A Letter to Julia



A Letter to Julia

John D. Locatelli

Preface

Dear Julia,

It is for you that I’ve written this account of what happened to our family during the years your mother took Mirapex. I hope this book will help you come to terms with the tragedy Mirapex caused in all our lives and give you an appreciation of how your mother had prevailed and excelled in life under very difficult circumstances. Your mother would have never hurt you on purpose. Hopefully this will help you understand that your mother was as much a victim of the effects of Mirapex as you were.

By now you might be a young mother yourself with a daughter of your own. I can only pray that you will be as kind and as loving a mom as your mother was to you.

Love Grandpa

People say that large corporations are heartless. That is truly a misnomer. Corporations have thousands of human hearts beating within them, and each and every beating heart is beating within everyday people. These are people we sit next to in church, people we talk to on the bus, our neighbors, our friends, our families. Heartless? Hardly.

Natural disasters shake us to our very core since none, not the wisest, nor the most religious, nor the kindest or loving, understand, can help us understand why. But, even worse are the human made disasters. They are made from greed and indifference. They do not have to happen. Are not natural disasters enough to bear?

Chapter1: Christmas 2008

On October 6, 2008, in desperation, a young wife and mother called out for help to one of the largest pharmaceuticals in the world. That woman was Mary, my daughter. The corporation was Boehringer Ingelheim. In one of her more lucid moments Mary had visited their Web site and gathered hope from what she read there. Hope from the fact that they valued and cared about each and every patient who were prescribed their medications. She was close to giving up, and in her darkest moments contemplated ending her own life. That glimmer of hope saved her that day. Somehow she reached a night watchman on duty in Germany. Was an angel helping her? We don’t know, but by this time she was hardly capable of taking care of herself, let alone call to Germany on her own. Somehow he directed her to the right place to e-mail for help. Somehow she was able to e-mail. That watchman was certainly an angel.

Several days later Mary burst into our house, full of hope for the first time in years. She had just been called from the offices of Boehringer Ingelheim in Connecticut. Mary was in tears describing how nice and understanding their representative Michelle was. Finally, someone could help us. All we had to do was have the family write letters to their legal department in Connecticut describing how their drug Mirapex had affected all our lives. Mary had been on the drug Mirapex for almost three years and we were used to such bouts of grandeur. Mary had schemes to make millions on various Web sites, millions from buying overlooked valuable items at Goodwill, free money from grants that were there for the taking. My wife, Helen, and I had supported her in a scheme to start her own business as a florist. We set up a special room in our basement and dragged home a used cooler to store the flowers in. We essentially paid her salary by buying all the flowers for resale. The business came to naught. Understandably, Helen and I and the rest of our family were skeptical of this new “scheme”.

Mary was so happy to have gotten that call that Helen and I were afraid that if we didn’t respond in a positive way to her excitement we would lose her for good. Privately, we were told by a lawyer friend that Boehringer Ingelheim was most certainly trolling for information they could use against us if we tried to ask for compensation. He advised that the last thing we should do was send the letters. As always, we acted to keep Mary with us. As long as she was alive, there was hope. Helen and I convinced the rest of our family to send the letters. Most of her siblings were suffering from what they called “empathy fatigue” but they agreed to help us against their better judgment. I was also skeptical, but I’ve always believed in the basic goodness of mankind, so I had hope. Our family has always been close and we pull together when we have to. I’m reproducing those letters here exactly as they were sent as I can’t think of a better way to introduce Mary’s story to you.

My Letter

“Mary Magalhaes is my daughter who is 36 years old this year. When she was 15 years old she was diagnosed with Lupus. In spite of her illness she was able to complete college, get married and bare a daughter. After her daughter was born she was able to care for her daughter and also work part time for Microsoft as a paralegal. Eventually she resigned from her position at Microsoft and started her own business. Her first year in business was very successful as she earned over $100,000 and had several employees. During this time she hired an architect to design a remodel of the small cabin on a lake she lived in with her daughter and husband. She also hired several workers to excavate for the basement addition. At this time everything seemed to be working out for her and her family.

Two and one half years ago she was prescribed Mirapex. She did have more energy, but I noticed an immediate change in her behavior. Before Mirapex and during family gatherings she would often have to spend time sitting or lying down. However, she would still engage in activities with everyone else (she has two sisters and a brother) and always sat down to eat with us. But after Mirapex she would spend her time away from the family sewing, and would rarely take time to even sit down with us to eat dinner. She also lost an excessive amount of weight to the point of looking gaunt.

Mary would stay up all night sewing, but would never finish any one project. Often she would go out of the house with dresses pinned together and her underclothes sticking out. Mary apparently had more energy to do things, but that energy was not directed towards the practical.

I didn’t know it at the time, but she was neglecting her business to sew. It was only several months after she started on Mirapex that she lost her business from not doing her legal work. By this time I had completely taken over the building of her house and the funding of it also. The loss of her business left me in a bad position as her cabin was left jacked up eight feet on temporary supports and I felt I had to get safer support for her house by completing the basement addition.

Before Mirapex Mary was a very attentive mother, but after starting on Mirapex she neglected her daughter. Mary wouldn’t comb her hair or bathe her. Many times her daughter would be sent off to school dressed in mismatched and ragged clothes. My wife and I tried to help her out with her daughter, but we didn’t know the extent of her financial problems.

As we eventually found out, her financial problems were enormous. Mary had stopped paying her bills including her mortgage. She simply didn’t open her mail, but spent all her time sewing. By the time I found out the extent of her financial neglect she was deep in debt. The only solution was for her family to declare bankruptcy last January. My wife spent months going through all her unopened mail trying to sort out what she owed.

My wife and I paid a substantial sum to bring her house payments up to date, pay most of her outstanding bills, and to keep the electricity and heat going. To do this my wife and I increased the mortgage on our house by $50,000. Since the basement addition on her house needed to be completed to keep her house livable, my wife and I increased the mortgage on our house a second time by $300,000 with some of this additional money going to pay the substantial bankruptcy fees.

We tried to get my daughter to quit taking Mirapex, but the Mirapex had changed her to the extent that she couldn’t realize how it had changed her behavior, and she was no longer capable of managing her own health and making decisions. I was extremely worried as she was only getting a few hours sleep at night and I was afraid she would eventually become seriously ill.

We finally persuaded her to gradually quit taking Mirapex this last month. Her daughter was also staying up at night when she sewed, sometimes not getting to bed before three in the morning, and this was showing up in her daughter’s school performance. That seemed to convince her to stop the drug. As Mary came off of Mirapex she began to realize the extent of her problem and how far in debt she had gotten her family and her parents. This realization made her alternately mad and depressed that she felt she had literally lost over two years of her life. It was during this gradual tapering off of Mirapex that additional tragedy struck and my worry that Mary’s mind and body would eventually give out from lack of sleep came true.

