Intervention

Cafe Society
1

I sometimes watch Intervention if the previews look interesting. This last one, about the girl in the midwest from the large family (full of Bunnies and Bonnies and Brandis and Bethanies) who was OD’ing on painkillers was disturbing.

No doubt this girl did have chronic pain. Her knuckles were very swollen. But as soon as the mother described the onset of the illness, a rash followed by intense pain, I thought “that’s Lyme disease.” How frightening to see the ease with which local doctors diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis in a person who was so young and then put her on painkillers. The mother was the only family member to care enough to get the tests necessary to diagnose Lyme disease (which the entire rest of the family was interested enough in to call “Lymes” disease).

The family totally creeped me out. They looked pretty average, and on the surface they seemed to care. But the camera crew kept filming this girl who was utterly gorped out getting her car keys and driving! If the family truly cared, how did she get to this point and why did they not have her license revoked?

The father in particular was screwy. All he did was weep and moan, and when the girl’s twin sister exhibited one of the few signs of healthy behavior in the show by telling the girl she couldn’t be a bridesmaid because she didn’t want her wedding spoiled (and whose bright idea was the bridesmaid thing to begin with?) the father acted like the bride-to-be was ruining everything.

This show was a very good example of how the illness in question relates to the entire family. All the girls were vying in a very sick way for their father’s love and attention, which one of them admitted to. A sick person gets a lot of attention, and has no reason to become well if getting attention is the goal.

I find this show fascinating more from what it doesn’t show and from what’s behind the scenes than from the scripts.

2

I missed it…Ivylad had to watch his Buckeyes get their asses handed to them.

I’ll catch it next week.

3

That whole family is fucked up. This is one of the few times that I really felt sorry for the addict. My mom deals with chronic pain and my dad, who’s also been dealing with a lot of pain issues since his cancer diagnosis claims to have been hooked on pain pills following a back surgery he had when I was a kid (no idea if he was actually addicted). I wondered how she managed to get medication to be that messed up before they mentioned that she’d been doctor-shopping. I have a hard enough time getting my doctor to write me an extra refill on some muscle relaxants that I use maybe twice a month. You could tell that the addict in addition to her pain issues was taking bizarre comfort in her diagnosis and the identity she’d built up around it, which is part of why she was so terrified of the idea that she had a different illness. Interesting that instead of the usual “so-and-so has been sober since whenever” the end text talked about her continued usage of alternate meds.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, did it sound weird to anyone else that the bride called the people at her wedding “the audience”?

4

I couldn’t believe how hateful the entire family was toward Brooke. It was like her illness was an inconvenience and just a play for attention in their eyes. I can’t imagine being in chronic pain and having my familt steal my pain medication. Out of the whole awful family, I wanted to slap the twin the most. “MY wedding… MY dream… I don’t want her to hobble down the aisle… me, me, me.”

When the doctor announced that her family understood the level of her pain and Brooke burst into tears asking what did he tell them, I was so sad for her. After all these years of being treated like shit…

5

Glad I’m not the only one who thought the family was a bunch of fuckers. If I’d had a family like that I’d be feeding the drugs to them to shut them up.

The comment about her having a positive test for Lyme Disease and how her mother reacted told me everything. Fucking bitch.

6

Did we see the same program? The twin was the ONLY person in the family to set healthy boundaries. It was totally appropriate to not want her wedding to be ruined by her out of control sister.

The father’s response to the sister’s attempt to set a healthy boundary was what I found interesting. He felt personally offended by her, as if she were the one disrupting the family and not Brooke.

7

Once again, did they show an alternate version of the program in some markets? Her mother was the one who finally managed to get her to doctors who would do more than just shove pain meds at her, and her mother was the one responsible for taking her to a specialist who diagnosed Lyme disease.

Her mother seemed like she’d just had about enough of the whole drama, which is totally understandable. She was the one person in the family actually trying to do something constructive and helpful for her daughter, but she was surrounded by family members who only wanted to dwell in Brooke’s illness. I bet that family hasn’t talked about anything else for years.

8

I dunno. First they tell her not to show up at the hospital during the birth of her neice… Understandable as labour can take hours and she would have been in the way or trouble. BUT they fail to call her once the baby was born and her mother gives her a curt response and hangs up on her.

The next day (so it would seem) After tht she gets a call saying you can’t be in the wedding party.

After that we get a nice veiw of the Bride to be going on endlessly about her day blah blah blah (I hate people like this) The most important day of her life and that crap!! When the father confronted her he said “You’ll find in life there are more important things than this” He was right!

The family wanted to use tough love to face an addiction which in this case was perfectly understandable. They treated her like a heroine Junkie as if it was just a matter of her giving up pain meds. That was not the case. Hell the Doctor who came in said as much. She wasn’t given the proper tools or advice on medicating herself and got caught in a bad spiral but in no way can she be treated teh same way you would treat a junkie.

I dispised the family by the end.

As a footnote The Lyme Disease is still debatable as stated in the end. While getting the proper treatment, Doctors are still giving different diagnosis on her condition.

9

You brought up two things that pissed me off as I was watching this. First, the horrible way Brooke’s mother treated her when she called to find out if her sister was in labor. “The baby was born at blah blah, I’m busy. I have to go.” click Okay, we get that the family is annoyed with Brooke but would it have been so bad to have at least called her to let her know the baby was born? Her mother was just flat out hateful to Brooke. Then daddy starts bitching to Brooke’s twin sister the next day about taking Brooke out of the wedding party. Hypocrite, much? All I could think of was, “Why not take your own damned WIFE to task, you hypocritical son-of-a-bitch?”

