Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 64851 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 324(@200wpm)___ 259(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64851 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 324(@200wpm)___ 259(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
“What did she say?”
“She said if I knew what I was talking about, then I would know Kenny’s condition was degenerative. Cerebral Palsy is not a degenerative disease, and anyone who had been taking care of him for as long as your mother had would have known that. The only reason I couldn’t be sure about the symptoms I believed he had was because they could have very well been his Cerebral Palsy. So I observed him. By then Kenny and I had become friends, and he’d come out with us sometimes. Remember that time when he got that really bad headache when we’d gone to the art gallery. He said that he had some pills for the headaches. I got the pill bottle out of his bag and noticed the drug he was taking. It was seizure medication.”
“Kenny did suffer seizures,” I interjected.
“Right, but he specifically said it was for the headaches, and the type of medicine he was taking if he wasn’t truly a sufferer could cause seizures. In fact, most doctors are hesitant to prescribe that particular medication because too many patients were experiencing severe side effects. I saw the name on the prescriber and got very concerned. No one could really prove it, but there had been rumors about Dr. Laski for years. Anyway, I took my concerns to your mother again, and she completely went off on me. Called me everything but a child of God and told me that you would eventually get tired of me because I’m trash who is trying to make trouble.”
I frowned. This was the first time I was hearing this. “When did this happen, and why did you never say anything?”
“About what your mother said? Would it have made any difference? I had stopped by her house to speak with her because I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt that she wasn’t aware about what was going on. I knew if I told you about the conversation, you would either take her side or mine. If you would have taken hers, I would have, of course, been crushed; but if you had taken mine, that would have caused a rift between you and your mother. If nothing else, at the time I believe she loved her children. So, I kept my peace. I started asking Kenny questions, and that’s the reason we started talking about how he’d suspected for a while that something was wrong with him. To clarify, he felt different, not the regular struggle he was suffering. That’s when I went to you. You got angry with me. I tried another time, and you completely lost it. So I didn’t really know how I was going to get Kenny the help he needed if you weren’t willing to listen, and Kenny didn’t want me to get social services involved to get his mother in trouble.”
My chest got tighter like someone had put their hand around my heart and squeezed as I listened to Frankie’s explanation. Everything was starting to come back to me. I’d refused to listen to her when she was only trying to help. “And then what?”
“I tried to keep an eye on Kenny, but your mother was always around watching like a hawk. It was like she didn’t trust me to be alone with him. Even though Kenny was an adult, he said his mother took care of all his medical decisions. It concerned me that Kenny didn’t have much input in his own care. He was very outspoken in all other things, but as far as the medical stuff, he just let your mother take care of him. I don’t know if you remember this, but he was displaying some troubling symptoms. A lot of them could also have been from the Cerebral Palsy, but the kind he told me he had didn’t lend credence to this.”
I was curious now because as I scoured through my memories, I vaguely remember a few times when something seemed off with Kenny, but I couldn’t quite figure out why. And every time I’d asked, he would wave it off and say he was fine. “Could you tell me what those symptoms were?”
“Facial tick, labored breathing, slurred speech. That’s just off the top of my head. There were other more subtle symptoms, but I couldn’t be sure unless he had proper tests, and it was just a guess even though in his age range it shouldn’t have been likely.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I believed that there was something else going on with Kenny besides the Cerebral Palsy, and he believed it too. So he asked for my help. He was starting to feel worse. Kenny felt helpless because his mother refused to listen, and he’d already figured out that Dr. Laski was a fraud. He says he even tried to tell you, but you brushed him off. Kenny did some digging into how much control his mother actually had over his medical decisions. With Kenny being in his twenties, I was surprised he hadn’t questioned her until then, but I get how difficult it is for some people to go against their parents.” Frankie paused to squeeze the bridge of her nose and released a sigh.