My wife and I celebrated out 40th wedding anniversary the weekend of September 13th and 14th. We had a party on Saturday night with dancing and planned a more formal gathering on Sunday afternoon. On Sunday morning we received a frantic call from her husband that she was having a violent seizure. We arrived at her house just as the paramedics got there. It was very traumatic for us as she was crying and thrashing in her bed mumbling incoherently. After three days in Auburn General Hospital, many tests and several additional seizures later the doctors attributed the seizures most likely to anxiety and her body readjusting to the decrease of Mirapex after two years on the drug. Mary’s mind and body simply gave out from the stress of lack of sleep and the stress of realizing what had happened to her. Mary and her daughter are now living with us while she is recuperating.

I don’t know when my daughter will be able to start work again. Now in the last week of tapering off of Mirapex she is able to think clearly, but she is still very fragile physically and mentally.

The additional stress of paying Mary’s bills and saving her house will soon force my wife and me into bankruptcy.”

Sincerely, John Locatelli

Her Brother’s Letter

“My name is Adam Locatelli, Mary Magalhaes is my older sister and I live just four houses down from her on the same street. I work from home and have been around pretty consistently over the past three years. This allowed me to be very much a part of my sister’s life and unfortunately, also let me watch her decline in health after she was put on Mirapex. My sister had a great job working as an independent contractor doing legal work for both Microsoft and Accenture. Her business was so successful that I was able to work as an independent contractor myself working under her and helping with the overflow of legal contracts. The first thing to be lost to the medication as her mental health started to decline was her job. I noticed something was wrong when my workload suddenly dropped off to nothing and then we lost our contract work for both companies. It turns out my sister had just stopped working all together but had not told anyone.

This was when I started to notice that her whole personality had started to change. She was no longer the sister I had known for so long, but was a different person. I saw her life get consumed little by little and saw all the hurt it was causing to all of us around her. She stopped talking to people like she used to, and started filling her time with constant projects that she could never put down. She would stay up the entire night sewing random dresses and clothes, and there seemed to be no way to get her to stop. I saw this change impact her daughter Julia in many bad ways. My sister had lost the ability to be a mother, and even to be a wife. Nothing was done around the house, she never cooked anything, she never cleaned up, she never helped with homework, and she just wasn’t all there. Luckily with us so close down the street, we were able to feed and dress Julia and make sure that she got off to school alright. There were many days I can remember having to pick Julia up at the bus or get her after school simply because my sister could not remember to pick her up.

Over the next couple years things only got worse. She was not eating hardly anything and started to get very thin. She was always wearing only about half of a dress that she would be in the process of sewing. She never had a complete outfit on like she would have worn before. She was always tired and looked much worn out, a result of not sleeping or eating enough. It seemed like we couldn’t even trust her to go out by herself anymore, and most of the time that was true. She would impulsively buy tons of plants, things off the internet, and constantly be buying stuff at goodwill that she had no where to put in her small house. Stuff piled up everywhere, in her house, in her car, and she really seemed like a wreck.

I also noticed a very scary change in her demeanor. She had become very depressed and would talk about suicide at times and it would really scare me. I can remember a day when it was just me home and I had to basically stop her from drowning herself in the lake. I was witness to a lot of unpleasant times and situations, and I never want to have to constantly worry about her again like that. In addition to the suicidal tendencies, she had also become distant and just didn’t have that spark in her eyes that she used to. She was so unlike herself that I was wondering if that person I knew was ever going to come back.

Financially she was doing really bad but was good at hiding it. I only found out about this when I learned that my parents were going to have to bail her out with a loan they took out on their house. She had over $200,000 in debt that had accrued while she could not work or even pay her bills. This ended up putting my parents in a very bad financial situation as well and I witnessed this start to tear my family apart. She was going to lose her house and ended up having to declare bankruptcy to avoid that. As it sits now and from what I understand, there is still a possibility that she will lose her house, and in turn we could lose ours as well. These problems have put a tremendous strain on everyone in the family, caused a lot of stress, and even depression problems with a lot of us, me included.

Recently, she was finally taken slowly off of the Mirapex. It didn’t take long until I started to see glimpses of my sister coming back again. Even more crazy, was watching her get her mind back and seeing her realize everything she had done in the past few years. She is now completely off the pills and I can say that she is back to the person that I had always known growing up. It has meant everything to me to get my sister back, but there is no way to get back all the time and money that was lost. She lost almost three complete years of her life and we lost out on those three years of her life as well. Nothing can bring them back. I am just thankful that my sister is still here with us, and still here for her husband and daughter. I know we are lucky that these problems with the medication were discovered. If they had not, I am certain that she would not be here today. Thank you for your time.”

Sincerely, Adam Locatelli

Her Mother’s Letter

“My name is Helen Locatelli and my daughter’s name is Mary Magalhaes. It’s hard to put into words the effect that Mirapex has had on our family and especially Mary. She went from being a happy, competent, reliable person to a distressed, dependent, manic one. At times, it was almost more than I could bear.

She because extremely compulsive to the point that she neglected even the most normal things in life like eating, sleeping and keeping herself and her environment clean. She went from being a loving, caring mom to one who was bothered by the nuisance of having a daughter to care for. I had to step in and take over the responsibility of getting Julia up for school, dressing her, feeding her, bathing her, helping her with her homework and keeping her oblivious as to what was happening to her mom. These were very formative years in Julia’s life and she missed out greatly on her mom’s presence of mind to interact with her.

I recall standing at the bus stop many times with Julia thinking, “why can’t Mary just be normal like these other mothers?” I so badly wanted her to just be able to get Julia up in the morning, feed her, dress her and walk to the bus with her. I didn’t think I was asking for too much! It wasn’t because I resented doing those things at all. It was only because I wanted Mary to be living a normal life.

Before Mary started taking Mirapex she ran a very profitable business. She not only employed herself but also was able to pay me, her two sisters and brother to work for her. We were all dependent upon the income we received from her. Bit by bit our work started slowing down. We soon realized that it was because Mary was neglecting her work to do things like make clothes out of curtains, wander aimlessly around stores, paint anything in sight, search Craig’s List for people or animals that needed help, etc. that kept her from her work. Eventually she lost her job and with that, ours were lost as well.

It got to the point where I was afraid to have Mary out of my sight. We conveniently live down the street from her so this helped immensely when it came to watching out for Julia or keeping tabs on Mary. We knew that Mary was suicidal because she was extremely depressed and at times definitely lost her will to live. From time to time she would take off in her car and I truly would fear for her life. She would often get confused and forget where she was going or how to get back home.

On a recent occasion she took off with Julia in the car. She had seen an ad on Craig’s list for a house 80 miles away that was being torn down. She took a crow bar with her and had every intention of driving to that house to pry out windows she thought she could use for a greenhouse. When I tried to call her on the phone she wouldn’t answer. Finally her seven year old daughter picked up the phone. I had to keep her on the phone as if I were a 911 operator. I asked Julia to describe where she was by reading the names on street signs or buildings near her. Mary had broken down emotionally and was unhappy with Julia for being on the phone with me. This was the first time ever that I’d experienced Mary not wanting to talk with me as we always had been very close. I spent the next couple of hours trying to track them down and eventually found them about twenty miles from home. Mary and Julia had not eaten anything for quite some time and there would’ve been no way for Mary to continue to drive anywhere. I managed to coax her into my car and then I took the two of them to a restaurant to get them some food. Another family member came to pick up her car.

