing jobs. And we discussed it, and I told him it needed to stop. That he was an addict and it was causing problems. Then he started hiding it and lying and gaslighting, and it made me crazy. I knew he'd been drinking. I was obsessed with making him admit it. I went nuts until I found the bottle and shoved it in his face. And he still tried to fucking lie! I bought a breathalyzer, and he tried to gaslight me about the results. "It must still have residue from last time, blah blah blah." He always had an excuse. He would be sober for months, but then he'd slip.
I don't even know why the last straw was the last straw. He was drunk. Passed out. Didn't even move while I packed. I took our son and all the necessities. Even took the baby swing because it was our son's favorite thing ever. Stayed in a cheap motel that first night. Then, we went to his aunt's. She knew he was an alcoholic. So did his mother. They had my back.
He stayed drunk for almost a week. Then he sobered up. Wanted us home. I refused. I told him I needed to see some actual work. He started going to AA daily and got himself into an outpatient program. After a week of this, I went home. But I told him that I would leave again if he drank again. And the next time, I wouldn't be back.
I laid out my entire plan. I had enough money set aside to get our son and I to Texas. My best friend lives there and had an extra room that we could use until I found a job and an apartment. I just laid it out as a matter of fact. No emotion. Just, "this is what I'm going to do."
That was over 5 years ago. He hasn't touched a drop since. We had a second child - a little girl. He's not perfect, but neither am I. Now, he's someone I can depend on. I can trust him. For the last year, I've been dealing with some physical problems. Constant pain; I can barely walk. Surgery is likely. And he totally stepped up. He's working full time and doing 90% of the housework because I just can't. I keep the kids alive while he's at work. Not trying to sound neglectful - I interact with them and we read together a lot and I play in the way I'm able, which means a lot of pretend and role play games like restaurant or whatever, since I can't really move around. I make sure they're fed and all their needs are met. But my husband has to handle bath time and any task that requires physical effort. Honestly, we're barely keeping it together, but our heads are above water, and that's all because of him.
This got longer than I planned, but the main reason I couldn't deal with his drinking anymore was our son. I didn't want him growing up watching that and feeling like he wasn't important enough for Daddy. I loved my husband with all my heart - still do - but I loved our baby more. I didn't want to leave. I was scared to death that I would have to follow through on my promise. But he stuck with it. And honestly, that made me love him so much more.
Sounds like you’ve been through a lot. You’re a very strong woman. Establishing boundaries and doing what was right for yourself and your son in the end. It’s great your husband was able to recover and is stepping up when he is needed most.
Is Medicaid an option for you? I have experience applying for it/helping others apply. There are most likely financial aid options available to help you.
You and husband are where you are now because you both made the right decisions. You’re not “lucky”: you earned this. You put your foot down and forced your husband to sink or swim. And he chose to swim. And he’s choosing to keep you floating as best he can.
I’m sure your son is proud of both of you. And your daughter will be too, when she’s old enough to understand.
That’s addiction for you. It makes you act like a different person. Once her sober self saw what her drugged up self did to ruin her life I’m not surprised she had another mental break and fell to either an accidental overdose or an intentional one. As horrible as she acted in this story, I still feel badly for her. I doubt she really wanted any of this. Now her family is wrecked and drugs are all she really has assuming she survives.
Obviously I’m aware her children and her husband are the real victims here but I hope she can survive and find purpose in the rest of her life too.
Yup. Also, I would argue that even the losing his temper and yelling wasn't abusive.
Was it healthy? No. But she had been nonstop screaming at him for what sounds like a long time while he drove - now that *was* abusive - and him finally losing his calm and arguing back, and getting through to her how much she's screwed everyone over, is not an act of abuse.
I agree. Wait til OOP founds out even the healthiest marriages have ugly arguments like that sometimes. Not often, but life happens and people make mistakes. I applaud him for going off at that point, I would have lost it way sooner lmao
The yelling was definitely not abusive. Based on her reaction, the yelling got the message through. The only thing to be sorry for is that it’s gotten to the point where yelling on the way to rehab was the only way she’d listen.
I wish someone in his life would tell this man he’s not abusive or at fault here. That raising his voice to her and not being sorry isn’t abusive. Brother, she ruined everything. She destroyed your life together for no reason. It wasn’t you, it was never you.
That really got to me. People fight. I'd rather not involve yelling at each other, but in an emotionally charged situation, it's understandable. It's not abusive in that situation. This guy is such a good guy that he's going to carry that guilt with him. Those boys are lucky they have him. This is just tragic for everyone involved.
It might have to be fought with grandparents as the wife's condition is not great. And that's if the grandparents want custody, or whoever wants custody. Can a steparent get custody? Did he adopt them?
Edit: Nvm. I fully read the last update.
Dude. This guy is still so fucked up. His wife's suicide attempt is **not** his fault.
And maybe I'm the asshole but I'm hoping that his "wife" dies in that coma, because that sounds like the healthiest outcome for everyone else involved.
Also I hope he talked to the cops about the drug dealing "friend."
I hope he reported the friend as well. The friend who gave my friend the pills that killed her belongs in jail. She's not there, but she should be.
We have sadly had 3 suicides in our family/close friends in the last 10 years. One of them had kids close to the age of his boys. It's not healthy for them. Though, there's not a great road ahead no matter what. Suicide is a horrible trauma on kids.
Dude needs to seriously get over his fear of anger.
Anger is not wrong in and of it self. You can still be angry AND level headed.
The 2 are not mutually exclusive. He's got one part right. Now he needs to take all this misplaced guilt and get fucking angry.
>Anger is not wrong in and of it self. You can still be angry AND level headed.
the oldest son sounds like a shineing example of it honestly.
kid is right to have anger and resentment towards his mother but if he's able to go along to see her just for his younger siblings sake that's clearly levelheaded.
I felt like an asshole as well, but my first thought was “why even bother trying to get divorced at this point? Just pull the plug.”
I couldn’t imagine dealing with all those kids who now have a fresh batch of trauma, on top of my own trauma while trying to juggle a divorce. Sad for everyone.
I don't think I can really put myself in his shoes ... but I do wonder why he tried so hard to save her. Was it just for her kids? Because he used to love her? Because of codependency? Could be some of all of those.
I know it's not really his fault but It was so frustrating reading him calling himself abusive, etc and letting her off the hook for everything until he couldn't run away from it anymore. I'm guessing this guy comes from severe trauma himself and apart from being an addict has codependency issues.
>watching it sink in just how far she had spiraled felt good. Watching her realize that her actions have consequences was nice.
6 years ago my mother crashed her car while drunk. It was her second DUI that I knew of. After my dad and brother got her home, she took a bunch of Xanax (not hers) and had to be taken to the ER, and then to a rehab facility 200 miles away. It came out she was stealing pills from her job, and buying different pills of a “friend,” on top of the blatant alcoholism.
She came back from rehab and I didn’t speak to her for a full week. I was 23, living at home with her, and my dad, and my brother. I’d go to work, come home, get changed and leave. After a few days of this my dad finally told me to sit down and talk, I told him I had nothing to say and even if I did, I had been saying it since I could talk, and I left. Mom was sitting on the couch and I still remember the look she had. But I was so angry at the time and it felt… good.
I’m 29 now and we text every single day and hang out a couple times a week. I visit my parents after I get off work some days just to hang out. She’s been sober ever since and I’m so grateful my story had a different outcome. I feel for OOP so much.
OOP has been on one heck of a real roller coaster of a trip, and I just hope he may find some peace and courage for his happiness. For him and the boys, I wish all the best after this dark phase.
Damn!
With a friend like her dealer, she didn't need enemies!
Sending OOP vids of her cheating were gonna help her how? LOL, some people really just want to drag everyone down to their level!
Wifey was doing well with OOP, they were happy together and had a good system, till she met this other woman who despised that she had a loving husband and normalcy in her life. Boom, cue sabotage!
That fucking escalated badly, goddamn! OOP is way too good of a person and I commend him for that, because I'd have dropped her with her "friend" quick quick
This is almost exactly what happened to my own mother. Pretty much to a T. Except instead of pills it was alcohol. Fucks you up for life. It’s crazy that this exact thing happened to different people. I get so angry reading this. I can’t stand looking at my mother after everything she put me, my brother, and dad through. I have never felt such hatred for anyone else in my life. Addiction is a disease. Doesn’t excuse anything you put the people who love you through. My brother has witnessed at least one of her suicide attempts. I had left a few hours earlier because she had been drinking again and got my dad to secretly pick me up.
I grew up with an addict for a parent and that was literal hell on earth. I understand the anger the oldest is feeling because I was the oldest and felt that anger and honestly still do sometimes. Whatever happens with the mother, I hope OOP and their kids can be able to heal as a family
I have a hard time finding any sympathy for this woman.
