5--Background History

The rent at my house went up $300. per month. Besides that, Frank, my roommate, had threatened to kill me. The trust supported my decision to move. I had lived on Beachview Street 20 years before. Then I had a small one-bedroom apartment with a shower but no tub. I never wanted to take a bubble bath so badly.

I had been taking vet tech courses at Cedar Valley Community College for two years. I only needed one more class to have an associate degree, and to take the state exam to be a registered veterinary technician. But I had to move. The apartments were being demolished. I had to make more than the $5.25 was making at the animal clinic. We used a human anatomy textbook when we studied animal anatomy. I would have had a human understanding in the comparative and contrastive anatomy of dogs, cows, horses, birds, and snakes. I would basically been an animal nurse, but that doesn't pay much more than minimum wage.

i applied to the Richardson and Garland School Districts as a secondary teacher. It was the end of summer, and the districts would be filling last minute positions. I was hired as a 6th grade language arts teacher. I had taught this level class before.

The 6th grade teacher from the previous year had made a great impression on the staff about her lessons and teaching. Somebody in my team got her lesson plans and gave them to me. I was insulted. I had taught middle school for 12 years. I didn't need to play carbon copy to anyone's lesson plans. I didn't want or need her lesson plans. That was my mistake,

The teachers of the five core classes had one off period for mutual planning and for handling discipline problems. I generally get along with everyone, but I wasn't getting along with my teammates. I was quiet and not involved in discussions. The others were making plans to take the kids to the annual Renaissance Fair. No one explained anything to me. I sat at team meeting feeling like a bump on a log. I wasn't allowed to fit in. I commenced to do my own thing with my own lesson plans. I felt better when the students showed up for class in September.

I had a writing lesson that was really good. I took the kids through an imaginary weekend. Friday night they were playing video games with their friends. Saturday, they spent at the mall, with lunch at the food court. When they woke up Sunday morning, they heard the birds singing from the trees. I had a hidden cassette player at the back of the room. The students were instructed to write for the final ten minutes of class to write why they didn't do their homework. I clicked on the cassette player of birds for Sunday morning.

The next Monday the students were passing the word that the new English teacher was a witch. I resigned. I was able to stay on campus, grading papers in the conference room to be eligible for COBRA insurance. My mental status was poor. I was depressed. I would need to COBRA insurance to cover the majority of psychiatrists' billing. My ego was seriously bruised, and I was having numerous bipolar symptoms during the day, and nightmares at night.

I had moved from my one-bedroom apartment to a small gray brick 3/2 with a nice yard. For the remainder of the school year, I spent time with my cat, and a blonde Lab I got from the animal shelter and had named "Big Bad John." The dog and cat got along fine. I was a housewife for the remainder of the year. There was no husband, but I spent time with housework which kept me busy. In addition to bipolar problems, my back was giving me a lot of pain. I had played Superwoman during my life, lifting and moving items that were really too heavy for me. Now, I was paying the price.

There was a middle school aged boy that walked passed my house every afternoon during the weekdays. One day I went out and asked him if he wanted to make some money running my vacuum cleaner over the carpet. Chris was a regular helper once every week. I appreciated his help because running the vacuum cleaner hurt my back.

I had left my name and number as a tutor at the local community college. I received a call from the mother of a ninth-grade student. Her son needed help in his English class. He had decided that he already knew all he needed to know. The Word program, he said, would fix all the errors by the time he would be looking for a job. In the meantime, he was failing his English class. David had to read "The Catcher in the Rye," and he refused to even pick up the book. His parents had divorced, and David wanted to be with his father. His mother thought that a tutor could help. I did what I could. I started reading the novel to him aloud. I was as frustrated as his mother. Eventually, she realized that she could read the book to him as I had done, and my tutoring job played out.

I was overly stressed from working with one obstinate student. I ended up with a case of shingles. I went to the emergency room for what I thought was a migraine headache on Tuesday. The headache didn't subside, and I returned to the ER on Thursday. About that time the rash and the bumps, broke through my skin. The bumps emerged on the left side of my forehead, and the left side of my face, as if there were a dotted line where the left and right side of my head met. The shingles continued down the left side

My mother had purchased my little gray house as a good investment. The woman who had sold it to us was interested in buying it back. It had been a convenient drive to school, but I wasn't commuting anywhere. I moved back into my mother's house along with my pets. I had seen several private psychiatrists and finally went to the MHMR office to receive treatment. The medication I received made me sleepy and zonked me as though was a zombie. My activity was limited. I watched TV, slept, and took care of my cat and dog.