I used to write in a journal daily. I went back over my journal for the year 2006 and began to excerpt out things I’d written regarding Mary and the effects that Mirapex were having on her. It was mind boggling to realize that this situation had been going on for almost three years. It made me feel sick to my stomach to re-visit many of the horrible experiences I’d been through with Mary over that time period.

Her brother, Adam, was very much affected by this entire situation. He became very depressed and suicidal as a result of worrying about his sister. He prevented her from drowning herself at one point. He feared being left alone with her. His moods were directly affected by how she was doing and I knew that mine were as well. I never became suicidal but I certainly felt like giving up many times over. I saw no end in sight and no hope for recovery for any of us.

She didn’t want any of us, including her husband, to know that she was not paying any of the bills. Because she had been so competent before, all of us assumed that things were running along as normal. It came as quite a shock to us when we realized that she hadn’t been paying her mortgage or other bills and consequently they were going to foreclose on her house. She ended up having huge credit card bills that were a result of compounded interest and late fees rather than any purchases.

In an effort to bail her out and try to save her house, my husband and I re-mortgaged our house to the point where we are not able to hold onto it. I have been desperately trying to hold both of our households together on very little money. My husband had to retire recently and that has cut our income down substantially.

At our urging and as a result of seeing the devastation in Mary’s life as a result of taking Mirapex, Mary started to get weaned off the drug. This was a long time coming because earlier attempts at talking to her about the possibility of getting off it were met with anger and accusations that we didn’t want her to feel good anymore.

Things came to a head a couple of weeks ago. I think Mary’s body had finally decided that enough was enough. She started having a “seizure” where her body shook uncontrollably and she couldn’t speak clear words. 911 was called and she was rushed to the hospital. After spending several days there and having many tests, the doctor finally concluded that the seizure, as well as the subsequent ones she had in the hospital, were a result of anxiety from coming off the Mirapex drug. Even though she was coming off of it slowly, her body had been so used to having that drug in her that she reacted badly. This was a very scary time for us. I really thought we might just lose her completely.

I’m happy to say that life is finally returning to normal now that she is completely off Mirapex. The sad part is that the devastation it caused and the years it took from her and us can never be reclaimed. It has left its nasty mark on us financially and emotionally. Mary looks at friends and relatives now as if she hasn’t seen them in almost three years. She can’t believe she’s 36 years old. She gave her daughter a bath for the first time in several years yesterday and was surprised to learn that Julia knew how to wash her own hair. She was thrilled that she has a daughter and can be a mom to her.

Though I am also thrilled that our Mary is back, there’s a part of me that aches inside. I’m trying to focus on the future and not think of the past three years that have been robbed from me. I wonder how many long-lasting effects this situation will have on all of us and it scares me.”

Sincerely, Helen Locatelli

Her Sister’s Amy’s Letter

“I am writing on behalf of my sister, Mary Magalhaes, who contacted you concerning her experience with your pharmaceutical, Mirapex. I was told it would help you see a clear picture of how the medication affected my sister’s life if family members wrote of their observations.

I feel that the family’s experience with Mirapex was love/hate: Mary loved it and we hated it. Mary had spent much of her life in pain due to Lupus. After starting Mirapex in early 2006 she was in seventh heaven. She said that she was finally waking up rested and without pain, which was good news to all of us. However, it became apparent over time that not only was Mary more energetic and awake, but that it was to an abnormal level.

Whereas Mary was always an active participant in family gatherings, she was now preoccupied with other things, particularly sewing. If the rest of us were watching a movie, she would say she would come in a few minutes, but would never show up, having spent all that time searching on–line for fabric. She would frequently stay up all night sewing, even to the point of sewing what she was wearing. She seemed to have no capacity to self-regulate her activity. She did not seem “present” with other people, distracted by her own thoughts and interests to a degree she had not been before.

However, it was not just sewing that became an obsession to her. No matter what it was, she would become extraordinarily enthusiastic about it. For instance, in the summer of 2006 she took in a dog that was unable to stay with its owners because they could not handle his being blind. She loves animals and has a tender heart, but became so obsessed with this dog that she forsook all other things, including her job. I went out to pick up her daughter, Julia, so that she could concentrate on her job, but instead she spent the time dealing with the dog. At this point my husband and I went out to talk to Mary and her husband, Joe, about their situation. When we walked in the house we found the table completely covered with sewing materials and the rest of the room as well. Mary cried and asked us if we wanted her to feel tired and achy again. In fact, Mary was very upset with anyone if they suggested she should go off the drug and accused them of wanted her sick.

Things only got worse from there. Mary ended up losing her job because she could not concentrate on it. She could stay up all night sewing, but couldn’t spend several hours a day on work. Her only child had always been her pride and joy. In fact, if you asked Mary who or what she loved best in the world, she would say, “Julia”. It soon became apparent, however, that her regular self was being eclipsed by the medicated one. Julia was left to her own defenses while Mary pursued sewing, or at a later date, flower arranging. Julia was late for school, and when she did arrive, her hair would be uncombed. At one point, she didn’t even have shoes that fit. Meals were irregular or nonexistent. Mary would show up at a family gathering in a newly sewn outfit with hair and makeup done, but Julia would be unkempt and perhaps not even dressed.

Finally, this year, after her job was lost, she was not able to tend to her daughter, she wasn’t keeping track of bills, and could not regulate her activities, she could no longer pretend that this medication was a good thing. She may have felt better, but her life was in shambles. At this time she also had a dental visit where the dentist was flabbergasted at the state of her mouth. She had several cavities, needed three root canals, and had an infection in her whole jaw. The dentist said there was no way that her normal care and visit schedule would permit such rapid decay and that it must be related to a medication. Shortly after this, in September of this year, Mary was hospitalized with seizures the doctor said was a result of stress and medication.

I truly feel that Mirapex robbed my family of my sister for the last two and half years, and that Mary was not herself for the time she was on this medication. It was like poison for my sister. Her life rapidly descended into shambles, but she was not able to notice it. Because she is considered an able-bodied adult there was not much we could do to change the situation until it became so bad that even in her drugged state she could not avoid confronting what was happening to her.

I hope this information will be of some use to you. Thank you for your time.”

