It cost me an arm and a leg
Nancy Kitka
Copyright 2011 by Nancy Kitka
Smashwords Edition
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Note: Some names have been changed to protect the author. As a kid, I wanted to be the Catwoman when I grew up. In the 1966 Batman movie, she pretended to be a Russian woman named Ms. Kitka, and teamed up with the other three main criminals: the Joker, the Penguin, and the Riddler. I chose the name Kitka as homage to the Catwoman.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 4 – Sex and drugs and rock’n’roll
Chapter 5 – Meeting the bikers
Chapter 6 – Bad News for Nancy
Chapter 7 – While the cat is away, the mouse will play
Chapter 9 – There is no honour among thieves
Chapter 11 - We are all terminally unique
Chapter 12 – Consequences and delaying gratification
Chapter 13 - Working for a living
Chapter 14 – Forgiveness and mindfulness
Chapter 15 – Family of origin – the buck stops here
Chapter 17 – Synchronicity is a nod from God
Chapter 18 - Anniversary dates and PTSD
Chapter 19 – Singing – The best is never over
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“Angel of darkness is upon you, Stuck a needle in your arm, So take another toke, have a blow for your nose, One more drink fool, will drown you, Ooooh that smell, Can’t you smell that smell, Ooooh that smell, The smell of death surrounds you” ~ Lynyrd Skynyrd - (Allen Collins - Ronnie Vanzant)
My boyfriend and I climbed into his ’66 Chevy on a bitter cold morning in 1977. I was wearing jeans rolled up to my knees, cowboy boots and my favourite burgundy leather jacket. Our cock-a-poodle dog, Cherry Brandy sat in the back and I scooched over to the middle of the front seat. Jordy turned the key. I leaned forward to put my purse down. There was an absence of sound and then a whoosh shoved me back into the seat. I thought I was being electrocuted. But how could that be? My mind scrambled. What was happening? Everything went in slow motion.
I saw Jordy go out the window, feet last. I tried to follow him. I put my left hand down, and then my right then I fell. I was pinned under the steering wheel. Everything stopped and I realized what had happened.
I screamed: “Oh my God, those fucking bastards! Those fucking bastards blew us up!”
There was a smell of burnt metal and flesh as I lay there watching Jordy run around like a chicken with his head cut off. He kept throwing snow on the car. Later, he told me he was afraid the gas tank would explode. He never came over to comfort me. He was freaking out. His arm was broken.
I could see through the hole where the dash and motor had been. Jordy’s brother ran out of the house with a shotgun. I thought, “What are you going to do, asshole, shoot the bomb?” I may have screamed it.
Paul Graveline stood there with his hands in his pockets looking at me as if I were already dead. The police were close by and came to help before the ambulances arrived. A cop held my head to one side. I couldn’t see my body. I could not put my right arm down. I wanted to see why but the cop wouldn’t let me look.
I whined: "Ouch, you're hurting my neck".
He loosened his grip and I looked down at my arm. I don't remember what I saw.
I screamed: "That’s a dead person's arm!"
The cop put my head back to the side again.
Sam and Jordy’s younger brother, Wayne, heard what had happened on the car radio. They got there before the ambulances.
Wayne repeated: “You'll be alright Nancy, you’ll be alright.” Sam looked at me and threw up. I knew one thing for sure: “If I stopped talking, I would die.”
I asked: "Where's my make-up, where's my mirror?" I wasn’t making sense because I was in shock.
The ambulances arrived. There was one for each of us. The paramedics cut the steering wheel to free me. Jordy passed out from the pain. I never passed out.
My driver asked his: “Where are you were taking him?”
He said: “The Civic.”
Mine said: "She won't make it".
I piped up: "Yes I will!" from inside the ambulance.
The paramedics tried to put an oxygen mask over my mouth but I kept pushing it off. I had to keep talking.
I asked: "What day is this?"
The paramedic replied: “Wednesday.”
“What month is this?”
“January”, he replied.
"WELL THEN WHAT FUCKING WEEK IS THIS?"
No one answered.
They took us to the General Hospital in the same emergency room. They asked Jordy for our address but he was howling in pain. He was awake again and swearing at everyone.
I answered: “401 Queen Mary Street apartment 2”.
When he heard my voice, he looked over.
He cried: "Oh my God, look at her arm! Look at her fucking arm!"
A curtain closed to separate us.
It was a Wednesday morning. The best doctors were performing surgeries at the hospital. They were paged, STAT. Someone cut off my boots and clothes. A doctor kept poking me with a needle above my chest. He was trying to find an artery. I had no blood left in my body. My heart kept pumping air.