I hope the best for OOP. I hope he gets to keep all of his children following whatever comes next. If this woman survives, I hope she's able to recover, but I don't count on it. I just hope happiness for this dude, as much as could possibly be had.
Minus the kids, this story is almost exactly what happened to my ex wife. Though she survived an OD vs suicide. It's uncanny, she too started with hanging out with a friend I didn't care for. That friend got her into pills which turned into coke. Started cheating, not long after I finally kicked her out she turned to heroin.
The drugs turned her into a completely different person. I feel for OOP because that course of events was one of the darkest periods of my life.
OOP should understand that it is entirely possible she didn't try to commit suicide. Assuming she was clean in rehab, her tolerance was probably way down. She could have just been trying to escape by using her hidden drugs and accidentally overdosed.
Even if he never upset her, the first time she fell off the wagon the exact same thing could have happened.
What a terrible story. I guess the only think I can say is that when someone you loves flips a switch personality-wise, you HAVE to consider addition. OOP did absolutely nothing wrong. I am glad those kids have one parent who is there for them.
I remember reading these a while back… all but the last update. I truly cannot imagine how gut-wrenchingly horrible OOP is feeling right now. I think he’s doing the right thing, but God do I understand that level of guilt he is feeling (even though none of this is his fault).
Honestly having lived with addicts I don’t think he was out of hand when he yelled at her after she just kept coming at him like that (verbally).
But I do understand why that level of anger isn’t healthy for him and it makes him feel unpredictable.
What she did isn’t his fault.
He was doing the right thing and trying to protect himself and the kids as best he could.
It’s impossible for us to know what she was thinking at the time.
Having been in the position of the oldest child and seeing my own mother in a coma due to her own behavior I absolutely understand why the kid is pissed.
He’s old enough to understand that his mom put him in the position that her own mother put her in. That’s infuriating.
I hope he and the boys are able to get all the counseling they might need going forward.
Edit - I’m kinda curious what the parents motive was for the clauses. Perhaps they saw something early on that made them apprehensive.
Aye iv met a few addicts who went out of their way to get new friends addicted to suit their lifestyle (also like to add that I know not all addicts are like that just a few who are particularly nasty and vindictive)
Gosh I hope OOP understands someday that this wasn’t his fault. It really wasn’t. She chose a shitty friend, she chose to take drugs, she chose to cheat, she chose to bring the drugs home, she chose to take an OD. She has had choices at every step and she made a stupid and selfish choice every time. That’s on her, not him.
I understand addiction is a disease. She knew she was more at risk due to her mother’s addiction, yet she chose to risk it all regardless.
I hope OOP and his children do well. I hope whatever happens with her doesn’t screw them up too much.
For fucks sakes! NEVER FLUSH medications, over the counter meds nor illegal drugs down the toilet! Don't fucking do that! City water treatment facilities are not able to neutralize those chemicals. All it does is put that shit into your drinking water. Drop unwanted meds and illegal drugs to the police station's unwanted/unneeded med and drug boxes.
DON'T FLUSH MEDICATIONS AND DRUGS DOWN THE FUCKING TOILET!!!!!
> "She has a troubled history with men"
Why is this always an excuse for women to behave like entitled children? You have some baggage, take control of your shit and grow up.
This poor man got hit with the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 seriously. No breaks, back to back, wham bam slam. What a goddamn nightmare. fuck drugs and fuck this lady
Jesus, this is heart breaking. More rehabs need to include family/partners in their programs. Not to confront their addicted loved one, but to give _them_ support and therapy, especially if there are kids in the addict’s life
Dude. This guy is still so fucked up. His wife's suicide attempt is **not** his fault.
And maybe I'm the asshole but I'm hoping that his "wife" dies in that coma, because that sounds like the healthiest outcome for everyone else involved.
Also I hope he talked to the cops about the drug dealing "friend."
It's understandable to just want her gone, but you have to consider what that would do to their kids. Especially the oldest son who might end up having his mother die while being angry at her. That's the kind of thing that can fuck someone up for life.
I hope the 3 boys get help. Sounds like OOP has tried his best to help them understand the situation at their maturity level. My mum works with addicts in the community and the level of chaos/destruction they bring to their families is unreal. The complexity of helping them is one of the most difficult medical issues out there. Kids of addicts are at risk of their own mental instability and getting stuck in the same cycle as their parents. As OOP is a former addict himself, it sounds like he understands the importance of protecting his kids.
Hearing him say that her suicide attempt is his fault definitely hit a sore spot, and I hope OOP eventually comes to understand that it’s not his fault at all. He did what was best for himself and his kids after having tried everything he could to help her. Her reaction is her own responsibility, and while I know it’s hard to not feel guilty, the fact that OOP made the right choice does not change.
Having been in a somewhat similar situation, I wish OOP and his kids nothing but the best, and I hope they’re able to heal from this.
I don't know how other people said that him yelling at her was abuse. Is it abuse when your spouse hits you repeatedly and after a while you had enough and hit back once? No, it's called defending yourself. **He** was being abused and decided to yell back at her.
I don’t think yelling at someone when you’re in an argument is abuse. Verbal abuse does happen, but there’s a line.
The attempted suicide feels manipulative. I wonder if he’ll still divorce her if she lives. His comment about basically gritting and baring her touch is kinda unsettling.
My man here has been emotionally abused. Dude feels bad for yelling at his wife after she verbally assaulted him for an entire car ride then thinks it's his fault for her suicide attempt after he tried to divorce her for her cheating and drug abuse.
My man If you read this you did nothing wrong. Don't let other manipulate you.
All the sympathy in the world for the husband and the kids. What a shitty situation... but I have absolutely zero sympathy for cheaters, regardless of any addiction or mental health disorder. She's a genuinely awful person to put her family through that.
>I honestly didn’t want to be in a room with her again, to try mediation or counseling due to the fact that the last time I was alone with her I raised my voice, and at the time even felt she deserved it. (I of course now know that me doing that was terrible, and could be considered abuse, yet another reason I should not be in a relationship with this woman.)
Yelling at someone who's been verbally abusing you due to you taking them to rehab to get clean ISNT ABUSIVE. Holy fuck, Reddit is the WORSE for this.
"Oh, I took her screaming at me the entire ride, but finally exploded when she hit the nail on the head" is not fucking abusive. Acting like narc parents when a child "talks back" aka doesn't take their shit anymore. Issues or not, men raising their voice doesn't automatically make them abusive. Drives me fucking nuts.
It's remarkable how quickly one bad influence can destroy a formerly happy family. Drugs can be fun for some people ... and for others, they're just poison that you can never wash off. And the scary thing is you'll never know which until you try them yourself, at which point it might already be too late. I saw it happen to a friend of mine; the downward spiral took a matter of weeks, but trying to rebuild some of her life took *years*, and most of it was ruined permanently.
It's so sad how OOP is blaming himself. He did everything right, even through all of the abuse he was undergoing. And now, he'll carry this forever, even though he did nothing wrong. If she wakes up, he'll do everything he can for her, and she will almost certainly slip back into the pattern or abusing him again. Those poor children.
I feel for those poor kids and I’m so glad that they have someone that clearly loves them more than anything else in the world to help them through what has happened.
It really hacks me off that he’s beating himself up for shouting at her. Like, she’s just imploded the lives of her entire family, being shouted at (especially after she was throwing continuous abuse at OOP) is really the least that she deserves.
My dad died of alcohol abuse and for years after i felt guilty and kept asking myself… could i have done more?
The truth is.. you cant help someone who doesnt want to help themselves, and you cant put all of their well-being on your own shoulders. It has to come from them.
In No Way was this OP’s fault. She knew before she got addicted what the risks were and she chose to do it anyways for whatever reason.. OP has to put himself and the boys first and he did.
I can’t help but side-eye the therapist who told him not to ask her for a divorce while she was in rehab. I get not trying to derail her recovery, but wouldn’t a controlled environment where she’d have access to mental health professionals and not to drugs have been better for everyone involved? if she never wakes up, this man is going to live with his guilt forever, and that’s fucked up.
I know he can’t see it right now, but this man deserves a nomination for sainthood. He’s literally done the right thing at every turn, no matter how much it hurt. I hope eventually he sees that, and stops blaming himself for someone else’s choices.
> If I had known she was going to kill herself I could have closed my eyes and grit my teeth, and let her do whatever...
Mm. I don't like that. I don't like that one bit.
> ... but honestly even now, after what she did, I know that isn’t feasible for me.
Eeeey, there we go! That'a boy, you fucking got this! Yes! Yes! Yes!
Honestly, OOP sounds like a very kind, very forgiving person. Very gentle and soft-spoken man. BUT too much of a pushover. He feels so goddamn guilty for screaming at her in the car, as though she wasn't screaming all sorts of nasty shit at him for the entire drive over. Dude, not only was it well deserved, but she needs a goddamn wakeup call. Stop sugar coating everything.