Sincerely, Amy Locatelli Stoelinga

It is 6:30 a.m. Christmas morning and Helen and I are still wrapping presents. We have hardly had any sleep for weeks. Before I retired Helen had a small business, more like a hobby actually, selling gift items at two flowers shops and from a small booth in a mall in Puyallup, Washington. I had planned to retire on my University of Washington pension and the equity in our home. We started out building equity in houses by living in and remodeling two houses in Seattle, and then building a log house in Hobart, Washington about 15 minutes from where we live now. All these projects were family built, wiring, plumbing, everything. Four years ago our family built our present house on lake property my parents bought in 1953. This house was supposed to be our retirement home. However, as described in the letters to Boehringer Ingelheim, we were blindsided by Mirapex. We never saw it coming, and the emotional and financial damage was done before we knew what was happening. Consequently we needed extra income from somewhere to try to keep ours and Mary’s family afloat.

A friend told us about a small flower and gift shop for sale in Enumclaw, Washington, about 20 minutes from our house. Since Helen had experience with buying and selling gifts and Mary had shown amazing talent in flower design, we bought the shop hoping it would give us income and help Mary back into reality by giving her purpose in life. We also hoped it would help our son Adam recover from the trauma of Mary’s behavior by giving him something positive to focus on.

Unfortunately, Mary has been able to work only sporadically at the shop. Helen and I are at the breaking point this morning. Mary has forgotten who had died during her years on Mirapex. We have to tell her the truth that this or that person is no longer with us, but it sends her into spasms of sobbing. We have had to put together arrangements ourselves, and fill in with other people. Sometimes we simply can’t fill orders. Mary tries to work, but can’t seem to organize her thoughts. The slightest thing will distract her. She does wonderful flower arrangements, but we are losing business as she can’t get the orders done on time.

Here we are, trying to make a normal Christmas for our family, and especially for Mary’s daughter Julia, who really is the innocent victim. Julia has suffered in unmentionable ways. The low point, if there could be a low point amongst all the horror, was when over a week ago Mary wandered away from our house. We had the neighbors searching along the lake as we were afraid she’d thrown herself in. We tried to shield Julia from all of this, but it was impossible. We called the police and they found her wet and shaking walking along a dark road. In her despair Mary was trying to walk to the Enumclaw flower shop.

Can we get through this Christmas? We don’t know. Will Helen and I be here next Christmas? We are not sure anymore. What is our future, who knows? We are in correspondence with the legal department at Boehringer Ingelheim through a senior paralegal Virginia Ruszczyk and with Vincent Lodato from their law firm of Sills, Cummis & Gross. We have no lawyer. The final chapters of this book are still being written, the outcome uncertain. Will they help us? Mary already has lost faith in the medical establishment. I pray every night that Michele at Boehringer Ingelheim was sincere and not trying to take advantage of a mentally sick and desperate woman. I fear that a cold shoulder from Boehringer Ingelheim will push Mary over the edge.

We got to bed around seven a.m. Christmas morning and had just fallen asleep when our son-in-law Joe woke us up. Our carport had collapsed from the snow load and damaged my son’s car and our Mustang convertible. I had meant to shovel the snow, but wanted to help my desperate wife wrap presents instead. My son looked at the mess and summed it up when he said “Happy f------ Christmas”.

Chapter 2: Where Mary Came From

My father, James John Francis Locatelli was born in Butte, Montana in 1907. Family lore has it that his father, Stephen, was so overjoyed that he finally had a son after seven daughters that he used all the boy’s names he’d been saving up on my dad. My dad’s mother, Martha Calagari, had immigrated to Butte from a small Italian town close to the French border. Her passage had been paid for by a wealthy man in Butte with the understanding she would marry him soon after arriving. However, after she met him in person, she changed her mind and refused to marry him. Instead she took a job in a Butte hotel so she could pay him back. Interestingly, my maternal grandmother, Kate Wagner Schwarz, was also living in Butte at that time. She remembered much talk in Butte about the beautiful young woman from Italy that refused to marry the man she had promised to marry. Grandma actually went to the hotel out of curiosity to meet her. What a pleasant surprise for Grandma when Dad married her daughter Wilma Wagner Schwarz and Martha became her in-law.

My father was only five when my grandfather Stephen died from what was called at the time “Black Lung Disease”. As were most of the immigrants, Stephen was a miner in one of Butte’s deep gold mines. He worked for shares. My father was too young to remember, but his oldest sister recalled when Stephen came home one evening very excited. He had uncovered a rich vein of gold ore. However, the next day he discovered that the owners of the mine had moved him to another shaft and were mining the vein for themselves. Such was the life of the immigrant miners. The miners had a saying that in an accident the owners would try to save the mules that pulled the ore from the mines first, then the miners. After all, the mules were more valuable than the miners since they had to be trained and were less numerous. There were always new immigrants. Because of the ill treatment he received, Stephen hoped to get out of the mines by starting a small store catering to the Italian immigrants. He started the store, but his dream was cut short by his early death.

Eventually my father’s older sisters married and moved away from the mines to Seattle, Washington. Western Washington’s forests, lakes and salt water sound were a paradise compared to Butte’s mining devastated countryside. Later, my father, his mother Martha and the younger siblings also moved to Seattle in search of a better life for all of them. My father was only a boy when he was put behind the wheel of a large Cadillac touring sedan and trusted with driving his mother and sisters to Seattle. I liked traveling to Butte from Seattle with my Dad since he could point out the traces of the old road from the new freeway, and I enjoyed hearing stories of his trip. My father had to grow up fast and take on adult responsibilities to help his widowed mother.

My maternal grandfather, Frank Schwarz, was raised outside of Chehalis, Washington on land his parents settled on before Washington was a state. That distinction makes it possible for my family to join the Pioneers of Washington State. While my mother’s sister Carolyn was still alive, she was always very careful to keep me enrolled. My grandfather and his brothers built the original homestead house which was still standing a few years ago, vacant, but with the original hand-carved shingles intact. My grandfather had a clear memory of carving the shingles as an after school chore.

My grandmother married Frank Schwarz in Chehalis. At first, Frank and Kate ran a small restaurant in a local hotel. Later they moved to McCleary, Washington where Frank found work logging. Grandma raised her three daughters there, my mother Wilma and her sisters Carolyn and Franketta. My grandparents were hoping to have a boy to name after my grandfather, but made up the name Franketta when the third daughter came along. Grandma did skilled work in the factory and I can still remember, as a little boy, Grandma proudly showing me a sample piece of plywood where she had replaced a knot with an insert. Grandma excelled at telling stories of her childhood and of imaginary characters she made up. My brother and I and our cousin Kathy would pile in bed with her in the morning and listen for hours to her tales. What great memories for us to have.

After graduating from high school, my mother Wilma moved to Seattle to attend a business college. My mother and her sister Carolyn graduated first and second in their high school class. Mom had really wanted to go to the University of Washington, but as for many people of that era money was too tight. During the depression she worked for a bus company. One of her jobs was to sort the bus tickets. After she finished sorting her boss would have her scramble the tickets and then sort them over again so that he would have an excuse to keep paying her salary. How is it that the owners of the mines in Butte valued the mules over the miners, but my Mom’s boss made work for her so she could stay employed? How can some businesses care about people, but others not?