Dr. Desjardins told me later my “femoral artery was blowing in the wind.” Had I lost consciousness, I would have died because blood flows out faster when you are unconscious. Had it been summer, I would have died because you lose blood faster in the heat.
I don't remember much else except begging for something to kill the pain. Doctors operated on me for eight hours but could not tell my parents if I would live.
I woke up in intensive care with a breathing tube was down my throat because my lungs had collapsed. Injuries to my abdomen blew out part of my stomach. There was a patch over my right eye. I had pins in my right leg to reset the broken tibia. My right thigh looked like a cutaway model view of leg muscles from health class. The doctors were not sure they could save it. Nurses smelled my leg every few hours checking for gangrene.
I knew something had happened to my arm but the doctors told me my left leg was gone on two separate occasions. I didn’t even know it was injured. I lost my right hand because I was putting my purse down. My right arm protected the right leg from being blown off completely. I lost my left leg below the knee.
My first note to dad was “NO MOM”. I was not on speaking terms with mom. I wrote notes because I could not speak. She came anyway because dad probably never showed her the note. He told me about it but he probably hid it from her. Mom and dad came to the hospital often.
No one would give me a mirror those first few days. I thought my face was blown off and wanted to see what it looked like. Mom gave me her compact. I had small blue marks all over my face like freckles. They were from the engine oil burning my face. I said “I look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook farm”.
An old man in the bed beside me never stopped coughing until he died. He kept waking me with his coughing. I was happy when he died because if I could sleep, I got a break from the pain. I was in constant pain and could not handle it anymore. I yelled at the doctors who were doing rounds: “I am in so much pain. It never stops!! Please, please, do something!”
The doctor ordered a syringe full of morphine. I got a short break from the pain. And then it was back.
I was in intensive care for seventeen days. At the time, they told me I could be in the hospital for two years. I spent six months in the hospital, counting rehab. The doctors managed to save the mangled right leg. I almost didn’t make it a few times but I was young and my body was strong.
At eighteen, I hung out with the Satan's Choice then I went out with Jordy, President of “Bad News for Ottawa”. He used to place scotch tape along the edges of the hood of the car at night. In the morning, he checked the tape. If the tape was intact, no one had tampered under the hood. I called him paranoid and made fun of him each time he did. He stopped doing it.
At nineteen, I was blown up. I needed to sign in with probation for using a stolen credit card. That was why I was up. Otherwise, I hardly ever got up before noon.
Jordy’s mission in life was to do life. He was convicted in 1987 for the murders of a tow truck driver and seventeen year old girl. She was shot five times in the head for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can relate.
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"The creative adult is the child who has survived". ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
I was born in 1957 and there had been ten childless years in the family. My brother Steve was twelve and Ginette (Gigi) was ten. We camped and skied as a family for the first few years of my life.
I have fond memories of mom singing to me while we lay in her bed in the morning. She sang songs like Ti-Pi-Tin by The Andrews Sisters and "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" by Irving Berlin. I loved her voice and said: “Mommy you should be an opera singer”. She laughed her special laugh.
Mom had three nervous breakdowns before I reached the age of twelve. There was no more singing. When I was six, my sister Sue was born. We went camping once more, and then never again.
I went to French school to learn to speak French. I loved school. I skipped grade three so was only eight years old in grade four. Although always popular, I never felt I belonged. I felt things to the core of my being. Small slights hurt just as much as big ones. I seemed to have no defences to protect myself from being hurt. I was so much younger than everyone else, I felt like I did not fit in. Everyone had a role but me.
As a child, mom's sister took her to the dentist to get her teeth fixed. They put her to sleep and when she woke up, they had pulled all her teeth.
When I was eight years old, mom had a nervous breakdown. I woke up to her screaming in terror: “Doctor, come back with my teeth!” There had been a lead up with her behaviour become erratic but I was scared to death. I told her the night before my friend was being confirmed. She twisted reality with fantasy and said: “We are all getting confirmed today.”
I was terrified. Steve, Gigi and Dad did their best to manage the situation. The three of them took care of me and Sue who was two and mom in psychosis. Gigi dressed me for school in the downstairs bedroom, told me to stay put, and then ran upstairs. I remember my hands shaking. I trembled like a leaf in that room all alone.
I could hear mom demanding: “Ginette, bring me my black brassiere. Ginette, bring me my black brassiere.”
