Yesterday, I notice that this one post on my blog that was over ONE YEAR ago… had more page views than the entire blog gets in a given day. At first, I thought that was kind of strange… probably a computer error issue.
Keeping chronically ill pt all stressed out and treated like a puppet ?
Then last night I got this message from one of my readers
http://www.fox29.com/news/186180486-story
Family of 5, including tot with heart transplant, found dead in apparent murder-suicide
Home of Mark and Megan Short in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania. (Google Street View)
Police found a handwritten “murder-suicide” note in a Pennsylvania home where a family of five, including a toddler who underwent a heart transplant a week after birth, was found dead of gunshot wounds, prosecutors said Sunday.
Police found the bodies of Mark and Megan Short and their three children, as well as a deceased dog Saturday afternoon in the living room area of the family’s home in Sinking Spring, Berks County District Attorney John Adams said.
“A handwritten note was discovered in the home which appeared to be a ‘murder-suicide’ note,” he said on Facebook.
A handgun was discovered near the body of one of the adults, the prosecutor said.
Sinking Spring police went to the home when a relative couldn’t get in touch with Megan Short to find out why she missed a pre-arranged lunch date, Fox29 Philadelphia reported Sunday.
An investigation by police before they arrived at the home revealed that there had been “domestic issues” between Megan and her husband, the station reported.
Mark Short was 40 and his wife was 33. Their three children were Lianna, 8, Mark Jr., 5, and Willow, 2.
Willow and Megan were featured in articles in the Reading Eagle in 2014 and The New York Times in 2015 about Willow’s transplant and the family’s difficulties obtaining anti-rejection medication for her.
Megan worried at the end each month that her daughter’s drug supply would run out before it could be refilled, The Times reported.
“You just feel like every month, you’re hoping that they don’t mess it up,” she told the paper.
Fox 29 reported that the mother had written publicly about her struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder after Willow’s heart transplant.
Sinking Spring is about 70 miles northwest of Philadelphia.
Filed under: General Problems
This is so heartbreaking. Your original blog on what they go through (written a year ago) had shown up in my FB feed (which I read, so it was fresh in my mind) the day before I noticed this horrible headline in the news. As soon as I’d read it, I remembered your year old blog (the name Willow was stuck in my head).
It really hit me as to how much these families with chronically ill children go through. All the hospital and doctor visits (most of which requires traveling to special children’s hospitals and/or to pediatric specialists), the medical bills, medication, taking care of an ill child, making sure the other children receive attention and care, etc.
The list goes on and on. I can’t even imagine the stress that is involved. They haven’t said which one wrote the suicide note and pulled the trigger, but I imagine whoever did it just snapped and couldn’t take it any longer. It’s so sad because these are the people who fall through the cracks in this country.
Unbelievable.
Kevorkianites will attribute this event to poor planning. They will argue that the sick baby should have been aborted before birth, rather than treated with an expensive surgical procedure, that his father did not appreciate at all.
2,000 years ago, before Christianity came to Ancient Rome, this idea had a name: “pater potestas.”
Under the law of pater potestas, the father owned the children and the wife. He cculd dispose of them as he pleased, legally.
Although this idea appears evil to many of us, particularly so to those of us who are women, many men still adhere to it. Pater potestas is anti-Christian. The churches rightly seek to stamp it out.
The reason that pater potestas persists, is that many of us learn, from a very young age, to repeat a lie that others want to hear about themselves. Instead of telling the schoolyard bully we are afraid to play with him, we praise his skill at beating up his last victim. This lie distracts him from beating us, but has a consequence: the bully wants to believe that his evil act of beating up others, is a good thing, so he uses the phony praise to confirm to himself, that he’s really a great guy because he scares the hell out of the people he beats.
This is an important skill to learn, in our present context.
We pain patients must learn to speak the truth, about those who want us to commit suicide. We must state that they are evil for wanting us dead or suffering. If we do not say this, they want to believe that their evil deeds are good.
Voting evil people out of political office, is easy. You wait for the election, and vote for anybody who’s less evil than the incumbent.
The hard part, is recognizing the evil and choosing to remove it from power.
AMEN,, anyone who thinks its their rite to tell anyone how much physical pain someone should or shouldn’t endure,when it is literally physically impossible for anyone to physically feel the physical pain of another from medical illness,,,,is evil,,,their inability for empathy,compassions,and the arrogance to think they have that rite,to tell others how much their gonna suffer in physical pain,,,defines a true psychopath,,which is evil in my book,,maryw