Dad was going to Broadway High School in Seattle when he had to quit school to find work to support his mother. Like my mother, Dad always regretted not being able to go to college. He eventually found work in a Seattle Oldsmobile agency and on a blind date met Mom. They begin their life together in a rumble seat and were never separated until Mom died in her seventies. After they were married they lived with my Dad’s mother in the University District taking care of her until she died. Most of Dad’s family was living in the University District, but my parents broke tradition and in 1949 built a very modern view home in West Seattle that overlooked Puget Sound and further westward, the Olympic Mountains. The first floor of the house was cantilevered over the basement. I can still remember visitors being afraid to stand in front of the floor to ceiling view windows for fear of falling. West Seattle was where I grew up.

January 4, 2008: Mary has been slowly getting better, but still hasn’t been able to drive without getting hopelessly lost. I’ve been driving her to work and on her errands. Mary still has occasional seizures, but they are not as bad as the ones that put her in the hospital. The seizures seem to come at night when the events of the past three years become clearer to her. Mary tries to put such thoughts out of her mind, but can not always do it. She is able to work at our flower shop, but still has trouble focusing on her tasks. Before Christmas, we were afraid that we would have to have her institutionalized, but now I don’t think that will happen. But, will she ever be OK again? We fervently hope so.

I can understand that all medications come with risks. Even the common over-the-counter drug Aspirin has the risk of internal bleeding. Common side effects of other popular drugs are sleepiness, nausea, and itching. More serious side effects can be life threatening such as heart and breathing problems. However, all these side effects can be evaluated by the person that takes the drugs. They can then decide if the beneficial effect of the medication is worth the drawbacks of the side effects. But, what about a medication like Mirapex that robs a person of their mind so that they cannot make rational decisions? Even with her world crashing down around her, Mary thought everything was fine, even better than ever. Mirapex made her incapable of deciding if the side effects of Mirapex were too awful to continue taking it, or, even if there were any side effects. Such a medication is more insidious than other medications with more serious side effects. At least with those medications one can quit if the side effects are too onerous. Our family tried to get Mary to stop taking Mirapex, but the effects of the drug made it impossible. By the time we realized the extent of her problems the damage was already done.

My wife Helen’s grandparents on her mother’s side came from Sweden, and Norway. Even though Helen’s mother, Gudrun, was born in West Seattle, Gudrun could only speak Norwegian and Swedish when she first started school. Her maternal grandfather worked in the local brick factory. He walked to work six days a week, several miles each way. Helen never knew her father or her grandparents on his side. They were Poles that lived in Kiev, Russia, and her father Leo Verbon and his brothers escaped from Russia during the Russian revolution. Leo was the best educated of all Mary’s grandparents. He was a nationally known Naturopath that was the director of Spaulding General Hospital in Portland, Oregon. Patients would come from out of the area to be treated at his clinic, one of whom was Walt Disney’s mother. Helen’s family still has the cartoon of Mickey Mouse, drawn by Walt Disney, thanking Leo for curing Walt Disney’s mother of cancer. Gudrun told stories of Walt Disney coming to visit them in Portland and bringing Disney character toys for the children. Leo was also an ordained minister and traveled weekly between Portland and Seattle to deliver sermons. He combined his faith with his medical practice.

After Leo’s premature death when Helen was ten months old, Gudrun moved to West Seattle to be close to the rest of her family. So my future wife and I grew up together in West Seattle only a few miles apart, but as I was four years older than her we didn’t meet until I was senior in college at the University of Washington and Helen was a senior at West Seattle High School. My father’s family, like my mother’s, had always valued education, but because of their circumstances higher education was not always possible. My brother, Jim, and I were never told directly that we were expected to continue on to higher education, but both felt that since our parents never had the opportunity to go to college it was an opportunity we could not squander. Because of this both my brother, who was four years older, and I were pretty bookish and finished in the top of our high school classes. Neither of us had much time for social activities, especially in college, so by my senior year I hadn’t really dated much.

In 1966 my friend Karl was playing basketball on a local church team, and I believe he was required to attend some other church activities to remain on the team. While there he took a liking to the daughters of the minister. The senior youth group was going camping over Labor Day at Twin Harbors State Park on the Washington Pacific Coast. Karl thought if we went camping at the same park we might have a chance to meet up with the minister’s daughters. I was game since I was finally determined to find a girl friend. We ended up camping not far from the church group. Karl and I tried spotting the minister’s daughters, but we couldn’t seem to find them. Ironically, the minister had just left to take a new position elsewhere and he and his daughters were not there. At that time Karl and I didn’t know this so we kept looking. Karl and I were out on the beach scouting for the daughters and we noticed two young women leaving the church group so we caught up with them and tagged along. The women were Helen Verbon and her friend Beverly. Helen and I hit it off immediately. A few days later I went to see Helen in West Seattle along with Bill, another friend of mine. We all talked for awhile on her front porch. After we left Bill predicted that Helen and I would eventually get married. Bill said it was because Helen liked to kid around and I could take it. I guess Bill was right since forty years, four children and three grandchildren later our feelings for each other haven’t diminished. There is so much chance in life, some of it good and some of it bad. The lack of the minister’s daughters turned out to be good luck for me and bad luck on the beach for Karl. Things did turn out OK for Karl as eventually he did get a blond girl friend and he ended up marrying her.

Both my family and Helen’s were very family oriented. Helen was related to (it seemed) half of West Seattle and I had lots of relatives in the North Seattle area. Both families were always visiting back and forth and some of mine and Helen’s fondest memories involve getting together with family on holidays. After Helen and I got married we settled in West Seattle so we could be near my parents and Helen’s mother. Helen was only nineteen and I was twenty three. I was a scientist at the Atmospheric Sciences Department at the University of Washington and Helen settled into homemaking. We decided to have children right away since both our parents were (or, so we thought) getting older and we wanted our children to have the experience of grandparents and our parents to have plenty of time to enjoy them. Now that I’m 63 I realize that our parents in their early 60’s and late 50’s were not as old as we thought.

Helen and I were pretty naïve when it came to life. We were married in Helen’s West Seattle church in September. Helen loved holidays and was really looking forward to our first Thanksgiving together, especially having dinner at both our parent’s homes along with other relatives and our siblings. Helen started not feeling well just after we arrived at her mom’s house, and spent most of the dinner laying in one of the upstairs bedrooms. I can still remember Helen’s mother and her Aunt Edith exchanging knowing looks after they checked on Helen. We were surprised, but happy to learn that Helen was most certainly pregnant. We found out soon enough that nausea is one sign of a coming baby.

Helen was very athletic when I met her. When she was younger her older brother Richard taught her how to lift weights, throw the shot put and run. It’s a shame that she was born too early to make use of the blossoming of women’s sports that happened in the 70’s as she could have been a star athlete in several sports. Helen and I hadn’t finished childbirth classes when our first daughter Amy was born. Helen was only in labor for a few hours and she delivered an hour after we arrived at the hospital. Helen hadn’t yet turned twenty. A few days later Helen didn’t even look like she had ever been pregnant. The others in the child birth class were really surprised when Helen showed up at the next week’s class with a baby instead of a fat stomach.

Three years went by before Helen became pregnant again. During those three years we had moved out of a small apartment into a house built in the 1940’s. It was on this house that we started what was to become a lifetime of house remodels and new constructions. Because our first daughter had come so fast with minimal labor we rushed to the hospital when the first signs of labor started. However, this time the labor was quite long and finally the doctor decided to induce the birth. The doctor predicted that the baby would come at 5:30 p.m. and at 5:29 on April 29th, 1972 our second daughter Mary was born.

There are many, many interesting stories and anecdotes that I could tell you about Mary’s grandparents. Mary came from solid working class stock, but also from people that badly wanted to continue their education and encouraged their children to do so. But, if there is only one impression of her grandparents that I would like you to come away with, an impression that explains the essential Mary, is it is this one. Never from anyone, have I heard anything bad ever said about Mary’s grandparents. On the contrary, they were well liked by everyone.

Mom was the hub of my father’s family. Many mornings in the summer when school was out and I could sleep in I could hear Mom talking to one or the other of my father’s many sisters. They all confided in her because she was a good listener and non-judgmental. I never remember Mom speaking to me in anger. She was everyone’s friend. Years after my mother died, people still came up to me and told me how much they enjoyed my mother. These were relatives, people that knew Mom through PTA and friends from church.

My father worked over forty years for the Oldsmobile agency in Seattle. That was long enough for anyone to get a reputation, good or bad. My brother and I would frequently buy auto parts at various parts stores around Seattle. Invariably, when we gave our name, they would always ask if we were related to Jim Locatelli. Since we were the only Locatelli’s in the Seattle area, being his son was a foregone conclusion. Then we had to listen to a story or two of how fairly Dad treated them and how much they liked him. Then they always gave us a big discount on the part’s price. Children don’t always appreciate their parents until they become parents of their own. I was always embarrassed when this happened, but now I realize how proud I was to be his son.

Helen’s father, Leo, was very charismatic in his medical practice. His reputation was widespread for his ability to heal people, not only through his medical ability, but as much through his force of personality. He had tremendous empathy for his patients. It’s said that he lit up rooms every time he walked into them and his presence was immediately known. Helen’s mother, Gudrun, never said anything bad about anyone, not even to her children or closest friends. Before I met Gudrun, I had never met anyone like that. My parents were extremely well liked, but on occasions they did complain about other people. Gudrun never said anything about other people unless she could say something good about them. Even her later years as she grew more dependent on her family for help, she retained her good nature. Sometimes I wished she had been not as nice to everyone, as I felt people took advantage of her kind and forgiving nature. But, that was her nature.

Mary is very much like her grandparents in temperament. Mary loves everyone. When the other grandchildren were off playing, she could spend hours sitting with her grandparents and listening to them telling stories of their childhood. Mary wasn’t just doing it to be nice; Mary loved being with them and hearing their stories. Even when the drug Mirapex had stolen her mind that part of Mary’s personality didn’t change. Mary is kind to everyone, even people she shouldn’t be kind to. Mary, like Gudrun, can be taken advantage of. She also has enormous empathy for others like her grandfather Leo had. Everybody gets a hug, especially those that don’t often get them. Parents of a daughter that had recently died came into the flower shop where Mary worked to arrange for funeral flowers. As they were leaving, Mary felt compelled to follow them outside. She hugged both of the parents then gave the mother a single lily relating to them that she had a strong feeling that their daughter wanted her to give them that single lily. They both broke down crying and told Mary that lilies were their daughter’s favorite flower. Such is Mary.

Everyone loves Mary. If I included all the testimonies on Mary’s character from all her friends, those testimonies alone would fill up this book. If I listed instead all the bad things said about Mary this book would be totally blank. I’d like to end this chapter with a cute story from Mary’s early childhood. Mary was still in grade school when we told her we would be moving to a new address as we had outgrown our second house with the promise of more children in the future. I kidded her by saying that in addition to learning a new address she would have to pick a new name for herself. She became very quiet; then after a few minutes thought Mary said, in all seriousness, that she would like her new name to be Gloria. If only life was that simple.

Chapter 3: Mary is Diagnosed with Lupus

January 28, 2009: Mary had seemed to be getting better every day, but today was a real setback for her. Helen came home very discouraged tonight as Mary was simply not able to focus on only two simple tasks arranging flowers. Despite the fact that Helen stood by her and tried to get her to accomplish what she needed to do, nothing got done. She was very easily distracted by anything and everything. She got frustrated with herself and everything around her. She couldn’t figure out if that was because she hadn’t eaten or because her brain just wasn’t working correctly. My wife got her some food and told her that her only job was to sit down and eat. She did do that after being reminded several times. She was a bit better after that but still not able to accomplish much of anything. It wasn’t until perhaps mid-afternoon that she finally got one of the jobs done.

Meanwhile, flowers had been delivered from the wholesaler. One of the things delivered were some pink tulips which were needed for an arrangement the next day. In fact, one of the simple tasks Mary needed to do was to arrange those tulips in a vase with just some filler. Mary thought the shop had to pay too much for those tulips so she sent them back with the driver. Unfortunately, there were no tulips to replace them with so the flowers will have to be bought at a local store at full retail price in order to fill the order. Mary realized her error and was again very frustrated and discouraged for making that decision.

It’s almost a full time job just to have someone, like my wife or myself, standing by Mary when she is like this. She needs continual prodding and has to constantly be reminded to stay on task. She worries about what we are thinking about her and expresses concern over that. It’s pretty exhausting all the way around.

Our first house was on 35th Avenue SW in West Seattle. We had been looking at houses in West Seattle for some time and had asked my father to help us. The last time my dad shopped for houses was in 1949 so he was in for major sticker shock. One of the houses we looked at was so small that the bathroom only had a three quarter sized bathtub in it. Helen, at five foot three inches couldn’t even fit in it. Other houses were just as bad with another having such a small kitchen that the refrigerator was on the landing of the basement stairs. This was the early 1970’s and our budget was in the $10,000 range. My father thought that we should be able to find a really nice home for that price, but he soon found out otherwise. By the time we found the house on 35th we were pretty discouraged. It was a “for sale by owner”. The price was more than we wanted to pay ($15,950), but the kitchen had the refrigerator in it, and it even had a small eating area. The bathroom had a full sized tub in it. It looked like heaven to us.

My father had designed and helped build his dream house overlooking Puget Sound. This gave me hope that we could remodel the 35th Ave. house with my Dad’s help. It had an unfinished basement and an unfinished attic. With the purchase of that house we were off and running straight into life. This is the house we lived in when Mary was born.