It made no sense. I snuck upstairs to see for myself what was going on.
Mom saw me and sang: “If I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake!”
Gigi took me downstairs, told me to stay there because mom was having a “nervous breakdown”. Then I was sent to school. I walked to the corner to catch the school bus. As I got on the bus, I pushed my way to the front of the line grumbling: "My mother just had a nervous breakdown".
Steve and Dad could only get mom in the car by pretending they were going to church to be confirmed. She sat in the middle with Steve sitting on her right side to block her from jumping out. She spent months in The Royal Ottawa Sanatorium.
I felt like mom had died. If things were discussed, I was not included in the conversations. No one had time to help me cope. I felt like I did not belong once again because of my feelings. I did not understand why she left me. I was devastated.
Dad took me to see her once. When she saw me she sang: “If I knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake”.
I said: “Oh mommy that is what you sang when you were sick”.
A giant sad man sat catatonic. He frightened me. It was a strange place with an aura of sadness and confusion.
I did not know the woman who came back from the hospital. Mom was prescribed Haldol and Cogentin. These powerful anti-psychotics made her zombie-like. She sat for hours and staring off into space. She did not get up in the morning. She did not get dressed. She had no joy. My dad worked. Gigi and Steve were teenagers so they went out a lot.
Things didn’t get better for a long time. One night when I had a nightmare, I got up, took my pillow with me to crawl into bed with mom because I was scared. She sat bolt upright and screamed: “WHO'S THAT? WHO'S THAT?” I ran back to my bed more terrified by her than the nightmare.
People with schizophrenia have trouble dealing with day to day life. The little things overwhelmed mom. There was not much routine for us younger kids.
Mom had trouble sleeping at night and slept all day. At Christmas, I listened to my new transistor radio through the earphone in bed. Mom stormed into my room screaming: “Turn that thing off!! It’s keeping me awake.” My radio had nothing to do with it but there is no reasoning with a crazy person, even if she is your mother.
It became a pattern for Mom to blame me for her problems. She also made fun of me when I cried. “Oh poor Nancy, you are so hard done by.” I stopped crying.
As a teenager, mom would tear a strip off me. She actually would froth at the mouth as she yelled at me. I learned to defend myself by screaming louder and saying mean things back to shut her up. I learned to give it back and then some. This does not make for good relationships with anyone and set a pattern that was tough to break.
I soon figured out if I kept quiet and out of Mom’s way, I could do pretty much as I wanted. Mom blew little things out of proportion if she was awake and coherent. Either there was no discipline or the punishment was way too severe for the crime. I was being conditioned to behave badly and reinforced to act out. I also learned she did not have the energy to fight for long. I learned it was ok to yell and scream to get what I wanted if being nice didn’t work.
It was so bad Dad tried to intervene because he could see she was being irrational with me. She thought everything I did was because I was out to get her. Mental illness is a self-centered disease and it causes the person suffering from it to take everything personally. The world revolves around them. People laughing must be laughing at them. The television talks to them. Songs are written about them. A child misbehaving is doing it to get them. Dad tried to help me deal with her but her paranoia came true. Dad and I united against her.
I stayed out all night at fourteen and came home to find a note from Mom on my pillow. In the note she told me she was a paranoid schizophrenic. She claimed my behaviour was making her sick. I took this to heart. I never knew until I was older she had breakdowns before I was born. I believed her when she told me I was bad. I thought I caused her to be sick. This is a perfect example of the faulty thinking going on at the time.
There are lots of books for parents or siblings of schizophrenic children. It seemed no one acknowledged this happened. There is a dearth of writing about growing up with a schizophrenic mother. If you are searching, I recommend “Growing up with a schizophrenic mother” by Margaret J. Brown and Doris Parker Roberts. I found it affirming to read about experiences somewhat similar to mine. Ultimately, our answers are from within. We look outside ourselves, when we must look inside for answers. Finding the book was great but really, I had to change.
Mom died of mouth cancer. She was likely in horrific pain but refused to take her teeth out until the very end of her days. We loved her with teeth or without. We loved HER.
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“Most of the people we see don't want to live in a shelter and feel safe in their own little camp. Experience has taught me that almost 100 percent of these people suffered abuse as children. Well over half have emotional, mental problems. Most have drug and alcohol problems.” ~ John Gallagher
I attended a French catholic primary school but was devastated when my parents sent me to an English public high school. I lost the girlfriends I had grown up with. I had also lost mom because she was barely coherent. I was pretty overwhelmed by the feelings of loss but got through Grade 9. No one modelled how to deal with feelings. My family had developed their own coping skills for better or worse but their way did not work for me then and still does not.
