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These are friends of mine. Good people struggling. Like we all do sometimes. Any little bit helps when money is that tight. Consider giving your hard earned money to real people instead of advertising machines when you want to donate. And please help my friend Kate and her family if you can.

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Jackie Lane

My Best Friend's Dad

I had the most amazing day yesterday. I spent the day at my best friend's dad's house cleaning it out for the last time. Maybe most people would think that is a morbid thing to have been an amazing day. But to me sometimes the most amazing days aren't necessarily about all happy things. Sometimes the hard memorable things become the amazing things as well. And we spent most of the day laughing and reminiscing and finding treasure.

Exactly 10 years ago we were in college and my best friend's dad moved down to the very edge of New Jersey. Right near the bridge into Delaware because he knew he'd need to be in and out of the Delaware Veterans Hospital pretty much for the rest of his life. We would skip math class in college to go visit her dad in the VA hospital and wait outside in the hallway riding IV stands up and down while he got angry with the nurse for waiting so long to come clean him up. He was completely mentally with it. With his internal organs on strike! Having some sort of a riot inside of him. Nothing is sadder than seeing a strong proud man suffer. And there is No Way In Hell he'd let teenage me and his daughter do the dirty work of nurses for him like my mom often did for my grandmother when she was sick.

The economy was good and we were in the middle of the housing bubble so at 240k the house was a deal, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms. A den, a living room. 2 attics, a fireplace. Been there forever lots of land around and a cute little community. Possibly somewhere for my friend to go after he's gone. And then maybe rent it and have income or just keep it for herself after he was gone. But seven years of medical bills later and an economy that crashed after he had passed away the house was underwater. As a majority of Americans houses had become.

But my best friend made good money. She has always had multiple jobs since we were 17 years old and the state would allow it. She keeps her home space a modest size since she has no kids yet. So for a year and 5 months she paid the underwater mortgage to keep her dad's house. Until one day a year ago. Ten years after we helped her dad move from Union New Jersey down to the border of New Jersey and Delaware. A tree fell on her dad's house.

I remember the day we moved him down. We had to take route 9 down past where the Birch Hill night club had just become The Birch Hill Retirement Community. The place we spent our formative years was gone and we were driving by on the same road for another reason. Some things were ending but others were beginning.

Luckily the neighbor next door was living at his mom's house because she had passed away and called my best friend right away to tell her the tree fell on the house. And he cut it up for her. She patched up the hole but there was still mold in a house not worth as much as was owed on it. So there was nothing to do but stop paying for it and let the bank take it over.

No one will live there. There is no money to fix things that are broken in this economy. There is an abandoned factory in town and warehouses. Buildings. Homes. And half full strip malls.

Our mom's and pop's shops are barely hanging on. I was 1.5 hours away from the densely populated city I live in. Still within the confines of Jersey and the country looked like a run down post apocalypse movie set.

Doesn't anyone else realize the zombie end of times trend is a metaphor? We have a society that doesn't accurately remember the mistakes of the past and that doesn't invest any time or energy into our children's futures. Some people do or would want to if we had a choice of where our tax money was spent. Most people would rather spend our hard earned dollars, paid to government for services, on infrastructure instead of military. Ruining more young boys with war.

I have a few new books and a Super Nintendo to get fixing. The History of The World War publishing date 1920. The books are slightly musty and need to be aired out. We donated most of the medical books except for the female anatomy book from 1972! Can't wait to read that!

Not mint so not worth more than the information printed within them. But special to me. We're not what we owned when we were alive. But we are what we read. What we knew. What we experienced and taught other people.

We found a VHS tape labeled Sightings...
I had to take it. I was hoping alien abductions or some other weird home movie. But it turned out to be television clips of Vietnam.

Vietnam was all over tv when it was happening and I guess whenever he taped this home video off of cable. We forget now because war is hidden on special channels geared to military minded people. But he was must have been sighting himself, his brother, and their friends. Now it is too late to ask which of the thousands of boys in the footage are him and his friends.

His brother suffers from mental illness and health complications from being a Marine and has a hard time getting the money for the help he needs. The waiting list for veterans health benefits is long. You have to prove you're a danger to yourself or others before your mental illness deserves government funding. Bullshit. They should all have access to any counseling they need for the rest o their live. War doesn't ever leave you.

My best friend's dad died of cancer caused by agent orange or one of the other many toxic deforestation chemicals used in Vietnam. So did my mom's best friend in 2010. So did my dad's best friend in 2014. Many men I know have died of lower body internal cancers that spread in the last few years. Men just barely breaching 60 years old. Mentally all there with bodies rotting from wars they fought as boys.

They didn't even have a choice back then.

We found my best friend's dad's draft card from 1969. The pocket change from other countries he traveled too like Germany and the Netherlands while he was in the service. Coins dated from the 1970's in a treasure chest with his initials on the lid with all his cufflinks and a silver dollar in a heart shaped box.

The house was also a time capsule of our teenage years together. Teen magazines in drawers from the start of the new millennium.

My best friend lived in Lavallette where my Gram is from and where I grew up when Hurricane Sandy hit. The building she lived in caved in. On her apartment. Now she will have some important treasures and history of where she came from to travel with her as she moves to the other side of the country.