I went through several doctors, looking for the best medications to beat my symptoms. There was a great deal of time spent commuting to doctors' appointments. Eventually, I checked in to a psych hospital. A doctor there managed to give me a medication "cocktail" that quelled my symptoms. When I was released from the hospital, I went to the office of the doctor who had been treating me. He was very good at prescribing medication to fix the problems I was having. I was with this doctor through 2009, when I checked in to another psych hospital for medication adjustment. In the hospital a patient can be monitored closely when medication changes take place. If the patient receives a medication that has bad results, the offending medication can be discontinued, and another quickly put into place.

Michael Jackson died in the summer. I went psychotic. I fell into a mindset that had nothing to do with reality. I was living in a world of my own making. I felt I hadn't given Michael the respect he deserved, and my guilt took over. My guilt fed my bipolar disorder. I thought Michael was still alive, and that he would be coming to take me away with him, to travel the world incognito.

I went to spend the night at my mother's house. I had been hearing things that weren't there, though I believed they were. I heard a Christmas choir outside my window singing Beatle songs to me. I asked my mother if she heard them, and she couldn't hold back the tears in her eyes. I was content with my situation, and I didn't know anything was wrong. Michael would be coming to take me out of my uncomfortable situation. All I felt I needed to do was wait at my house.

Mother called 911 the next morning. I was in her backyard with the dogs, having a cup of coffee in my nightshirt. Mother's gates in the backyard were padlocked, and she locked me out of her house at her back porch. I was getting cold this November morn, but I couldn't get in the house. Mother didn't unlock the door until the paramedics arrived. Somehow, I was talked into getting into the back of the ambulance to have my vitals checked. When I was safely stowed, the ambulance proceeded to Green Oaks Psychiatric Hospital. I don't remember exactly what happened. Michael was at the hospital with a lot of young girls, and he left with then. There was no more Michael Jackson in my head. i was in the hospital for a couple of weeks, and I gained two boyfriends. The first one was in a wheelchair from MS, and he was also bipolar. He rolled past my room singing, "You wanna be Starting Something." I was enamored. He wanted me to come to his sister's home with him for Thanksgiving, where he would announce our engagement. I didn't go to his sister's, and I didn't see him after I left the hospital.

The other boyfriend was a guy named Timothy. He had long dreadlocks which caught my fancy. One of the patients in the hospital at the time was a very educated man who spoke seven languages. Timothy said he spoke nine languages to better the man who spoke seven languages. When I checked out of the hospital, Timothy followed me home when he was released. He went to North Dallas, retrieved his bicycle, and took the DART train to my stop. He rode his bicycle to my house. I was glad for the company, and let him in. My mother would have nothing to do with me at the time. She didn't come see me in the hospital, and she only called on the phone when I got home.

Things were great at first. We had sex and had sex, and the arrangement was fine with me. I had a prescription for Xylem, the date rape drug, to help with my insomnia. On the third day that Timothy was at my house, I told him to leave me alone because I needed to sleep. My bipolar symptoms weren't under control because I had gone without any sleep for three days. He had sex with me while I was sleeping. When I woke up the next morning, he was sitting in the bedroom chair and told me I needed to make him coffee. He became very demanding. I wanted to get him out of my house, but he wouldn't go.

Timothy spent his time braiding electrical cords. He braided every electrical cord he could find. He unplugged the cords at the outlet, and braided them back so that they would be about a foot too short to plug in. I tried to unbraid the cords he had unplugged, but it was a losing battle.

Timothy offered me his script for schizophrenic medications. I had my own prescription for bipolar disorder, and I didn't need or want his meds. One morning he was talking all nonsense words. He didn't make sense at all. He said something about going to his place in North Dallas to see about the cat who lived under the bridge with him. He had no apartment. He seemed to be homeless and living on the streets before he was at my house. I really wanted him out of my house, but he wouldn't leave. After a couple of weeks of me being somewhat afraid, he went out the front door and I locked it behind him, Finally I was alone with my cats and my dogs. I was content taking my bipolar meds and living in a world where Michael Jackson was dead and gone.

Continued "7--Barnes Bridge"