We were so excited to find a house that actually had a real bathtub that both Helen and I were very surprised to discover when we moved in that the main floor was painted a pumpkin orange; a real pumpkin orange. So, the first order of business was to repaint the downstairs. We put walnut paneling on the fireplace wall, painted the other walls white, and antiqued the woodwork. It looked really good to us, but looking back on it now we were certainly children of the 70’s. Helen also went to classes to learn decoupage and how to make large molded grapes. We remolded the kitchen, replacing rotted windows, taking out a wall, adding a new sink and countertop, wallpaper and paint, and new electrical plugs. Yesterday I was looking through our box of saved wallpaper to use some in an Easter window display for our shop and ran across our old kitchen pattern. It brought back nice memories from that period. We even put Helen’s dream fence, a white picket fence around the front yard. We didn’t have much money, but we were happy.

Helen’s cousin, Gail, who lived a few blocks away, had morning sickness while watching a game show on TV. Ever since then, if she sees that show it makes her nauseated. That was the first I’d heard of that happening, but it was soon to hit home at our house. Helen’s pregnancy with Amy had been so uneventful that Helen’s pregnancy with Mary caught us by surprise. Helen was definitely sicker with Mary, but that was not all that happened. While Helen was pregnant with Mary I was still working on the attic. I was turning it into a bedroom for Helen and I and another for Amy and the new baby to come. Helen was pretty far along when all I had left was to install the carpets. We had wanted nice plush carpeting with a lush pad underneath, but had to settle for indoor/outdoor carpeting with no pad. To get the carpeting upstairs Helen and I had to haul it into the attic by rope through an upstairs window. I didn’t notice any odd smell in the carpeting. It smelled new and clean to me, but the smell made Helen sick. As a consequence, we didn’t move into the finished bedroom until after Mary was born and even then Helen had trouble with the smell.

The 35th street house was on a busy arterial. We didn’t think about this when we bought it, but while Amy and Mary were growing up it became more of a concern. There was no parking on the side of the street in front of our house and the parking on the other side was fairly limited and dangerous with all the traffic going by. After Mary was born Helen and I started looking for another house in West Seattle we could buy at a reasonable price and rebuild into our dream house. We found a little stucco house on a double lot with a great view of Puget Sound and the mountains. It also had eight fruit trees. The yard needed a lot of work, but the potential was there. In June 1973, when Mary was a year old, we moved into the new house on 59th Street.

All our family worked hard on the new house. I built a fun tree house in the back yard for Mary and Amy to play in. My father and I collected used concrete from a road rebuilding project, broke it up with sledgehammers and used it to build retaining walls for a large vegetable garden. My father and I tore down a free used fence and rebuilt it around our house so the kids would be safe in the yard. Since I was married I had worked full time at the University of Washington as a scientist, then pretty much worked at nights and weekends at home on all our building projects. We did things together as a family, but I was working too much. A fellow scientist at the University related that they had every Sunday as family day where they did fun activities together. That sounded good to us so we adopted that plan. Ironically, several years later when I mentioned to the scientist how great his suggestion had been he admitted that his family had fallen away from the practice soon after he told me about it.

Mary’s life was filled with friends and extended family. She had three loving grandparents and lots of cousins to play with. We were always getting together for family birthday parties and holiday celebrations. On Sundays we went to the church, where Helen and I had been married, and then had family day. During the summer we went camping or spent leisurely days on Pipe Lake, on property my parents bought in 1953. In the fall we picked and canned the fruit from our trees. One apple tree had so many apples that we invited different friends and family over each year to pick and squeeze them into juice. My parents always came to help with the squeezing. Life was good.

January 31, 2009: Helen came home from work exasperated once again. She’d taken notes about some of the things Mary had said at the shop because she was having trouble working again. Mary had a wedding consult and got herself into quite a dither before the bride and her mother arrived. She questioned her ability to do much of anything and was unable to make any flower arrangements at all. Here’s part of what Mary said:

“Since I got out of the hospital I’m having a difficult time just living. It is strange waking up because things just don’t feel or seem right. It’s like I went to bed at age 33 with the excitement of life and woke up three years later wondering what happened. I’m living in some sort of time warp. I’ve completely lost my confidence. I know I used to be able to do things but now I have to re-teach myself all the basics, even like reading a clock. Something definitely happened to my brain. It feels like someone took over my brain. It scares me when I feel pain in the right front part of my head. I used to write contracts. I knew what they meant. Everything made sense. Now it seems like things in my head are continually shifting and I feel as if I’m jumping from year to year.”

In the late seventies Helen thought about having more children. Amy and Mary were growing up and we missed having little feet running around the house. We had fixed up the house, but would need more bedrooms for the extra kids. My father, Helen, and I had added a new kitchen on the side of the house. I drew the plans and we did all of the work including the plumbing and electrical. Now I took on the more ambitious plans of rebuilding the rest of the house. We decided on a two story four bedroom half -beam style home. During the permit process the building department wanted to have the footings of our existing foundation checked to see if they would support a second story. To our unpleasant surprise the existing house had no footings. We were bitterly disappointed since we didn’t have the resources to tear down the house and start over. Instead, we decided to build a two bedroom two story addition onto the side of the house. I dug the foundation by pick and shovel by hand in the evenings and Saturday.

When we had the foundation poured we had to wheel the concrete from the alley around to the side of the house by wheel barrow. The first time the driver of the cement truck filled my wheel barrow with concrete I couldn’t hardly lift it, let alone wheel it. He took pity on me and filled the other loads half full. He didn’t even charge us for the extra time to complete the pour. This was typical of our experience with building inspectors and other “blue collar” workers who went out of their way to be kind and helpful. In a couple of years of hard work our new addition was complete.

Helen became pregnant during the time when we were completing the finished work on the new addition and the remodel of the rest of the house. We wanted to have everything done well before Christmas and the new baby came. Everything was going according to plan. Our financial situation had slightly improved since we lived in our first house, so this time we were able to pick out real carpets with real pads under them for the house. The three bedrooms and the front room were to be carpeted. There was a special deal at Sears in Seattle where installation came included with the purchase. This was a treat for me since I could simply show up after work and the carpets would be installed. Unfortunately, there was an employee strike at Sears which held up the delivery of the carpets. It wasn’t until Christmas Eve day that the carpets were installed. We hadn’t decorated for Christmas since the rooms had to be cleared for the carpet installation. After a very long Christmas Eve night, the tree was up and trimmed, all the presents were out and Christmas came on schedule to the Locatelli house.

On January 4, 1981 our son Adam was born. Helen had wanted to try natural childbirth with the third baby, as was the trend in the early eighties. There was concern then about being over drugged during childbirth and its effect on the baby. She got through it, but it almost did her in. Right after the births of Amy and Mary, Helen was sitting up in bed anxious to work on baby announcements, all excited about the new arrivals. This time she was in bed, but more like a zombie than a new mother. When she could get the energy to speak she begged me and made me promise that she would never have to go through childbirth again. I was relieved that, after a good night’s sleep, Helen was back to her old self and thrilled to have a son. If anyone wants to ask Helen about natural childbirth they better have a running head start. Helen was certainly a victim of another popular trend of the time based on the bankrupt philosophy that having a very large baby by natural childbirth could be fun and inspirational. Now Mary and Amy had a baby brother to play with.

