Los Vegas Nevada aka Sin City
A Novel By Brian Howard Seibert
© Copyright by Brian Howard Seibert
In The Shadow of TASU (The Autism Spectrum Umbrella)
Chapter 4: Betrayal, Los Vegas, Nevada, July 2006:
Although my sister Donna had not appeared to have benefitted from Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, I had not given up all hope of improving her plight. She was being heavily medicated by her institutional physician so that she could be more easily controlled and her dives had been interrupted by her little holiday at West Edmonton Mall, but, more importantly, this just seemed to reinforce my theory that we had a limited window within which to correct the damage done to my son Austin by the oxygen deprivation caused by Persistent Pulmonary Hypertension of the Newborn, PPHN, during his birth. I theorized that we had until he turned five and his brain started hard-wiring itself, to correct the oxygen deprivation damage in a manner that would be natural and fluent. So I don’t feel that the money I spent on my sister, that four thousand dollars, was wasted, but rather an indicator of how expensive it might be to achieve significant improvements at her tender age of forty. Had Austin been given HBOT immediately after his PPHN incident, the damage may have been reversed in one or two dives, but at two years of age it would take a few more months of diving. At Donna’s age, it would take years.
Anyway, I’m sure my mother thought the money wasted and I think my wife Ann must have thought so too, for she seemed to resent the fact that I had spent money on my mentally disabled sister.
I did some research over time on the treatment of the mentally disabled in Alberta. It did not turn out well. In the 1920’s, the Alberta government (along with B.C. and California) experimented with voluntary sterilization of the mentally retarded. Mentally handicapped people who seemed to be problematic could be ordered sterilized so as to not reproduce the problem further, but only with the agreement of their parents or guardian. In the 1930’s the Alberta government took the bold step of introducing involuntary sterilization of the mentally retarded. Mentally handicapped troublemakers could be sterilized involuntarily by court order and medical professionals from the University of Alberta took a major hand in implementing the law and it turned out that natives and Slavic immigrants as well as other minorities were soon targeted for sterilization.
In 1937-38, Adolph Hitler sent Nazi lawyers to Alberta to study how the law had been introduced and implemented and the Alberta model was soon being used in Nazi Germany for the sterilization and euthanization of the handicapped there. In 1945 this practice was stopped in Germany, but in Alberta, sterilization continued until it was banned in 1972 under the Lougheed government. The Alberta government had even implemented laws that this policy could not be discussed in the government legislature under pain of incarceration so, although the Lougheed government took power in 1970, promising to end this heinous crime against humanity, it took them two years to put an end to the criminal policy. In this two year period, my sister Donna was sterilized. But the Alberta government wasn’t done with crimes against humanity. They were still very into their residential school program whereby young native children were stripped from their parents and incarcerated in residential schools where they were systemically raped and murdered and buried out in their schoolyards all across this wonderful country we call Kanata (Canada). The 278 young bodies buried in a Kamloops residential schoolyard is but a tip of the iceberg.
But getting back to the mentally handicapped, in Alberta, 4500 disabled persons were court ordered to be sterilized and 3000 were and 1500 escaped the province with their parents. In B.C. the number was one level of magnitude lower at 300 sterilized, a number that allowed the B.C. government to burn the evidence, all their files, which it did. In Alberta the number of files made it prohibitive, so the proof remains as does the old legislation that turned the crime into policy. Truth and reconciliation my ass. The government officials who perpetrated these crimes against humanity are still out there and their names are still plastered all over buildings across this country. I have heard that many people have sent their University of Alberta degrees back to the university in protest of the involvement of U of A in both of these human rights violations. I’d send mine back too, but it would be the waste of a stamp. Politicians don’t give a shit about anything and parties mean nothing. They are all just the flip side of the same coin. To a certain point anyway.
My wife Ann mentioned to me that there was a Tae Kwon Do tournament in Los Vegas and that her girlfriend Sherry had told her about it and said she’d wanted to send her son Chris, but they couldn’t afford it. Ann then told me she thought it would be a good idea if we paid for her trip as a way of thanking Sherry for all the diving she was doing with Austin. I told Ann that I felt it was sufficient that we were paying Sherry, but Ann kept working me over on it and in the end she got her way. Soon the three of them, Ann, Sherry and Chris headed off to Los Vegas, Chris for the tournament and Ann and Sherry to check out HBOT facilities in the United States. After all, Los Vegas was where they built the Barotech Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber that Austin dove in every day. And for the next week it was me who was diving every morning with Austin and my eldest daughter Amanda took care of the other children while I worked my job in the afternoons and evenings. It was a lot of work for me and it was hard work for my daughters and the trip did not go off without a hitch or two. But my daughters were tough, we all practised Tae Kwon Do. Amanda was twelve years old and a green belt, Sarah was ten and she and I had just become blue belts, my wife Ann was a green belt and Rachel, our six year old, was a shadow warrior. But we were all on a six month sabbatical from the sport while we were diving with Austin. We didn’t have the time or the money to keep up our training, and my wife was off to a Tae Kwon Do tournament in Los Vegas.