In the end, all my sympathy was with Brooke and not one bit with the family. In fact, I was thinking that Brooke being in treatment and AWAY from her family was probably the best thing for her. I just hope she can find the help she needs to control her pain and live a happy life.

10

Is there any way we can find out what happens to the subjects of this show?

11

The show last night and the family really, really pissed me off. The woman obviously has rheumatoid arthritis- possibly brought on by Lyme Disease. RA is extremely painful. As the doctor at the end told the family, she may have been taking more painkillers than she’s “supposed to”, but she very may well have been told to take it that way, to prevent her from being in a lot of pain. I think she needed to be evaluated and counseled and possibly detoxed, and she definitely needed to pursue new, non-narcotic alternatives, but the way her family treated her was horrifying. (However, I’m not sure she was taking all that much. Two Oxycontin and 12 Vicodin and a few muscle relaxers a day sounds pretty normal to me for an RA patient, actually.)

The mother seemed cold and hateful, and the dad seemed like he was putting on a show of caring in front of the cameras.

Doctors that treat pain are aware of and vigilant against abuse, but two of them that I know are of the mindset that yes, their patients will become physically addicted to their narcotic pain meds. But so what, they’re going to be on them for the long-term, and you can’t expect a human being to live in pain- that’s inhumane. There’s nothing inherently wrong in being on continuous pain medication, and it’s perfectly normal to become dependent on it. To lump this chronic-pain patient in with the crackheads and junkies they’ve featured is redonkulous.

12

I don’t really have any commentary to add to the discussion, just to say that I’m damn near obsessed with this show in general. I need an Intervention intervention. OTOH, I’ve found myself sounding like Jeff Van Vonderan sometimes when talking to the adolescents I work with. I heart Jeff.

Carry on!

13

Actually, the sister seemed like a selfish, control-freak to me… Like her wedding is too important to have someone “imperfect” standing up with her… Waiting until the night before the wedding to tell her wasn’t a healthy boundary - it was just plain disgusting.

And the mother was an ass for not even talking with the poor girl on the phone when the baby was born. It’s very obvious there are **alot **of problems with the whole family.

I agree with **Otto **- I felt really sorry for the girl addicted to the pills - and thought her whole families were assholes… I thought it was very appropriate for the girl to question their sincerity at the intervention. “You never understood before, and now you feel sorry for the pain I’m in?”

I’ve had relatives with horrible arthritis, and it’s no picnic - must be even worse when your family isn’t there to support you, and spends all their time working against you.

14

Well you’re right about not waiting til the night before the wedding, and I also wonder why she included her in the first place, since this behavior has been going on for years. But my post referred to “an attempt to set a healthy boundary,” which I think that was. I don’t think the sister cared about imperfection. I think she didn’t want her sister passing out in the aisle or vomiting on her dress, and she didn’t want the entire congregation waiting three hours for her to show up.
Any of these things was pretty likely to happen, based on past incidents.

I actually had a sister-in-law once who reminded me of Brooke. She was in a car accident and then became addicted to pain meds. She certainly was in some pain, but she was also an addictive personality and she didn’t try to find any other techniques to manage her pain or deal with the root cause of it. She just latched onto the pills - which the doctors were all too happy to provide - and descended into the bottomless pit of addiction.

This girl was late to everything. She was four hours late to her own wedding. Each and every family holiday dinner got cold on the table because she hadn’t shown up yet (codependent behavior on the family’s part, of course).

My point is that I know how one person with an addiction can completely screw up family dynamics. Unless everyone in that family is very, very strong and extremely healthy to begin with (and what family is like that?) very ugly things can and do happen to all of them.

I still do think that if the sister didn’t want someone at her wedding - whether it’s five minutes before it started or two weeks prior - it was her wedding and absolutely her right to not have that person there. Of course there are bound to be hurt feelings, but that happens and can be dealt with.

Agreed, and I found that behavior surprising, but who knows what had preceded it? I could totally understand cutting her off on the phone if they knew she was going to go into a begging-pleading-recriminating routine they’d heard thousands of times before. Is anyone in this family allowed to get married or have a baby or have even one minute of time that isn’t about Brooke?

The problem with addicts is that EVERYTHING is about them. I’m reading a lof of stuff from people who don’t seem to know that because they haven’t experienced it. There is no “just include her in the wedding” with an addict. She will find a way to be front and center. She seemed to be hogging her father’s attention, even as a guest. An addict simply cannot behave normally.

I’m sorry for Brooke too. It looked like it was absolute hell to be her. I think the family has responsibility for this and so do the doctors. I think her drivers license should be revoked immediately and her little dog should be taken away before she kills it through neglect. I think she should be living in a supervised setting, because she obviously cannot take care of herself.

I hope she gets the help she needs.

I

15

Well, considering that she mentioned she didn’t want Brooke hobbling down the aisle and Brooke hobbles due to unbearable pain and not the drugs, I’d say that is pretty obsessed with perfection! I cannot imagine how this family would deal if a member was wheelchair bound. Probably accuse the family member of being addicted to the chair and shouting at him/her to “Just walk already!”

16

Did anybody else catch it when the dad said something about how she has Lyme Disease, and so she needs to feel the pain in order to kill the parasites? What the hell?

17

I don’t think any of them is very bright. If they were, would they allow their painful situation to be aired on national TV? :slight_smile: