Last night’s season finale of Hoarding: Buried Alive really made me mad. Not because I particularly care that Maggie, a mother of three almost-adult children, chooses to live in filth and squalor with dangerous (and potentially deadly) furniture avalanches poised to happen at any moment. (Although I did feel sorry for her.) And not because no one can walk through Maggie’s house; they literally have to tunnel through it. And not because she has hundreds of chairs stacked all around her house (often at great heights), and yet no one is able to actually sit on any of them — ever.
I got mad because Maggie is literally putting her 19-year-old son Justin’s life in jeopardy. And I’m not talking about the severe emotional trauma that can result from living with a hoarder (including but not limited to: anger, depression, anxiety, OCD, isolation, fear of bringing friends to the house, abandonment issues). Though she’s certainly contributing to that. I’m referring to the fact that Justin suffers from a condition called spontaneous pneumothorax, which means that at least one of his lungs has collapsed and may well collapse again in the future. When your lung collapses, it’s wickedly and searingly painful. You feel like you can’t breathe (because you can’t). You often need major surgery, an extended hospital stay, a painful chest tube, and hopefully, morphine, which is exactly what happened to Justin. I know these details because one of my sisters lives with a rare, terminal lung disease called LAM, which has caused both of her lungs to completely collapse and require major surgery more times than I care to count. Which is also why Maggie’s refusal to accept and deal with her hoarding problem really pissed me off.
If any of Maggie’s crap were to fall on Justin, or even just poke into the area near his lungs, they would likely collapse again. And there’s no way that all of the dust created by Maggie’s hoarding is good for Justin’s lung condition. Furthermore, if Justin were to require an ambulance again, the paramedics simply would not be able to get into the house to reach him. As it was, when the EMTs took Justin to the hospital during his first lung collapse, they had to unload him through his bedroom window. (Maggie’s junk that she purportedly plans to sell has even encroached on Justin’s room, and she makes a tepid apology for invading his personal space with her emotional-turned-physical baggage whenever he’s out of the house.) Maggie isn’t just breaking Justin’s heart; she’s crushing his lungs.
In Justin’s case, I can only imagine that, on some level, his hospital stay was some of the most comfortable time he’d ever experienced in his young life. He had space. Light. A soft bed. Clean sheets. An uncluttered room of his own. A place to eat. He was not in danger of having large, heavy objects fall on top of him. And he had people around who were actually devoted to taking care of him. Which is far more than I can say about his suffocating existence at home with Maggie.
If you’ve ever been unlucky enough to have a loved one like Justin or my sister who’s suffered with any kind of lung disease, you know that the last thing you’d ever want to do is make it any harder for them to move and breathe than it already is — particularly if your deep-seated, treatable anxieties were to blame.
image courtesy of TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive
Post from: BlissTree
Hoarding: Emotionally Unhealthy -- and Potentially Deadly
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