The month before Ann was due to leave, she borrowed my credit card and wracked up a thirty four hundred dollar bill that we hadn’t budgeted for, so when she wanted to use my credit card on her Vegas trip, I refused her and told her I would give her one hundred dollars US a day spending money in cash instead. I paid for the three flights and their hotel rooms in Vegas and they could charge their meals and their shows against their rooms, but still my wife felt that five hundred dollars was not enough. She complained that Sherry was taking one thousand dollars with her and I think I retorted that Sherry wasn’t paying for the flights or rooms so she could afford to take that much.
The day they were supposed to leave, I drove them to the airport then I went to work in my office nearby. I soon got a call from my wife to come pick them up. Sherry hadn’t taken any identification for Chris along with her so they were not allowed to board an international flight with a minor. I collected them all at the airport and took them all home. The next day I took them to the airport again and, as they all now had proper ID, they boarded their plane for Los Vegas.
When Ann returned she had several brochures from HBOT clinics she had toured in Vegas. She’d been very impressed by them. They were run by medical doctors and had nurses on staff and seemed to be run more professionally than Gordon’s family oriented Canadian Hyperbarics operation. I pointed out that their rates started at $200 US per hour, over double Gord’s rates, but it seemed to me that after their tours of American facilities, Ann and Sherry just didn’t have the same regard for our HBOT efforts as they’d had before.
Austin finished his dive sessions at the end of August, 2005 and in September we enrolled him in a special Autism early intervention program at the Broxton Park School in Spruce Grove. My wife had already been looking for a house we could rent in the Grove so she could be more nearby. I didn’t want to rent a house, it was an added expense we couldn’t afford, but Ann kept insisting on it. We couldn’t find a decent house to rent so Austin started out school taking a bus from our acreage into Spruce Grove, which, because we were one of the farthest out homes, made for about an hour ride each way. I told my wife she could do the 20 minute drive to take Austin into town if she wished but she preferred to try the bus first. After Austin threw up several times on the bus, Ann decided we were moving into town in earnest.
While Ann was searching for a rental, I finally received a bill from Visa stating that I was several months behind in payments and that the card was over its maximum limit. That was a surprise to me since the Visa card was the only credit card that I had kept fully paid off, except for my unlimited American Express card which had no credit limit. I perused the bill and found about $1500 in charges from Los Vegas and $3000 in charges from clothing boutiques in West Edmonton Mall. My wife had stolen my credit card and had taken it to Los Vegas with her! She was stealing from me! I had given her $500 to spend in Sin City and she had spent another $1500 illegally. I guess if Sherry had spent a thousand, my wife would have to show her up by spending two. Just when I had been terribly betrayed by my wife, she had more terrible news for me.
Ann admitted to intercepting and hiding the Visa bills from me and went on to announce that she had taken the anti-depressant drug Prozac during her last month of pregnancy with Austin. I have never been hit so hard by a statement in my life. It floored me, as, no doubt, my wife had intended it to do. I didn’t know what to say. Ann had started taking Prozac after our third baby was born, but I made her promise me that she would abstain from using while pregnant with Austin. When I brought this up, Ann told me that her doctor had prescribed it to her. He had offered it to her during a bout of depression in February, but she’d refused, then he offered it to her again at the end of June and she started taking it.
Over the next week I did searches on the internet, looking up both Prozac and Fluoxetine, its generic label, and I found the FDA warning, “Not to be administered during the third trimester of pregnancy”! I told my wife that I wanted to sue her general physician, Doctor Kraker, as I was discovering more and more evidence linking Prozac with respiratory trauma during childbirth, evidence from the New England Journal of Medicine that stated Prozac use during pregnancy was causing up to six times the occurrence of Pulmonary Hypertension during birth. It was the same trauma that had caused my son to turn blue and had damaged his young brain.
I told Ann that I was going to sue her doctor and she told me, “If you sue my doctor, I’m leaving you!”
While I was searching for a lawyer to take Austin’s case, my wife was still searching for a house to rent in Spruce Grove. She announced one day that she had found a nice house to rent in Stoney Plain, another nearby town that would cut her drive down to ten minutes, and she said we were moving. I thought about it and told her I wouldn’t be moving with her.
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