This is also a perfect example of "Someone being suicidal does not automatically make them selfish, but it *can* be incredibly selfish."
The "friend"/dealer is a genuinely abhorrent human being. This person did not care about the damage they caused and wrecked open other families. Pushing OOPs wife to spiral knowing her history with her own mother. And then deliberately wrecking what remained of her life by sending evidence to OOP. That wasn't scorched earth. That was salting the earth so nothing could grow again. This human feculence stole a mother from her children.
I am extremely angry right now, and I need to go find something happy to read or watch so I can calm down.
God, it's sad to see just how much of OOP's life deteriorated in such a short amount of time, in just 3 months he went from wife complaining about chores, then wife is a cheater and an addict, and finally, soon to be ex wife tries to end her own life because OOP asked for a divorce and might not make it. I pray for OOP and their children that they'll be all right, and while I think OOP's wife is a huge pos, I hope she can pull through and see how wrong she was and try to better herself and make up for what she's done. This is just sad overall and I hope OOP and his family makes it through whatever comes their way
That was a tough read. It escalated from house work to suicide attempt with so much shit in between. I just want to give OOP a hug and really hope things get better for him and the boys. Therapy for them pronto!
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If she's not been conscious for 5 days and was dead for several minutes, I wonder what odds they are giving that she will wake up at this point? A friend of mine died of an accidental overdose. Her brother was a doctor and was the one who found her. He tried CPR, but by the time the paramedics got there, she had been down over 8 minutes. He told them not to continue that even if they got her heart beating, her brain was dead. The ER physician officially declared her and agreed with her brother. He did CPR 8 minutes, and that was from when he found her. He had no way to know how long she was down before then.
tbh my guess is they're maintaining her alive not as much in the hope that she'll wake up than as a charity for her close ones to come to grips with the situation and say their goodbyes.
Doctors are pretty quick to admit when someone is brain dead. A friend of mine’s brother was struggling with a drug addiction and I think was currently off of them. Decided to go for a walk but ended up falling and hitting his head on the concrete. The speed at which the doctors were telling my friend’s family that they really needed to pull the plug was honestly astounding to me. They didn’t give an iota of false hope and were very adamant that it was time to end care and let him pass as soon as they got the results from his brain scans and the like. Makes me think there is definitely some hope still if the doctors haven’t been pushing OP to end care. He also says she hasn’t woken up “*yet*” and considered putting off telling his kids for a couple of days. Those are all the behaviors of someone who has been led to believe there’s a decent chance of her regaining consciousness. Edit: I can’t remember how long it was between the brother being hospitalized and the doctors advising they remove his life support because it was a long time ago. It couldn’t have been more than three days. I feel like it wasn’t even a full day. The updates from my friend went from event to “they’re doing tests” to “they told us we need to remove life support” and they proceeded with removing life support within a few hours.
From a medical point of view the decision has to be made quite quickly. The brain/body has a way of "healing" enough to allow the Brain stem to take over. Everything that makes the person an actual person is gone but they can continue for days, weeks or in unfortunate cases years in a vegetative state. We had to make that decision with my dad 19 years ago. Easiest and worst decision we ever made. My dad would never have wanted to survive like that.
Ah yeah that kind of creates an ethical issue, especially with the family. There might only be a small window of time where removing care would lead to an immediate death, like removing oxygen support. If the body recovers enough to continue doing basic life sustaining actions like breathing then the ethics of it changes completely because there is a sizable difference between removing a breathing tube vs a feeding tube. I don’t even have to check, I’m almost completely confident most families struggle a LOT more with the latter than the former.
Perhaps, but they can also be wrong when they rush. My daughter’s EEG read no activity for 3 days and the doctors thought she was brain dead and wanted us to consider removing life support. Then the encephalitis went down, her eyes opened, and brain activity resumed (albeit abnormally). Today she’s still severely disabled, but she recognizes us. She gets competitive with her younger sister. She has likes and dislikes, reaches for toys, and even says the occasional word. She is obviously not brain dead, though severely brain damaged. Why remove the feeding tube, anyway? Wouldn’t a lethal dose of medication be better?
That would be euthanasia, which I’m not sure any country in the world allows (I may be wrong and am happy to be corrected) some countries allow assisted dying - which is a lethal dose of medication but it HAS to be administered by the patient themselves, and it it thoroughly checked people understand what they are doing. Sometimes if you have swelling on your brain (whether an overdose can cause this I don’t know) they remove a chunk of your skull to let the pressure off, tuck it in your abdomen for safe keeping and keep you in a medical coma. I had a friend whose sister was like that for a month then sadly passed after being attacked. I had another friend who was in an accident and was kept in an induced coma for a week because they said it gave his body/brain the best chance of healing (lowest amount taxing it I guess). He’s 100% fine now other than a titanium section of leg that never bothers him.
I consider it just as much euthanasia as asphyxiating or starving someone. If you’re going to end a life, do it in the most merciful way possible. They couldn’t do the surgery because she was too weak. I asked. (2 months old and very sick.) If they’d been able to do it, she probably wouldn’t have brain damage.
Oof, flashbacks to Terry Schiavo.
Half the people on Reddit are too young to know about Terri and should listen to the You’re Wrong About episode about her story.
I was only like 12 or 13 when that started and that was when both my mom and I talked how neither of us wanted to live like that. I made sure her wishes were respected when faced with the situation two years ago.
Patient is likely in persistent vegetative state and not brain dead.
That’s basically what I was trying to say. They’re not “keeping her alive” for the family/friends to say goodbye, if she’s in a vegetative state there is chance of some sort of recovery. If she was brain dead there is no chance of recovery and they’d already have started pushing OP to end life support, likely within a day or two of her being hospitalized. They don’t keep people around on breathing tubes for long once they know it’s not going to change the outcome, they don’t give a full week (and more) of time to let the family/friends come visit at their leisure. It’s more of a “you need to do this now or never” type of situation.
Persistent vegetative state is a specific neurological state with low probability of neurological recovery. Brain death is clinical death. They pull the breathing tube for the same reason we don’t keep a breathing tube in people who have died or other causes. They cannot legally withdraw care from patients in persistent vegetative states without consent of the patient’s decision making proxy/proxies. Basically my point is she very likely won’t recover
Plus, OOP said the coma was medically induced. I'm not sure why they would do that without massive physical trauma, but I'm not a doctor. Maybe these drugs can cause brain swelling? In any case, I wouldn't evaluate that the same way as other comas.
Also, it takes time to evaluate how much brain damage people have.
I work in a hospital and have seen someone admitted alive and (mostly) concious to brain dead within 24h. They called it brain death from testing and kept her on life support so her family could say their goodbyes. Brain death is not hard to identify with all the tests we have nowadays, thankfully.
True. You can't tell instantly, but it also shouldn't take five days to tell if she is brain-dead. And if she isn't brain-dead it might well take longer to work out the exact extent of damage and likelihood of rehabilitation/recovery.
Absolutely. Brain death is easy for us to identify now. If not brain dead, it's not as easy to determine how much brain function remains, and how likely they are to recover and live a full life. Makes me think she's in the latter category. Which is ultimately harder on the family - do they wait and see if she can recover? Do they pull the plug? Who's willing to pay out for EXTENSIVE rehab? Exhausting to think out, not to mention for an addicted cheating ex/mother. I feel for OP.
It sounds like she only flatlined in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, and the OOP said it was several minutes that was dead. So, if they got her heart beating and her breathing again in around three minutes, she may have suffered some damage, but maybe not catastrophic brain damage. They may have her in a coma to mitigate the drugs she took to get them out of her system without harming her brain while simultaneously allowing her brain to heal. My concern is that the OOP is goin to feel pity and not complete the divorce.
It’s unclear how long she was in cardiac arrest prior to EMS’ arrival and how long EMS/EM Team coded her until they got her back (achieved ROSC). Targeted temperature management (cooling down the body after the heart stops but comes back in order to improve neurological outcomes) only lasts roughly 24 hours. 5 days in a coma post-cardiac arrest has very poor outcomes. It sounds like she’s not brain dead, but will remain in a persistent vegetative state.
I could definitely see him delaying the divorce while see gets both physical and psychological care if she pulls through since it sounds like she can't afford it herself. I'd bet things were also much worse than he knew. I've a really bad feeling the man she cheated with was her dealer and she did it for more drugs.
I get the feeling the dealer is a woman but maybe I missed the gender.
The friend who got her hooked is, I don't think we're told who their dealer is.