Finally!

We've been talking about moving to California since we were 14 years old. One of us had to do it eventually. It was a bitter sweet day. In my opinion the best kind. The end of something old and the beginning of something new at the same time. The days you remember in life aren't the simple happy days. They are the challenging days. The days that teach you something.

Rest in eternal peace James Ryan. If you leave nothing else to this world, teaching one child unconditional love is enough. And you loved two.

I've seen love letters from their mom now and seen that sometimes traumas from our maturation come back to haunt us no matter how we run and hide and change.

No amount of preparation or knowledge can fix a broken adult sometimes. We need to start taking better care of and loving unconditionally our children. And not letting another single one go to war for our transgressions. And not letting a single one live through the mental stress of poverty.

Sometimes you can't fix people. You can only learn from their story how to keep more people from suffering. And that is enough. That is all that life is.

Once Upon A Time I Carried A Dead Baby

Once upon a time I was pregnant and carrying a dead baby. I've been stuck on what to write about here lately and I think it's time I tell this story.

I was working at the bank 50 to 60 hours a week. When I wasn't getting yelled at for taking too much overtime. Even though when I came in earlier or stayed later they had to ask. Kyle was a stay at home dad with Zack and Zack was 15 months old. I wasn't eating well. As in nothing all day at work. Occasionally a cheese pretzel from Wawa. And 1 sugar-free Red bull or 2 every day. The epitome of health I was not. I was losing weight but not for health reasons. I was stressed and being verbally emotionally abused at work. Which I even started to participate in which only made my stress and anxiety level higher.

We found out we were pregnant again at 4 weeks and I became violently ill all the time. It's surprising we didn't tell our family at around 5 or 6 weeks at Thanksgiving but my cousin was having her baby that day so Thanksgiving dinner was canceled. At around 8 weeks I actually thought I had a stomach virus on top of being pregnant I was so sick. This was a couple weeks before Christmas.

I wouldn't have told anyone where I work or in my family until after I was 12 weeks because it was my second pregnancy & a couple girls at the bank had recently had miscarriages so I knew how common they were. But everyone at my job knew because I was constantly physically ill throughout the day. At around 10 or 11 weeks I went for a routine ultrasound to make sure I was really pregnant to check on the size of the embryo and see how pregnant I was and if I was right about the time line.

An important part of the story is that I had had an ultrasound when Zack was 9 weeks in utero. I saw his heartbeat and from that point on Kyle and I called him the gummy bear. The fact that we decide to become parents even though we were only 21 years old became real.

Anyone who's ever had an ultrasound go poorly has experienced this moment. The technician puts on the goo and it's cold. As she massages the plastic wand back and forth you watch what looks like a poor quality television screen with her. If you've ever seen an embryo on one before you'll know even a small embryo if the technician is pointing in the right direction will give all the faintest womp womp, womp womp.

This time when the technician waved the magic wand, pressing deep into my belly back and forth, there was nothing but a sac.

There was nothing but a circle.

A placenta if you will.

You see the look on the technicians face as it goes dark behind her eyes because she knows what happens next is she has to tell you the truth.

She turns the monitor back and tries to hide from you the truth but, if you're smart as I am and you've seen this before, you know the heartbeat is missing. You remember how excited the technician was when she found Zack even though you hadn't planned on being pregnant and you weren't all that excited before that moment about the thought of being parents.

You start to cry uncontrollably. Right away, no matter how much you didn't want to be pregnant, no matter how much it was a bad time to have another baby, no matter how much it was really a blessing that you weren't responsible for raising another life you start to cry uncontrollably. Like you lost a great possibility.

The technician talks but you don't really hear anything that she says. You already know what she has to tell you. She tells you that you have to go meet with the doctor in the office. They bring you into the comfortable office the one with the nice chairs and all the fancy documentation and awards: not the office with the implements. So you know that something unpleasant is going to be talked about.

The doctor tells you that your pregnancy appears to be about 12 weeks along and you may stay pregnant for another week or two and miscarry naturally up to 14 weeks. You risk the possibility of carrying the placenta to term and having a stillbirth if you cross the legal abortion date. But we had plenty of time to decide.

No one ever said the word abortion. I wasn't killing a baby. Even the embryo inside me wasn't alive. I don't know if they say abortion when it is legal and you're in a doctor's office. The technical term is a DNC. In my experience they didn't. But I'm sure somewhere they do. Abortion has a connotation of guilt. DNC does not. In another state I would have had to go to a separate facility and be verbally and emotionally abused by protesters on the way in.

The doctor told me I had a choice but I didn't have to make it right that moment, that I could go home and think about it and if I chose to have surgery she would call them immediately whenever I decided I had been pregnant for long enough. We hadn't even driven all the way home before I said to my husband I don't want to be pregnant anymore. I was still violently nauseous at every moment. Knowing it was all for nothing only made it worse.

I went to the local hospital in the morning and was one of the first surgeries. My aunt is a very experienced and talented O.R. nurse at the hospital I was in. My cousin, her daughter, who is the same age I am came to sit and wait with me. Kyle was home with our son.

This surgery despite the fact that it was outpatient and supposedly less bodily traumatizing was a lot worse than my c-section. For my c-section I was conscious and I could move from the waist up. My husband was there to hold my hand and the doctors treated me with compassion.


When I had my abortion the room they made me wait in beforehand was icy and cold and I was unconscious during the procedure. I woke up feeling like I had been used while I was asleep. It was an awful feeling. As I came to and my pain medicine started to wear off I was in excruciating pain in my legs in abdomen. I had the best possible scenario. My aunt heard me moaning and told them to give me more Demerol.

The doctor who had done the surgery I had only met 5 minutes prior. She came to the bedside after I woke up and told me that they had removed embryonic material. Basically it wasn't just a empty placenta. It was a confirmed dead baby. That's what you need to hear when you're in pain physically, alone, and high as fuck on pain medications.

I can barely remember leaving the hospital. I'm assuming kyle pick me up but I don't really remember. My cousin may have driven me home. I slept off the rest of the painkiller that was in my the system and when I woke up I couldn't walk. My legs felt like while I was unconscious someone had swung them around like Barbie doll legs.

The doctors had given me a prescription for 600 milligram ibuprofen to relieve the pain. I could pop 3 regular strength ibuprofen because I had cramps when I was a teenager and PMS and barely notice the difference. Ibuprofen wasn't gonna cut it. I could have called my doctor and asked for a prescription for some sort of "cet" drug. Acetaminophen with oxycodone in it.But my cousin had had her baby like I said on Thanksgiving and afterwards she almost died from loss of blood and had to have a transfusion. She's not much for pain medication so she still had pain killers. She's a pharmacist so she knew the correct dose to give me so I took percocet for two days so that I could walk to and from the bathroom.

I only got 3 paid days off from work, and then the weekend unpaid. 5 days total to recover. I had been a full time worker up until that that week but I was changing back after the surgery because my husband finally got a full time job. So I was losing my 20 paid days off and using the 4 I was going to get as a part timer in the first week. 1 of which I had used on January 2nd because my doctor's office called to confirm my appointment for the ultrasound I had on January 3nd. It's illegal that they did because I had signed for them not to call my house about appointments and personal matters just for emergencies. It doesn't matter though because the person I lived with didn't want my husband and I having another baby in their house so they told us to leave.

The day I found out I was violently ill carrying a dead baby was the day after I found out I was homeless. I had only told my cousins and their mom the day before because I showed up on their doorstep with nowhere to live with my son and husband.

It was a blessing that I had to tell them the day before because I would not have been able to utter the words, that I had been pregnant. At least this way they knew I went to the doctors appointment so when I came home and something was wrong they knew what it was without me having to use as many words.

We were kicked out for being irresponsible and accidentally getting pregnant with another baby. I honestly think it was the time we used the sponge. I am skeptical of spermicides ever since and don't use contraception that relies on them.

My aunt took us in and thought that a new baby was a blessing no matter how much money you have or where you live. I'm glad that I was with my cousins who are like my sister's who took care of me like no one else could when I found out and after the surgery. It was physically and emotionally draining.

While going through something that was more awful than I could have imagined. I realized that 2/3's of women will experience miscarriage or abortion in their lifetime and my only experience with it was best case scenario. It wasn't great.

I don't regret the hard things that my husband I have gone through since choosing to have my son at 21. Each one has taught us something important. The experience of thinking we were having another baby, coming to terms with it, accepting it, being happy about it and then losing it, brought us closer together 2 years into our relationship. before that we had started to drift apart. We had to comfort each other in our loss even if in a lot of ways it was a relief. Our son is still a perfectly happy only child. If there was a permanent solution that was safe and we could afford, my husband and I would keep it that way for certain at this point.

Miscarriage is very common. Chances are you know women who have had one or more. It may be your mother, or your grandmother, or your sister, or your cousin, or your best friend but women are conditioned not to talk about these things in polite company. Just because women don't have children doesn't mean the trials of periods and pregnancy woes haven't effected them.

There is a judgment if not having children is your choice and there is a judgment if having no children is out of your control.

We don't have the luxury of pretending these things don't exist behind closed doors. We bring up these stories to comfort one another when someone we know is going through what we have been through. These experiences, we are taught, must be silent foundations of our existence. I think if more women spoke up about how hard pregnancy impacts the life of the average working age woman whether she is trying to not get pregnant or trying to have children we would all be better off.

We have more options for old men to continue having erections and shooting out their sperm than we know what to do with. Can we please find some options that make women's lives a little easier from month to month? So that we can be happy and healthy and pregnancy free if we so choose. For less than $10,000 and major surgery? There is a better way out there than hormones that cause weight gain, mood swings, blood clots, and heart attacks or major surgery. We just haven't found it yet.

If you really wanna stop women from having so many abortions and miscarriages find a better way to keep them from getting pregnant. Educate them to be the scientists who solve the worlds contraception problems and liberate all women. Make more than one 100 percent effective birth control method to choose from for women then we will see less abortions.


Be My Fucking Friend

P.S.- These women aren't impregnating themselves and you were all were born of a mother. This issue affects all of us.