I spent as much time as I could away from home. I was caught hanging out with boys a few times. The August before grade 10, I stayed at my brother, Steve's apartment. I thought he was so cool. I wanted him to like me. Steve and his wife took me to a party with them. His friend, Saul asked if he could take me out on a date. Steve agreed. Saul was twenty-five and I was thirteen.
Saul took me out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant then, we watched “Gimme Shelter” and “Monterey Pop” at the theatre. Saul and his friends made comments about Tina Turner singing and doing things with the microphone. I was overwhelmed the whole time I was with them but pretended I was not.
Saul had pre-rolled joints in a cigarette package. After the movie, he took me to his house. There were other men there for awhile. There was booze and they made a big production of rolling up a large denomination bill up to snort cocaine with.
Suddenly, we were alone. Saul brought me upstairs and had sex with me. I was a virgin. While it was happening, I disassociated. I cannot remember anything but the slanted ceiling. When he was done, he got up, left the room then came back and handed me a towel. I had no idea what the towel was for.
He must have known I had not enjoyed it because he said: "Someday you're going to love that." I remember thinking: "I don't think so". Saul sent me home a couple of hours late in a taxi. My brother and his wife were angry at me for being late and sent me home soon after as if it were my fault. It was not. It was Saul's. He became a criminal lawyer and he is a judge in Toronto.
He called to ask me out again. Dad answered the phone. Saul wanted me to go bike riding with him. I thought: “Yeah, right bike riding” and said no when dad handed me the phone. I did not want a repeat performance.
I did not tell my family what had happened. I did not want to get in trouble. I believed I would get in trouble because I let it happen. I felt like there was no way I could stop him at the time.
For years after if a guy was bugging me to have sex with him, I would have sex one time and never again. I felt I had to get it over with so I could say no. Only recently did I put the puzzle together. I was repeating what happened with Saul. I had to do it once to be able to refuse a repeat performance.
After Saul, I said to myself: “The first time hurt so I’ll go with a small guy so it won’t hurt this time.” I had sex with a guy named Jimmy because he was about five feet tall. A guy named Lee begged me to give him a blow job when we were necking in my parents’ basement. He swore he wouldn’t tell but he lied. He told. I was devastated by the way the other kids treated me. My first times were not pleasant experiences and sex was not a loving experience. It was more like boys would say anything to get it, and then discard you like you didn’t matter anymore once they got what they wanted.
It was the seventies, drinking was socially acceptable and it seemed like everyone was doing drugs. I owned four albums: Shhh by Ten Years After, Love it to Death by Alice Cooper, Through the Past Darkly by The Rolling Stones, and Abraxis by Santana. I would blast “19th Nervous Breakdown” by the Stones on my record player in the basement when I got mad at mom. I thought this was communicating to her what I thought of her and her breakdowns.
Teenagers hung out, got high and dealt drugs at the Canterbury Community Centre. One evening, I arrived and found Mike was drinking a large bottle of orange soda. I sat beside him on the metal fence backing on to the hill of the Community Centre.
Mike passed me the bottle and said: “Here Kitka, take a swig”.
I took a sip and passed it back. He took another swig, passed it to me and I chugged it.
He said: “There’s vodka in there so take it easy.”
“Yeah, yeah”
“You’re gonna get sick if you drink too fast.”
“No I won’t.”
I passed it back. He drank some more and refilled the bottle and held onto it.
“Gimme that bottle. I’m fine, I don’t feel a thing!!”
I drank some more and said: “Hey, Mike, make sure I get home by ten or my dad will kill me”.
“Alright.”
“No seriously, promise Mike.”
“I said OK I’ll get you home.”
The next morning, I woke up in my bed. I pulled the covers back and horror of horrors, I was fully dressed. I had no idea what happened. I headed toward the stairs to the kitchen to get some water because I was dying of thirst. I saw dad sitting on the couch. He did not say a word but he glared at me over his glasses. This was his signal to show he was mad. My stomach tightened.
He said: “Last night the doorbell rang. When I opened the door, there you were passed out on the front step. For god’s sake Nance, you were covered in puke! I hid you in the basement until mom went to bed. Jesus what in the Hell were you thinking? I carried you up to your room after she was asleep.”
I have no idea what I told him. But he said: “We can’t tell your mother because she’ll get upset.” I was fine with this plan.
I saw Mike later in the week and he said: “Holy shit, you fell backward off the fence and puked your guts out. But I got you home, like I promised. Hahaha. We carried you home, rang the doorbell and took off.”
I did not connect the drinking with the bad behaviour. I thought I was bad.
Around the same time, there was an outbreak of the crabs. Little Jimmy spread rumours I had given them to him. He was an evil little Gollum. On my way home, coming down off a run, I was feeling down. I was taking a lot of dexies (speed pills) and would stay up for days. He yelled: “There she is B.J. Crabs!” The people he was with laughed at me.
I could not take anymore. I did not have crabs. Life was so unfair. Nothing was working out. I would show them all. I’d make them feel sorry for what they did to me. They would come to my funeral, and then they’d feel guilty and ashamed for what they had done.
I went home, took mom’s bottles of pills to the basement. I turned on Alice Cooper, "Love It to Death" on my record player. I wrote a suicide note and then I went to the laundry room sink and downed all the pills. I figured I would pass out and die.
I woke up in a hospital room with four beds. The girl in the bed across from me was babbling about her miscarriage she had just had while on acid (LSD). I thought she was insane because she was laughing about the whole thing. Cat Stevens, “Wild World” played on her radio. Music sometimes evokes memories and feelings I’d rather forget. Wild World and Alice Cooper remind me of trying to kill myself to this day.
A psychiatrist at the hospital showed me inkblots. He would show me an inkblot and say: "What does this look like to you?"
"It looks like a fucking inkblot!"
He would then show me another, repeating the question.
"It looks like another fucking inkblot!"
He got me to promise I would never try to kill myself again. He told my parents later I would never try to kill myself again. That was the extent of the therapy.
My pregnant fifteen year old friend and family were my only visitors. Dad said I was so out of it when they called me up for supper they went to see what I had been doing downstairs. This is how they found my note. They took me to the Hospital, where the doctors pumped my stomach.
Mom knew it was a cry for help. No one would listen to her, especially me.
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Chapter 4 – Sex and drugs and rock’n’roll
“Teenage wasteland, oh teenage wasteland, teenage wasteland, they’re all wasted.” ~ The Who, Baba O’Reily
In September, I went into grade ten. In late October, Julie sauntered into our gym class sporting a huge hickey on her neck. I admired her laissez-faire, tough chick attitude. I made friends with her to learn how to be defiant like her. It seemed like a good plan at the time.
The previous spring, she ran away to Vancouver. In the seventies, the in thing for teenagers was to hitchhike out to B.C. Julie was adopted and her adoptive father was in billboard advertising. Billboards were displayed in cities across Canada displaying a huge photo of Julie with the words "Julie, please come home" under the picture.
Julie told me about when she saw it in Vancouver. She said: “Holy shit, here I am high as a kite on junk and I see this huge picture of me on this billboard. I just stood there staring at it and pointing. Man, I was freaked out! When I came down, I called home and my parents sent for me.”
She came back to school with no intention of slowing down. She educated me on the drug scene saying: “The speed in Ottawa is real good but the junk is shit. You’ll love speed and I know where we can buy some pink crystal.” I was eager to try it. It sounded like a solution to my problems. We scraped together money to buy the pink crystal. We went to a house three or four guys from Canterbury rented to do our speed with one of them.
Before my first hit, I said: “Show me how to hit myself so I can do the next hit myself.” She gave me a small hit on the pretext it was my first time. The first hit was amazing. The ether rush was like having an orgasm. You get all warm and fuzzy for a minute. Then, you are speeding for hours. I chased that high for years but you can never recreate the first time. Even though it was great, it wasn’t enough. I said the hit wasn’t big enough. I did the second hit myself.
Julie and I hit up in washrooms all over Ottawa. We wrote our names on walls with our blood we drew up into the syringes. We often hit up at the Community Centre. Once, we threw a point (needle) in the garbage because it was barbed. Later, we went back and dug through the garbage for it because we had run out of points. We found it, sharpened it on a match book and used it. Julie sometimes used toilet water to mix a hit. We thought nothing of putting ourselves in danger of catching a disease by doing things like this.
I could handle large amounts of drugs. I had finally found something I was good at! I hardly showed up at school, instead I got high as often as I could. If I was not partying, I was sleeping. The drugs gave me the ability not to care; but the trick was I had to stay stoned. For the next seventeen years, I could never get high enough and wanted more of whatever my drug of choice was at the time. My mantra was: “I want to get as high as I did that first time, and then I will stop.”