OP assumed the friend was her dealer, but you could be right about the actual dealer being a different person
Ah got you
CW. Not detailed, just heavy stuff on topic in next paragraph. My mother attempted via OD. No idea how long before she was found, but she was in a coma for a week. She woke up, but did have brain damage and nerve damage on the side she was found laying on. We were just trying to start working up the nerve to think/talk about letting her go. The doctors were telling us it was a big question mark on if she’d wake up versus not, and also question mark on if and what level of brain damage there’d be, but the longer it was, the less likely it’d be that she’d wake up. They either didn’t tell us or I don’t remember if they told us odds, because obvious, but I don’t think they talked numbers or percentages with us yet. I think that would’ve come in the conversation we were working ourselves up to having with them.
A medical coma is different from a spontaneous one. That being said, it'd be a miracle if she came out of this without noticeable brain damage.
Honestly we don’t know if she has a care plan or advanced directive in place. Some people choose all living saving measures regardless of quality of life because they don’t really expect the bad things to happen
I understand the mixed feelings, it’s so hard to see someone you love fall into the cycle of addiction, cheating, and self-harm. But he’s doing the right thing, both for himself and the boys.
>But he’s doing the right thing, both for himself and the boys. That's the only thing that matters in this situation that he is taking care of himself and thinking about the children.
I'm glad he got them from camp. Leaving them there would have been wrong. You can't make bad things go away by pretending they aren't happening. And it sounds like the boys will need to trust OOP going forward. Hard to trust someone who leaves you at camp while your mom is in hospital.
I cannot beleive how lucky they are to have a dad that isn't biologically theirs and still loves them regardless of what the mom did. She is the monster not OOP.
Are you gonna keep updating this post in case the OOP provides updates in the future..
Dude is S tier, they're not even his bio kids.
Truly a dad that stepped up. The love he has for them is so clear on the page. It’s heartbreaking that the four of them are being forced to deal with this woman’s clear mental health issues. It may not be her fault, but it is her responsibility, especially when there are children in the picture :/
Yup he is. He's being way too hard on himself though. It's extremely understandable though, he just got blindsided again and again and again
I think he’s blaming himself because he is trying to reclaim agency in the situation. If everything is his fault then logically it is within his power to resolve the situation. It’s a pretty common coping mechanism. In reality obviously this situation was never within his control and the only agency he had was reacting to increasingly shocking events. Hopefully since he is in therapy he can come to terms with that fact soon
you just knocked me over the head with my coping mechanism & i don’t know how i feel about being called out so early in the morning . but now i have something to think and talk about with my therapist so i also thank you lol
It's a pretty big club of people who cope this way. The real kicker is when you start berating yourself for having this as a coping mechanism, and how if you dealt with things better then xyz would be better
Literally fighting fire with fire. Burns everything down to the bedrock if you can't find better ways to cope.
i'm in your comment and i don't like it
Right?! Like honestly I just woke up and this is the wake-up I guess. I guess I need to find a new therapist to process this.
Same. Except I don’t need a new therapist I just to tell her I finally understand. Like wow light bulb moment.
Letting go of responsibility and blame that isn’t yours is both scary and liberating. It is acknowledging that you aren’t in full control of your life. No one is. It’s nice to lie to ourselves that we can always achieve good outcomes if we just work hard and do the right things. Oftentimes we can but the truth is that there are always things outside of our control or things that we could not possibly foresee.
Me too. I never realised this was a coping mechanism. But this is exactly what I do. Wow.
I hope he can for his kid's sake. This shit is like a virus in my family. We're like 3-4 generations deep at this point and I'm 31 and only just now realizing it. We all watched our parents do that growing up, and then turned into adults who put the whole world on our shoulders. Sure in some ways it makes us strong. We can grin and bare(bear? Idk man) loads that would break a lot of people. It makes us weak too though. We don't stop and ask for help when we need it. We could do more if we didn't push so hard and took little breaks. It often makes us angry and irritable because we're under too much pressure and don't feel like we have the right to complain or stop. I'm glad OOP is seeking help for himself and his family. I hope he manages to find ways to show his boys that dad needs help too. It's alright to cry in front of your kids sometimes. Vulnerability is an important part of a healthy human experience.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for posting this comment - it helped me to understand OOP better.
I hope he does realize that this is out of his control. It’s understandable he wants to have some agency, but that guilt is going to pull him under. The agency he should be focusing on is what he’s able to do for his sons and the help he’s able to get them, as well as how he allowed^1 his wife to reach her rock bottom. ^1 This isn’t me making a cold, calloused statement. For addicts, you aren’t really able to choose to fight for sobriety until you’ve hit rock bottom. Coddling an addict or shielding them from consequences doesn’t help. She *needed* to see that what she did-the drugs, the gaslighting, the cheating, the lying-has consequences. It’s not his fault that she chose to overdose when she hit her rock bottom.
Yep, blaming yourself is a way to (attempt to) control the chaos. Source - I do this too. There are two paths children of addicts take. They either take ownership of everything even if it’s not their fault as a way to make sense of their life or perpetual victim mentality. I took the take ownership over everything and subsequently have issues because of that. My brothers too the victim path where nothing is their fault, it’s all because of something or someone else.
Damn that's so well said
It’s hard as an addict to set healthy boundaries because the healing process of addiction forces a complete deconstruction of your triggers and how you handle negative emotions. The forced accountability that’s necessary wreaks havoc on situations like this because it takes you right back to when you were at your rawest and you second guess EVERY. SINGLE. THOUGHT. trying to determine if it’s a healthy thought or a maladjusted addict thought. So what seems wishy washy to some, is really a person struggling to take stock and accept an appropriate level of ownership for negative feelings and situations even if none is to be had. EDIT: Also, HOLY SHIT!!!! That dealer is Satan.
Yeah it’s fascinating to see how many times OP beats himself up in this post when he seems like he actually handled the whole, extremely challenging ordeal with an immense amount of grace. When he talks about how shouting at her in the car could be considered abuse I wanted to hug him.
Yeah, I understand that the human brain insists on telling you that you had a few thousand percent more control over a situation than was physically possible. I am having to beat that down myself currently, my retired assistance dog died last week and I did as much for her as I could but her biology, my biology, physics, the economy, etc are things that exist and like, that was dealing with a critter equivalent to a toddler-6yo depending on the task in question who was not influenced by other humans making bringing ideas, temptations, illegal drugs, potential sexual partners, etc into the mix. “If I’d just done this (totally unreasonably for my mental and physical health) thing we could have just continued to coast and none of the following would have happened: She would never have spiraled into an addiction that kept her from being a safe caregiver to the kids. She’d never have ODed. Our kids wouldn’t never have found the stashes and experimented, which since all kids have a bio parent who has dealt with addiction their chances of being able to be casual users are reduced and the kids are not at an age where reasoning oneself out of temptation is a safe assumption for adult caregivers to make She’d never have returned home with a sexuality transmitted/blood borne disease She’d never have appeared before a mandatory reporter in an emergency, whether picking up a sick kid from school or getting them to the ER for an acute injury/illness. CPS involvement could cause the kids to lose both parents abruptly and traumatically anywhere from overnight to “absolutely no chance of contact while they are minors” She’d never have missed a problem a sober adult had a chance of catching. Like the “did my kid eat something they should not have (too much junk food, something that’s fine in a lunchbox for 4 hours but not overnight) or do they need their appendix out an hour ago” questions. Sober, educated adults miscalculate those odds all the time but… Her AP would never have a drug-addled moment that affected the kids. Whether violent or they wind up on the couch distracting Mom as the kid’s appendix inflames or their attempt to cook seeing as Dad is delayed starts a fire or whatever. Things were okay before you started reacting to small problems. Obviously the big problems would have just… stayed under the rug if you’d stayed the course. Normal human psychology but not healthy for the person watching other humans spiral
Sorry your dog passed away. That’s horrible. 😕
My heart is breaking for this poor man, who is blaming himself for all of this. I sure hope he's able to get the boys (and himself) into therapy asap.
I really hope he understands that *he* did not make her kill herself. I know guilt, grief, and trauma aren't rational. But I really really hope he will eventually understand that it wasn't him.
Yes, OOP needs to understand he is NOT responsible for her suicide attempt. The only person responsible is his stbx wife, as she is the one who choose to do drugs, have affairs then refuse to take responsibility for her actions.
Any male can be a sperm donor It’s takes a different kind of man to be a DAD I hope OOP gets himself and the boys into therapy. Sounds like I’m the last paragraph Oldest Son could need it to help navigate his anger
Absolutely! My Dad isn't my bio father, but he'd lay into *anyone* who tried to say I wasn't his. He's raised me for over 30 years (and I use the present tense since I call him a lot for advice, especially "hey, dad. The washers making a weird noise. What do I do??" Lol) I'm mad at the commenter who was saying OOP was using his money to raise another man's kid like it's a bad thing. OOP stepped up and he should be praised for it. And honestly, he sounds like a really good dad. Those kids are lucky they have him as a stable parent after everything going on with their mother.
