Your Stories

What would have been helpful to our family and Jessie. By Arlene Last-Kolb.

1 if they had addressed the bulling that my son had to deal with almost daily. He had a speech impediment. Jessie couldn’t hear when he was young. It took us awhile to figure it out. He spent a whole year at child development at the children’s hospital. It was a program they ran to be able to observe very young children to be able to figure out what was going on. This is where I spent a whole year watching my son from a small room where he couldn’t see me but I could see them. He went to speech therapy twice a week to learn sign language and to learn how to talk. So when he later started school he started with a aide to help him out. So you can imagine what happened to him at school. The biggest regret I have is that I sent him to school. Of course as he got older with social media it got worse.

2 My son used marijuana to easy his pain and anxiety and as a parent it was hard to see him suffer. He graduated a head of his class, as he was very smart when it came to technology and music. He would have done much better if he could have gotten a trade or start on a career at a much younger age.

3 It would have been helpful to have had a advocate at the hospital the first time Jessie overdosed. We had no idea what we we’re dealing with. We knew something was wrong with our son, but we didn’t know what to do, we we’re in such shock. Someone to help us would have been helpful. Someone to speak up and say you need to treat this family better.

4 Immediate help. We we’re promised the world and my son was given hope and then we we’re kicked out of the St. Boniface and taken to Concordia. I now know looking back at what happened to us, I’m disgusted.

5 Educate our emergency doctor’s and nurse, because it seems like they no nothing about addiction and lack the compassion to even care. There it a lack of compassion in the medical field.

6. To get our doctor’s to stop prescribing our children drug’s to solve their problems. They are self medicating our children. Their giving them drug’s that we as parent’s don’t know anything about.

7. Hold doctor’s accountable for overprescribing. We have clinics and pharmacies on every corner. The same doctor’s than over prescribed oxytocin now run the methadone clinics

8. We needed help and we didn’t get it.

9 When my son suffered a weight lifting accident he was prescribed Percocet and thing’s went bad from there. It gave him the relief from his suffering that he felt his whole life. Now don’t get me wrong my son had a good life, loved his family and many thing’s. Had his own home at 19 and owned two cat’s. He worked for us and just lived a couple of minute’s away. But the bullying that he experience through out his life had a great effect on him. He was a sensitive boy.

10 I think we’re not prepared for this and many more families like mine are going to experience the horrible loss of someone so dear to them, and they’ll say how did this happen to us. A hard working loving family.

I heard something in a old movie I was watching . a girl say’s to her dad ” do you ever wish you had wing’s because common feet aren’t good enough” I think that was my son, he just wasn’t made for here, perhaps he is in a better place. Thank you Arlene Last-Kolb