or, How the State Will Screw You if They Can

disclaimer: what you are about to read has many references it the illegal Schedule I drug cannibis sativa. If I were you, I wouldn't use it or get caught with it...law enforcement tends to like to put even occasional users caught with under 1 gram of cannibis (also known as 'marijuana') in prison for a long, long time. I do not advocate anyone breaking the law..after all, does prison sound good to you? I don't want to go there, do you?

In April of 1999, my friend Tamy got pregnant for the first time in her life. She was 30 then. Tamy lives in a nice one bedroom apartment in Northwest Omaha with her cats, Jones (Mr. Jones, Jonesie, Bonehead) and Ivannah.

Ivannah had 4 cute little grey kittens that spring. One of them, Whitefoot, I gave to my sister Sheila (who immediately re-named him Ray).

Tamy was sleeping one Saturday night while a friend of hers is watching TV. Her friend shouts at her to get up, come out and help him because Ivannah's going nuts...seems she's apparently attacking one of her kittens and he's trying to stop her from hurting the kitten. Tamy stumbles out, still half-sleep, Ivannah lays Tamy's left shin open with her big-ass claws (Ivannah may have only weighed 2 pounds, but her and Jones both had huge paws with claws that were proportional to the size of their paws). Ivannah spazzed hard that night--she was a ball of white and silver lightening, howling, hiding from everyone and attacking anyone trying to grab her. Tamy called the Humane Society, and they showed up and helped Tamy get Ivannah in her carrier to go to the vet.

Result: Tamy goes to the emergency room. Tamy is afraid that Ivannah just tried to kill her. Ivannah's carrier at the vets' is marked "adult" on the label containing her name because she was so small that no one could believe she was an adult cat - with kittens.

When Tamy was examined at the emergency room, the doctor told her that she might get cat scratch fever and that one of the scratches needed stitches, but if he stitched it it might get infected. So the scratches were cleaned and bandaged and Tamy was sent home with instructions.

A week later Jones spazzed out also. This time it was a Saturday afternoon, Tamy was planning on going to the hospital emergency room anyway because she was vomiting and feverish, she thought she had come down with cat scratch fever. The Humane Society was called again and this time I saw her and told her to get a pregnancy test while she was there - for some odd reason, when I looked at her, I could tell. So they ran tests for the cat scratch fever and a pregnancy test - she had cat scratch fever and she was pregnant.

Her mom was in the same hospital (Clarkson) as the emergency room Tamy kept going to. Tamy's mom had cancer and had gone to the hospital a few months earlier - in fact, Tamy went up to see her almost every day. She was on chemo, etc. Tamy went and told her mom that she was pregnant, and mother and daughter both cried...Tamy got her tears on the floor beside her mom's hospital bed. Her mom kept chanting, "I'm going to be a grandma," while she cried.

The next week, Tamy had an appointment with her regular family doctor (a Clarkson doctor) who gave her a referral to an obstetrician so Tamy could start seeing him. Tamy was about six weeks pregnant.

Meanwhile, in the ensuing months, Tamy's mom comes home for 2 days from the hospital. The first day the Medicaid-hired nurse was late for the first shift of taking care of Tamy's mom so Tamy had to. Tamy wasn't supposed to because her mom had something called VRA which she had contracted in the hospital and could hurt the baby. Eventually, the nurses came and Tamy could go home. On day two Tamy's mom started hemorraging pretty bad so it was back into the hospital she went.

The father of Tamy's baby never came around, not even once, while Tamy was pregnant.

In the meantime, Tamy's obstetrician told her to get off of her Prozac because it might hurt the baby. Tamy is depressed, it's called mental illness. Lots of people have it. Sometimes it's curable, and sometimes it isn't. Tamy's isn't. Without her meds, she can't even keep track of her checkbook (she lost it when she was pregnant, closed the account, got new checks, and then found the old one stuck in the cushions of a padded old rocking chair soon afterward)...she was forever bouncing checks because she forgot how to balance her checkbook. She was also almost as much of a spazz as Ivannah was. Besides the fact she was throwing up all the time. She gave the checkbook to her brother to take care of while she was pregnant so he could pay her bills for her. She couldn't. (Her brother was also taking care of her mom's bills while she was in the hospital and found that one of the hired nurses was writing checks to herself for large amounts of money.)

She started smoking marijuana to calm her down and keep her from spazzing out all the time. She knew it wouldn't hurt the baby - almost all our friends who had had babies had smoked marijuana while they were pregnant and it hadn't hurt theirs. That, and it helped her keep her food down some of the time. She was vomiting up her prenatal vitamins.

Tamy's mom was going to have to be transferred to a long-term care facility eventually, because of Medicaid's limit on how mant days a patient can stay in the hospital, and they were waiting for one of them to have a bed for their mother...one day, they moved her to one in Lincoln and then called Tamy's brother at work and told him. Lincoln is 52 miles away from Omaha.

So Tamy was now relegated to seeing her mother once a week, on Sundays, completely gowned, with gloves, mask and cap on, for two hours, because of her mother's VRA and her own pregnancy. It was very depressing for her...here she is, pregnant, all she wants to do is bond with her own mother because of that, and her mother is dying. She can only see her two hours a week. She was really, really depressed.

Then, the ultrasound. You know how an ultrasound is usually an exciting, happy thing, because you're seeing your baby for the first time? Tamy's not only took for ever, but both of us knew when the ultrasound technician kept measuring the distance between the baby and the walls of the uterus from different areas around the baby that something was wrong. So they scheduled another ultrasound for very soon after because the doctor was rather worried.

On September 22, 1999, Tamy gets a call from her brother telling her to get ready, they're going to Lincoln, he just got a call telling him their mom was dying right then. By the time they got there, at 1:15 a.m., she was dead.

Twelve hours later, at her ultrasound, the doctor told her that her baby didn't have enough amniotic fluid and that she (the baby was a girl) might die. And if she managed to make it until 6 months along, they were going to take the baby by Caesarian section.

click for the next part of Tamy's Story