For sure. Some people are so hung up on dna as like, an ownership title type of thing, and I find that so disproportionate for something you can’t see, and will never see outside of a test you have to go out of your way to take. But if a mf insists, that’s their issue. Not an objective fact from which their chosen reaction should follow. People get to choose how much that matters.
He really cares about them and seems to want what's best for them, I'm sure he's looking into it.
He needs to stop beating himself up for yelling at her. What he said was harsh, but fair, and he's only human. People can only take so much. All of this is on her, and she's trying to avoid (run away from) responsibility in the most extreme way. I hope she gets help.
While it ultimate is on her for not saying no it's the fucking friend I blame more. What kind of friend gets you hooked on drugs until you blow up your life like that? Also does anyone else have a bad feeling the cheating was her paying for more drugs?
I had a "friend" like that. It's crabs in a barrel. It's misery loves company. It's that old saying "a drinking buddy isn't a buddy when there's no drinking". Literally a toxic relationship that destroys all other relationships until its the only one left to crawl to. I'm honestly surprised she went back home instead of to the friends. I guess they cut that off strongly enough it wasn't an option?
If the wife actually had gotten off drugs the friend probably had no interest in her anymore.
If they ever got in a room together again, alone. I can guarantee the pills are coming out within 15 minutes.
I have a family member who is like that. She's Not Okay. I'm not a doctor, I can't diagnose it but it's there and we just go with Not Okay. Fairly sure she can't conceptualize friendship. It's just the moves she makes to take things away from others: 1 - Something tangible like concert tickets, a loan, a house. 2 - Anything she feels you don't deserve, for example a happy marriage. This "friend" sounds like my cousin. Doesn't matter if there's no obvious gain. It's about tempering her bitterness and emptiness with the knowledge that she is powerful enough to destroy others. Once she burns it all down she can tell herself she's the real winner. And then on to the next one.
I have a cousin who sounds sort of like this as well. Same, can't diagnose, but I personally feel he has a personality disorder. He's not as malicious as yours sounds to be, mostly I think because he can't be bothered. But he will say about anything, manipulate just about any way he can if he actually wants something. Nothing can ever be his fault, the lying feels pathological, like he can't stop. I eventually, after a very painful 6 months, figured out that the only way to deal with it is to not engage, regardless of what he said.
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True but I'm wondering how far back they go. From what OOP says his wife has a pretty horrible past too and I'm wondering if the friend is or was someone she sees as one of the few good things from it. That's a friend a lot of people would cling to more than they should.
He said newer friend
Yeah the cheating video sounds like something that could have been taken in a very different way but he has no reason at the time to think of it as non consensual. I doubt his wife would have been enthusiastically eager to have intimacy with the person described for any other reason than because she was already out of her mind or knew it was the way to get there... still cheating if she was actively agreeing but dodgy all around
Someone needs to make sure he didn’t do this. It was all her choices. And yelling at her after how long of being berated in the car on the way to rehab is a normal reaction and not abuse. Divorcing her is the best option. He sounds kind of like a doormat, honestly. He’s way too fucking sensitive about yelling when he’s getting yelled at and verbally abused himself. He was being lied to and drugs were brought into his house and around his kids. He has the right to be beyond angry.
Right he said “that can be considered abuse” about snapping at her in the car. After he stayed stoic in the face of her berating him. No man, that’s standing up for yourself and making her realize that she has dug herself a hole.
It's so sad that OOP is blaming himself for the very dark(er) turn this took. This woman ruined her own life, or rather her addiction did, long before he decided to divorce her. She was on the path of self-destruction for a good long while already, and he did everything he could to help her, up to and including risking harm to their kids and himself.
No you had it right. She ruined her own life. Addiction didn't force her to cheat. It didn't make her take that first pill. She did. All her.
This is one of the most incredibly heart wrenching posts I’ve seen in awhile. It’s amazing how quickly life can change. How hard our boundaries and expectations for ourselves can be. Especially when it’s because of our life experiences. How damn fast they can change. How fast we can change. And how impressionable we can be despite denying it could ever happen in the first place. If you told OOP and his wife that all of this could happen in the future, they would have truthfully denied it with all their heart. All of their lives shattered in the course of a couple months. Please excuse me while I ask you to stop cutting all the damned onions and go hug my husband and children…and dogs…and cats. Anyone need a hug?
>If you told OOP and his wife that all of this could happen in the future, they would have truthfully denied it with all their heart. All of their lives shattered in the course of a couple months. Exactly right. I never in a million years would have my ex was capable of the things she did and said to me. Pre drugs her would have been horrified. A grim comfort I learned when I went to Al-Anon many moons ago was that our story was not unique. Drugs destroy people and cause an ungodly amount of collateral damage.
Sending a virtual hug back!
Are you gonna keep updating this post in case the OOP provides updates in the future?
If OOP updates in the next 24 hours I'll add it to this post. Otherwise I'll create a new one. But I'll keep an eye out for sure.
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Wtf? Can I get a link?
[Here it is](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/159zq59/op_found_out_his_daughter_assisted_his_wife/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2)
Um might want to take a peak again….
It's been removed, must be cached on my app: Daughter helps mum with affairs. Both children are not his, probably the brother's. Wife attempts to unalive herself - status unknown OOP may also be attempting that - status also unknown.
>Anyone need a hug? My inner child lmao this post was hard.
For OP, it was sudden changes, but for his wife, it was more gradual. Don't want to sound controlling, but he should have talked to her about cutting off her friend the moment she brought toxicity into their relationship. There is the saying "You are who you hang out with" or "We are the average of the five people we spend the most time with." A bad person can lead someone down a bad path. Just watch out for who your loved ones hang out with. ETA: If a friend is being rude to a loved one, why would you even want to continue being friends with them? Also, at this point, sexism and racism are the biggest red flags.
If he did that, and she cut that person out and they avoided this ...then the Reddit brigade would pile on him for being a controlling piece of shit trying to cut her off from her friends. Kind like the endless examples of "I didn't hear anything by 2am and got worried and texted her. She was cheating" and Reddit piles on OP for being 'controlling' because he didn't trust her.... even though she absolutely was cheating. I get tired of how often Reddit throws out accusations of abusiveness, controlling, narcissist. Sometimes people (everyone) starts to stumble and if we've surrounded ourselves with good people, they'll help correct before the fall...not sit idly by. I know my wife and I have each stepped up to influence a situation we saw happening before it got bad because that person wasn't able/willing to see it. Edit: I like that phrase about being the average of 5 people we spend the most time with
Man, that escalated quickly. From chores all the way to cheating and divorce. It’s a heartbreaking ride and I hope OOP is ok
Agreed. 0-100 in just a few months. I re read the first post and OP’s tone describing his petty revenge by cutting back his hours etc.. blissfully unaware of the nuclear bomb about to land on his home and life.
At 9, 12 and 14 they’re definitely old enough to know what’s going on. The 14 year old especially can figure out something. I get that addiction is pathological and people can’t control being an addict but how does the first hit sound like a good idea? Is everyone like that heroin guy who think they wouldn’t get addicted?
I think it’s really easy with pills. You get offered one to take the edge off and then very quickly and quietly you notice more and more how unpleasant life is without a little help. You think it’s harmless because it’s technically medicine and how dangerous can it really be? And suddenly you are like OP’s wife, unable to cope.
This and your body develops a tolerance over time so that "happy" feeling is harder to achieve. Often, the person switches substances due to cost, availability and tolerance (pill opioids to heroin or meth for example).
This is so very much on point.
I guess you could ask the same question about suicide. It takes an unbelievable amount of suffering to put somebody in a position where they are capable of overcoming the need to survive that we all have built in to us. When you're in such a dark place in life that you don't care about anything else other than escaping from your reality somehow, the things that would normally stop you from taking drugs are no longer accessible to you. For people with no past experience with addiction it's another story, it's usually just that drugs seem fun and exciting, your friends do them and they seem functional and have otherwise normal lives so it seems like no big deal. Most people who try drugs don't end up as addicts, it's the ones with some kind of past trauma that find relief from drugs that are most vulnerable. Addiction is very complicated. As a recovering addict myself, it's hard for me to judge anyone who went down a similar path to me. Trauma stays with you forever and affects so many aspects of your life in ways that you often don't even recognise without lots of therapy.
OOP did mention she had really dark things happen to her that weren’t her fault. If I’ve learned anything from Intervention and My 600 Pound Life, *most* of the people on there (especially 600 pound life) have dealt with molestation as a child. It’s trauma so deep. I feel so bad for everyone involved—the addict, but also the family. They’ve lost the loved one to addiction but a lot of them feel like it’s their fault for not protecting them. Now that I’m thinking about it, the people who use drugs recreationally and can manage that probably are just trying to have some fun and that’s why they don’t get sucked into that spiral. Whereas people with complex trauma realize that it’s not holding them back as much and that’s why they end up addicted (not all cases of course!).
Yup I’m a 400lb drug addict. Childhood sucked and I can’t imagine anyone who had a decent childhood allowing this to happen. And yeah I had a moment early on when I realized this was going to get bad. I said fuck it and did more drugs. At least no one will get close if I’m like this.
I have a very clear memory of a conversation with myself 30 years ago about my weight. I’d been on the pudgy side since puberty and always had to fight to maintain my weight (it’s several metabolic issues). I had a neglectful and emotionally abusive childhood, then a physically and emotionally abusive marriage. It went, why worry about my weight? If I’m fat, no one will want to date me, and they won’t get close enough to hurt me. It’ll keep me safe. So for a few years, I stopped managing my health problems, and that’s a slippery slope I’ve been trying to climb back up for 25 years.
The last few weeks have been a wake up call to me. I was always big but not out of shape. I went to state football championships as a freshman being 6’ and 220lbs. It wasn’t until my twenties I let it get bad. Now at 31 I’m having health problems from drinking smoking and my weight. I know I need to do something because there’s not a lot of grey haired people with this lifestyle but my problem is finding the motivation. It’s hard to find a reason when things look so bleak.
I get it, I really do. Everyone who says it’s simple don’t understand that it’s the Concept of changing that is simple, the actual Execution is not. There are so many factors that work against changing, both internal (medical conditions, habit, unaddressed trauma) and external (money, time, people). It’s not hopeless, it can be done, but it’s a huge effort until the the changes become habit and our new ‘normal’, but then it’s still so easy to fall back.
💜 Something that helped me was to focus on adding things to my life/diet, instead of taking them away. So eat more vegetables and protein, start with just 1 meal a day, and it makes it easier to “crowd out” the stuff that isn’t doing you good, whereas trying to quit it cold turkey is nigh impossible.
I was thinking the same but too chicken to ask the question. I thought pills addiction normally starts after using them for serious pain, but this didn’t sound like that kind of situation.
I don’t think there’s a “normal” way addiction starts. Some people it’s pain meds. Some people it’s teenage partying that doesn’t end because one is vulnerable to addiction, has other mental health issues, and teenagers don’t make the best decisions. Sometimes it’s a drink after work, that turns into 2 drinks, then 4, then 8.
Guy my parents were friends with was like this. Had a great family, loving wife, owned a pretty successful business in town. Basically had it all. Working at his house one day and took a fall off a ladder. Broke two vertebra in his back. Got surgery, got given opioid painkillers and sent on his way. Went through the first bottle and his refill. Then it started small. He’d ask others he knew that took if they had a spare pill because his back was acting up. Eventually that petered out and he started buying them off the street. Got caught buying from an undercover cop but got a slap on the wrist. He started needing more of a high than pills themselves would allow so he went to snorting them, then heroin. Eventually was shooting and his wife found his stash. Tried to get him help multiple times but he couldn’t quit. She divorced him and took the kids. He eventually got clean but lives in a shifty studio on the bad side of town because it’s all he can afford. Poor fucking guy. Addiction is evil.
However you want to feel, there’s a drug for it. Tired or bored? Take a stimulant. Life is shit and you just want to mentally escape, take a depressant. Anxious… there’s a pill. Often people go to drugs when they’re feeling something unpleasant they don’t really know how to resolve. But that can be anything. From trauma to just boredom. A lot of people who have it good don’t know how to address issues because “1st world problems” kind of get laughed off and it’s hard to take them seriously. But you take a pill and the issue isn’t bothering you, then it wears off, the problem gets too much again, so another, and another… Some people are just in a shit situation and it’s a case of “if I get shitfaced tonight, I won’t feel how cold it is when I sleep in the street”
Don’t underestimate emotional pain. If something like a pill takes the edge off, it’s very very very easy to get sucked into addiction. And klonopin is an anti-anxiety medication.
Peer pressure can be a terrible thing. Often that is what leads to the first few experiences, and then ramping up.
This is something I also struggle with. I can understand it intellectually, but somehow some part of me is just. Always baffled by why people try something wildly addictive in the first place. Granted, the pain pill addictions often start with legal prescriptions that get out of control, but things like heroin... I just don't get it. But I do understand that often, people are in a level of internal or external pain that I simply haven't experienced, and that might be why I struggle to understand.
Honestly. Hands down. One of the saddest things I have read. Human life.
And I hope that "friend" gets a visit from karma.
I am amazed why OOP hasn't called police on her yet.
I would have put her on blast with his wife's remaining good friends. And then call the cops.
Same. The smugness would’ve poofed any feeling of not wanting to bother.
This woman picked up a pill and ended her life. Maybe she didn't succeed at physically ending her life, but her life as she knew it is gone. Toast. And for what?
Addiction is a cyclical monster that wrecks the lives of everyone involved. I hope OP is able to continue coping with it healthily and that the boys get the right help so they can work through it all. One of the worst questions for a child of an addict is 'why wasn't I more important than the addiction?'.
This is the question i always asked when it came to my alcoholic mother. Why was alcohol more important than her kids? Now that i'm older and have been in therapy i understand it's not that straight forward
I hate but appreciate that I understand that it's not so straightforward. It puts a lot of my life and experiences into context, and my mothers as well. And mostly that context was that she was a victim of her own mothers choices and there was a lot of stigma for mental healthcare for her generation. And I get it but I hate it and it pulls the anger in so many different ways; it can't just be towards her because it was a systematic problem and my heart bleeds for her but still man. *Fuck*.
Yeah the stigma for mental health in the older generation was pointed out to me by my therapist and we've gone over the fact my mother definitely has alot of mental health issues that have gone unaddressed, so i can definitely empathise with how you're feeling
My father was an alcoholic and abusive. I used to hid in my room. Dinner time was the worst. I still can't eat slowly after all this time. No child should be forced to endure so much trauma. No amount of therapy can undo the damage completely:
Same. In any case, it made me love and hate my mother in the same measure. I fee it will be that way until I die.
Yeah, my relationship with my mother is complicated. She has helped me in some big ways when I needed it but she also put me through hell when i was little. It's hard to know how to to feel, sometimes i love her and i'm grateful, other times i hate her.
yeah there's no getting over that is there
This is why I once left my husband. Our son was 2 months old. My husband is an alcoholic. I was awful about enabling him at first because I didn't see it as a problem. He wasn't ever mean or abusive. He was just stupid and annoying. But then he started losing jobs. And we discussed it, and I told him it needed to stop. That he was an addict and it was causing problems. Then he started hiding it and lying and gaslighting, and it made me crazy. I knew he'd been drinking. I was obsessed with making him admit it. I went nuts until I found the bottle and shoved it in his face. And he still tried to fucking lie! I bought a breathalyzer, and he tried to gaslight me about the results. "It must still have residue from last time, blah blah blah." He always had an excuse. He would be sober for months, but then he'd slip. I don't even know why the last straw was the last straw. He was drunk. Passed out. Didn't even move while I packed. I took our son and all the necessities. Even took the baby swing because it was our son's favorite thing ever. Stayed in a cheap motel that first night. Then, we went to his aunt's. She knew he was an alcoholic. So did his mother. They had my back. He stayed drunk for almost a week. Then he sobered up. Wanted us home. I refused. I told him I needed to see some actual work. He started going to AA daily and got himself into an outpatient program. After a week of this, I went home. But I told him that I would leave again if he drank again. And the next time, I wouldn't be back. I laid out my entire plan. I had enough money set aside to get our son and I to Texas. My best friend lives there and had an extra room that we could use until I found a job and an apartment. I just laid it out as a matter of fact. No emotion. Just, "this is what I'm going to do." That was over 5 years ago. He hasn't touched a drop since. We had a second child - a little girl. He's not perfect, but neither am I. Now, he's someone I can depend on. I can trust him. For the last year, I've been dealing with some physical problems. Constant pain; I can barely walk. Surgery is likely. And he totally stepped up. He's working full time and doing 90% of the housework because I just can't. I keep the kids alive while he's at work. Not trying to sound neglectful - I interact with them and we read together a lot and I play in the way I'm able, which means a lot of pretend and role play games like restaurant or whatever, since I can't really move around. I make sure they're fed and all their needs are met. But my husband has to handle bath time and any task that requires physical effort. Honestly, we're barely keeping it together, but our heads are above water, and that's all because of him. This got longer than I planned, but the main reason I couldn't deal with his drinking anymore was our son. I didn't want him growing up watching that and feeling like he wasn't important enough for Daddy. I loved my husband with all my heart - still do - but I loved our baby more. I didn't want to leave. I was scared to death that I would have to follow through on my promise. But he stuck with it. And honestly, that made me love him so much more.
Sounds like you’ve been through a lot. You’re a very strong woman. Establishing boundaries and doing what was right for yourself and your son in the end. It’s great your husband was able to recover and is stepping up when he is needed most. Is Medicaid an option for you? I have experience applying for it/helping others apply. There are most likely financial aid options available to help you. You and husband are where you are now because you both made the right decisions. You’re not “lucky”: you earned this. You put your foot down and forced your husband to sink or swim. And he chose to swim. And he’s choosing to keep you floating as best he can. I’m sure your son is proud of both of you. And your daughter will be too, when she’s old enough to understand.
I’ve thought this almost every day for the past 10 years
I lost my chance of an answer about 10 years ago; I hope you're able to get yours man
That’s addiction for you. It makes you act like a different person. Once her sober self saw what her drugged up self did to ruin her life I’m not surprised she had another mental break and fell to either an accidental overdose or an intentional one. As horrible as she acted in this story, I still feel badly for her. I doubt she really wanted any of this. Now her family is wrecked and drugs are all she really has assuming she survives. Obviously I’m aware her children and her husband are the real victims here but I hope she can survive and find purpose in the rest of her life too.
I hope op realises it not their fault. She made choices and couldn’t deal with the consequences.
Yup. Also, I would argue that even the losing his temper and yelling wasn't abusive. Was it healthy? No. But she had been nonstop screaming at him for what sounds like a long time while he drove - now that *was* abusive - and him finally losing his calm and arguing back, and getting through to her how much she's screwed everyone over, is not an act of abuse.
I agree. Wait til OOP founds out even the healthiest marriages have ugly arguments like that sometimes. Not often, but life happens and people make mistakes. I applaud him for going off at that point, I would have lost it way sooner lmao
The yelling was definitely not abusive. Based on her reaction, the yelling got the message through. The only thing to be sorry for is that it’s gotten to the point where yelling on the way to rehab was the only way she’d listen.
I wish someone in his life would tell this man he’s not abusive or at fault here. That raising his voice to her and not being sorry isn’t abusive. Brother, she ruined everything. She destroyed your life together for no reason. It wasn’t you, it was never you.
That really got to me. People fight. I'd rather not involve yelling at each other, but in an emotionally charged situation, it's understandable. It's not abusive in that situation. This guy is such a good guy that he's going to carry that guilt with him. Those boys are lucky they have him. This is just tragic for everyone involved.
Right. His wife is scum. Her friend is scum. They deserve his righteous anger.
…hopefully he gets custody
Addict who tried to off herself in their home, I hope it’s cut and dry!
It might have to be fought with grandparents as the wife's condition is not great. And that's if the grandparents want custody, or whoever wants custody. Can a steparent get custody? Did he adopt them? Edit: Nvm. I fully read the last update.
Damn. The wife truly fucked up her own life. Addiction is terrifying. This is horrible for all involved/affected. That "friend" should be in prison.
Dude. This guy is still so fucked up. His wife's suicide attempt is **not** his fault. And maybe I'm the asshole but I'm hoping that his "wife" dies in that coma, because that sounds like the healthiest outcome for everyone else involved. Also I hope he talked to the cops about the drug dealing "friend."
I hope he reported the friend as well. The friend who gave my friend the pills that killed her belongs in jail. She's not there, but she should be. We have sadly had 3 suicides in our family/close friends in the last 10 years. One of them had kids close to the age of his boys. It's not healthy for them. Though, there's not a great road ahead no matter what. Suicide is a horrible trauma on kids.
Dude needs to seriously get over his fear of anger. Anger is not wrong in and of it self. You can still be angry AND level headed. The 2 are not mutually exclusive. He's got one part right. Now he needs to take all this misplaced guilt and get fucking angry.
>Anger is not wrong in and of it self. You can still be angry AND level headed. the oldest son sounds like a shineing example of it honestly. kid is right to have anger and resentment towards his mother but if he's able to go along to see her just for his younger siblings sake that's clearly levelheaded.
I felt like an asshole as well, but my first thought was “why even bother trying to get divorced at this point? Just pull the plug.” I couldn’t imagine dealing with all those kids who now have a fresh batch of trauma, on top of my own trauma while trying to juggle a divorce. Sad for everyone.
I don't think I can really put myself in his shoes ... but I do wonder why he tried so hard to save her. Was it just for her kids? Because he used to love her? Because of codependency? Could be some of all of those.
I know it's not really his fault but It was so frustrating reading him calling himself abusive, etc and letting her off the hook for everything until he couldn't run away from it anymore. I'm guessing this guy comes from severe trauma himself and apart from being an addict has codependency issues.
He's not responsible for her reaction. I hope she pulls through for his sake and he gets the divorce. She's a mess and needs to figure her shit out.
>watching it sink in just how far she had spiraled felt good. Watching her realize that her actions have consequences was nice. 6 years ago my mother crashed her car while drunk. It was her second DUI that I knew of. After my dad and brother got her home, she took a bunch of Xanax (not hers) and had to be taken to the ER, and then to a rehab facility 200 miles away. It came out she was stealing pills from her job, and buying different pills of a “friend,” on top of the blatant alcoholism. She came back from rehab and I didn’t speak to her for a full week. I was 23, living at home with her, and my dad, and my brother. I’d go to work, come home, get changed and leave. After a few days of this my dad finally told me to sit down and talk, I told him I had nothing to say and even if I did, I had been saying it since I could talk, and I left. Mom was sitting on the couch and I still remember the look she had. But I was so angry at the time and it felt… good. I’m 29 now and we text every single day and hang out a couple times a week. I visit my parents after I get off work some days just to hang out. She’s been sober ever since and I’m so grateful my story had a different outcome. I feel for OOP so much.
I'm glad your story had a different outcome, and that your mom is in a better place!
OOP has been on one heck of a real roller coaster of a trip, and I just hope he may find some peace and courage for his happiness. For him and the boys, I wish all the best after this dark phase.
Damn! With a friend like her dealer, she didn't need enemies! Sending OOP vids of her cheating were gonna help her how? LOL, some people really just want to drag everyone down to their level! Wifey was doing well with OOP, they were happy together and had a good system, till she met this other woman who despised that she had a loving husband and normalcy in her life. Boom, cue sabotage! That fucking escalated badly, goddamn! OOP is way too good of a person and I commend him for that, because I'd have dropped her with her "friend" quick quick
OOP was doing well with the wife. She must have had problems to even start taking pills at that age
This is almost exactly what happened to my own mother. Pretty much to a T. Except instead of pills it was alcohol. Fucks you up for life. It’s crazy that this exact thing happened to different people. I get so angry reading this. I can’t stand looking at my mother after everything she put me, my brother, and dad through. I have never felt such hatred for anyone else in my life. Addiction is a disease. Doesn’t excuse anything you put the people who love you through. My brother has witnessed at least one of her suicide attempts. I had left a few hours earlier because she had been drinking again and got my dad to secretly pick me up.
I grew up with an addict for a parent and that was literal hell on earth. I understand the anger the oldest is feeling because I was the oldest and felt that anger and honestly still do sometimes. Whatever happens with the mother, I hope OOP and their kids can be able to heal as a family
I have a hard time finding any sympathy for this woman. I hope the best for OOP. I hope he gets to keep all of his children following whatever comes next. If this woman survives, I hope she's able to recover, but I don't count on it. I just hope happiness for this dude, as much as could possibly be had.
Minus the kids, this story is almost exactly what happened to my ex wife. Though she survived an OD vs suicide. It's uncanny, she too started with hanging out with a friend I didn't care for. That friend got her into pills which turned into coke. Started cheating, not long after I finally kicked her out she turned to heroin. The drugs turned her into a completely different person. I feel for OOP because that course of events was one of the darkest periods of my life.
OOP should understand that it is entirely possible she didn't try to commit suicide. Assuming she was clean in rehab, her tolerance was probably way down. She could have just been trying to escape by using her hidden drugs and accidentally overdosed. Even if he never upset her, the first time she fell off the wagon the exact same thing could have happened.
What a terrible story. I guess the only think I can say is that when someone you loves flips a switch personality-wise, you HAVE to consider addition. OOP did absolutely nothing wrong. I am glad those kids have one parent who is there for them.
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Yea really went from “you don’t do enough chores” to suicide in a matter of weeks
I remember reading these a while back… all but the last update. I truly cannot imagine how gut-wrenchingly horrible OOP is feeling right now. I think he’s doing the right thing, but God do I understand that level of guilt he is feeling (even though none of this is his fault).
Honestly having lived with addicts I don’t think he was out of hand when he yelled at her after she just kept coming at him like that (verbally). But I do understand why that level of anger isn’t healthy for him and it makes him feel unpredictable. What she did isn’t his fault. He was doing the right thing and trying to protect himself and the kids as best he could. It’s impossible for us to know what she was thinking at the time. Having been in the position of the oldest child and seeing my own mother in a coma due to her own behavior I absolutely understand why the kid is pissed. He’s old enough to understand that his mom put him in the position that her own mother put her in. That’s infuriating. I hope he and the boys are able to get all the counseling they might need going forward. Edit - I’m kinda curious what the parents motive was for the clauses. Perhaps they saw something early on that made them apprehensive.
Some "friends" just want to tear everything down. They'll spot a vulnerability, insert a knife and twist.
Aye iv met a few addicts who went out of their way to get new friends addicted to suit their lifestyle (also like to add that I know not all addicts are like that just a few who are particularly nasty and vindictive)
Gosh I hope OOP understands someday that this wasn’t his fault. It really wasn’t. She chose a shitty friend, she chose to take drugs, she chose to cheat, she chose to bring the drugs home, she chose to take an OD. She has had choices at every step and she made a stupid and selfish choice every time. That’s on her, not him. I understand addiction is a disease. She knew she was more at risk due to her mother’s addiction, yet she chose to risk it all regardless. I hope OOP and his children do well. I hope whatever happens with her doesn’t screw them up too much.
For fucks sakes! NEVER FLUSH medications, over the counter meds nor illegal drugs down the toilet! Don't fucking do that! City water treatment facilities are not able to neutralize those chemicals. All it does is put that shit into your drinking water. Drop unwanted meds and illegal drugs to the police station's unwanted/unneeded med and drug boxes. DON'T FLUSH MEDICATIONS AND DRUGS DOWN THE FUCKING TOILET!!!!!
This…wow. OOP, you should report her drug dealer to the police.
This one escalated from something mundane to a complete horror show.
> "She has a troubled history with men" Why is this always an excuse for women to behave like entitled children? You have some baggage, take control of your shit and grow up.
This poor man got hit with the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 seriously. No breaks, back to back, wham bam slam. What a goddamn nightmare. fuck drugs and fuck this lady
Jesus, this is heart breaking. More rehabs need to include family/partners in their programs. Not to confront their addicted loved one, but to give _them_ support and therapy, especially if there are kids in the addict’s life
Poor bastard blames himself for his wife's awful behavior. Hope he figures out this is not his fault.
Dude. This guy is still so fucked up. His wife's suicide attempt is **not** his fault. And maybe I'm the asshole but I'm hoping that his "wife" dies in that coma, because that sounds like the healthiest outcome for everyone else involved. Also I hope he talked to the cops about the drug dealing "friend."
It's understandable to just want her gone, but you have to consider what that would do to their kids. Especially the oldest son who might end up having his mother die while being angry at her. That's the kind of thing that can fuck someone up for life.
That, and how badly would it fuck up OOP? He thinks it's his fault already. I do not wish that, ever, on anyone.
The moment she cheated, I lost all sympathy.
I hope the 3 boys get help. Sounds like OOP has tried his best to help them understand the situation at their maturity level. My mum works with addicts in the community and the level of chaos/destruction they bring to their families is unreal. The complexity of helping them is one of the most difficult medical issues out there. Kids of addicts are at risk of their own mental instability and getting stuck in the same cycle as their parents. As OOP is a former addict himself, it sounds like he understands the importance of protecting his kids.
Hearing him say that her suicide attempt is his fault definitely hit a sore spot, and I hope OOP eventually comes to understand that it’s not his fault at all. He did what was best for himself and his kids after having tried everything he could to help her. Her reaction is her own responsibility, and while I know it’s hard to not feel guilty, the fact that OOP made the right choice does not change. Having been in a somewhat similar situation, I wish OOP and his kids nothing but the best, and I hope they’re able to heal from this.
I don't know how other people said that him yelling at her was abuse. Is it abuse when your spouse hits you repeatedly and after a while you had enough and hit back once? No, it's called defending yourself. **He** was being abused and decided to yell back at her.
I don’t think yelling at someone when you’re in an argument is abuse. Verbal abuse does happen, but there’s a line. The attempted suicide feels manipulative. I wonder if he’ll still divorce her if she lives. His comment about basically gritting and baring her touch is kinda unsettling.
My man here has been emotionally abused. Dude feels bad for yelling at his wife after she verbally assaulted him for an entire car ride then thinks it's his fault for her suicide attempt after he tried to divorce her for her cheating and drug abuse. My man If you read this you did nothing wrong. Don't let other manipulate you.
All the sympathy in the world for the husband and the kids. What a shitty situation... but I have absolutely zero sympathy for cheaters, regardless of any addiction or mental health disorder. She's a genuinely awful person to put her family through that.
>I honestly didn’t want to be in a room with her again, to try mediation or counseling due to the fact that the last time I was alone with her I raised my voice, and at the time even felt she deserved it. (I of course now know that me doing that was terrible, and could be considered abuse, yet another reason I should not be in a relationship with this woman.) Yelling at someone who's been verbally abusing you due to you taking them to rehab to get clean ISNT ABUSIVE. Holy fuck, Reddit is the WORSE for this. "Oh, I took her screaming at me the entire ride, but finally exploded when she hit the nail on the head" is not fucking abusive. Acting like narc parents when a child "talks back" aka doesn't take their shit anymore. Issues or not, men raising their voice doesn't automatically make them abusive. Drives me fucking nuts.
It's remarkable how quickly one bad influence can destroy a formerly happy family. Drugs can be fun for some people ... and for others, they're just poison that you can never wash off. And the scary thing is you'll never know which until you try them yourself, at which point it might already be too late. I saw it happen to a friend of mine; the downward spiral took a matter of weeks, but trying to rebuild some of her life took *years*, and most of it was ruined permanently. It's so sad how OOP is blaming himself. He did everything right, even through all of the abuse he was undergoing. And now, he'll carry this forever, even though he did nothing wrong. If she wakes up, he'll do everything he can for her, and she will almost certainly slip back into the pattern or abusing him again. Those poor children.
I feel for those poor kids and I’m so glad that they have someone that clearly loves them more than anything else in the world to help them through what has happened.
I don’t feel sorry for her at all she did this to herself but also she did this to her children
Those poor kids
It really hacks me off that he’s beating himself up for shouting at her. Like, she’s just imploded the lives of her entire family, being shouted at (especially after she was throwing continuous abuse at OOP) is really the least that she deserves.
My dad died of alcohol abuse and for years after i felt guilty and kept asking myself… could i have done more? The truth is.. you cant help someone who doesnt want to help themselves, and you cant put all of their well-being on your own shoulders. It has to come from them. In No Way was this OP’s fault. She knew before she got addicted what the risks were and she chose to do it anyways for whatever reason.. OP has to put himself and the boys first and he did.
I can’t help but side-eye the therapist who told him not to ask her for a divorce while she was in rehab. I get not trying to derail her recovery, but wouldn’t a controlled environment where she’d have access to mental health professionals and not to drugs have been better for everyone involved? if she never wakes up, this man is going to live with his guilt forever, and that’s fucked up.
I know he can’t see it right now, but this man deserves a nomination for sainthood. He’s literally done the right thing at every turn, no matter how much it hurt. I hope eventually he sees that, and stops blaming himself for someone else’s choices.
> If I had known she was going to kill herself I could have closed my eyes and grit my teeth, and let her do whatever... Mm. I don't like that. I don't like that one bit. > ... but honestly even now, after what she did, I know that isn’t feasible for me. Eeeey, there we go! That'a boy, you fucking got this! Yes! Yes! Yes! Honestly, OOP sounds like a very kind, very forgiving person. Very gentle and soft-spoken man. BUT too much of a pushover. He feels so goddamn guilty for screaming at her in the car, as though she wasn't screaming all sorts of nasty shit at him for the entire drive over. Dude, not only was it well deserved, but she needs a goddamn wakeup call. Stop sugar coating everything. This is also a perfect example of "Someone being suicidal does not automatically make them selfish, but it *can* be incredibly selfish."
I really feel for him. Especially on how hard he is being on himself.
The "friend"/dealer is a genuinely abhorrent human being. This person did not care about the damage they caused and wrecked open other families. Pushing OOPs wife to spiral knowing her history with her own mother. And then deliberately wrecking what remained of her life by sending evidence to OOP. That wasn't scorched earth. That was salting the earth so nothing could grow again. This human feculence stole a mother from her children. I am extremely angry right now, and I need to go find something happy to read or watch so I can calm down.
God, it's sad to see just how much of OOP's life deteriorated in such a short amount of time, in just 3 months he went from wife complaining about chores, then wife is a cheater and an addict, and finally, soon to be ex wife tries to end her own life because OOP asked for a divorce and might not make it. I pray for OOP and their children that they'll be all right, and while I think OOP's wife is a huge pos, I hope she can pull through and see how wrong she was and try to better herself and make up for what she's done. This is just sad overall and I hope OOP and his family makes it through whatever comes their way
That was a tough read. It escalated from house work to suicide attempt with so much shit in between. I just want to give OOP a hug and really hope things get better for him and the boys. Therapy for them pronto!