Both girls enjoyed taking care of Adam, and it was nice for Helen and me since we had built-in babysitters. It was fun having a baby around the house again. Amy was 12 and Mary was 9 on the day Adam was born. We built a deck off of our master bedroom on the second story where all of us camped out on hot nights. We had bought a used Bastian Blessing soda fountain in the 1970’s for thirty five dollars from a University surplus sale. We finally had a family room to install it in. We started celebrating Mary’s birthday every year with an ice cream party.

One advantage of being a scientist at the University of Washington was the occasional field projects to other locations. Helen and I believed in doing things together so when the projects came along we went as a family. Since I was studying winter storms the projects went from November through January or February. We took Amy and Mary out of school and enrolled them in schools near the field project. This worked really well as the new schools were always happy to accommodate our kids and Amy and Mary made new friends and had new experiences. With my per diem allowance we were able to rent modest houses and with not eating out we could make ends meet. Before Adam was born we had stayed at Grayland on the Washington Pacific Coast. Amy and Mary loved it there. We stayed in a very small beach cabin close to scenic cranberry bogs. Friends and family came to spend time with us. In winter 1982 we were also on the Washington coast, but this time we were at Ocean Shores in a small house. We all look back on these field trips with good memories.

My parents spent several days with us at Ocean Shores. My mother enjoyed helping Helen around the house and my father really enjoyed walking on the beach with the kids and me. My mother helped Helen cook a “real” breakfast for all of us. It was a nice change from my normal fare of cold cereal and fun to eat with everyone around the kitchen table. Simple moments like that make a life. In early May we went on a trip with my parents to California to visit relatives. It was the last trip Mary would take with her grandmother. When we returned home my mother was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Mom died a couple of months later in July.

Soon after Mom died Helen started developing strong feelings about having one more child. Jesus used the example in his teachings of how a new mother will forget the suffering of childbirth after the baby arrives. That was the same for Helen who had forgotten the vow to have no more children she made after birthing Adam. We were finally in a finished house, but our finished house only had three bedrooms and she wanted a bedroom for each of our children. We began looking at property to build on. This time we would build a house from the foundation up. My father would help us and we hoped it would, besides being a large help to us, help him to recover from my mother’s death.

We paid a professional to install cedar siding on the outside of the house so we could get it ready to sell faster than I could do it myself. This stretched us pretty thin financially. There was an economic downturn in Washington State about that time which made it almost impossible to sell the house. Fortunately for us or maybe not so fortunately we knew someone that worked in the produce section of a grocery store. They were supposed to throw away all the spoiled vegetables every week, but boxed them up and gave them to us instead. One day a week we sorted through all the boxes of vegetables cutting out the spoiled parts and saving the rest. Once a week I made a stew out of what was salvageable. We called it depression stew. Sometimes it wasn’t so good, other times it was awful but it kept us from starving. Eventually the house sold and we had to find another place to live.

In order to find property we could afford we ended up buying one and one quarter acres in Hobart, Washington, about 30 miles southeast of West Seattle. It was a level lot next to farms. I started drawing the house plans and we moved most of our belongings into my father’s basement. Helen labeled every box and kept a list of what was in each so we could easily find something we needed. We moved a small travel trailer onto the property where Helen, Adam and I slept. I built a platform where we put our camping tent. The tent is where Mary and Amy slept. They had their beds and dressers in the tent so it was pretty comfortable, at least when we started in the summer. I put the washer and drier out by the power pole and covered them with a tarp. Helen was nine months pregnant when she had to walk out to the power pole to do the laundry and there were plenty of laundry to do with dirty clothes from building and the kids playing.

We designed a 4500 square foot log house that would be two full stories with an attic that our children could play in. Helen was pregnant with our last child so she couldn’t help with the heavy labor. I went on half time at the University of Washington. My father drove out from West Seattle every day I worked on the house to help me. He was 76 at the time, but he worked full days helping me put up logs. Both my father and I toughened up. The first time we put down flooring on the first floor (six inch wide used car decking) we thought we couldn’t possibly finish the house. By the time we put flooring on the third floor it was nothing. Friends came and helped when they could.

Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2009: Mary doesn’t want anything for Valentine’s Day. She doesn’t want flowers, candy or any present at all. This is not like her as Valentine’s Day is one of her favorite holidays, but she has been severely depressed for a week and shows no signs of coming out of it. She manages to get to our flower and gift shop and complete the flower orders, but all the life has gone out of her. We are just hanging on by a thread with the business since the recession has hit everyone hard in Enumclaw.

My father and I were just putting down the car decking on the first floor when tragedy struck. It had rained that day and my father and I were glad to come in for dinner, It was just Helen and I and my dad as Amy and Mary were staying in at Helen’s mother’s. After my father left for home Helen and I were just settling in to rest after a long day of work. Then the neighbors knocked on the door of the trailer. We had an emergency phone call at their house. Helen’s brother’s wife, Vicki, was killed in a car accident and their ten day old baby boy and three year old daughter were injured. Her car had gone off of the road on a corner and crashed into a tree as she was returning home from the baby’s first doctor visit.

Helen’s sisters Vivian and Muriel both had children close to the time Helen had Amy and Mary. Helen’s brother Leo and his wife Vicki had their children the time we had our last two children. Our families were very close. We had talked of building two houses close together where the kids could play and Vicki and I could work together on a community garden. They had looked at the property next to us and they were seriously thinking of moving closer. We had a lot of the same values and both families shared in a pioneer spirit to grow our own food and build our own homes. Vicki’s death struck our family hard.

Relatives started showing up at Helen’s mother’s house when they heard the sad news. No one told Amy and Mary what had happened, but from the solemn demeanor of everyone they knew it something really bad. Both Mary and Mary became very frightened that something had happened to Helen or me or Adam. When they were finally told of the tragedy they were relieved that their immediate family was safe, but devastated over Vicki’s death. It was June 19, 1984 and Mary was thirteen.

We had purchased a 1967 Checker Marathon while we still lived in West Seattle. It was parked on the side of the road on the way from our second home to my parent’s home. Later, after we bought the Checker, my parents told us that they were sure if I saw it we would buy it and I did. Helen’s mother Gudrun didn’t drive and neither did her Aunt Edith, so we always picked them up and drove them to family get-togethers. Now with our family enlarging, we needed a bigger car and the Checker fit the bill.

Besides hauling us everywhere we put the Checker to work building the log house. I rigged up a pulley and a log ramp that reached the second floor of our home to be. I loaded a log on the ramp, tied one end of a rope to the log and the other end to the bumper of the Checker. Helen was due any day as she drove the Checker in reverse and pulled the log s up. Amy and Mary untied the logs and stacked them on the second floor.

On August 4, 1984 the fourth and last addition to our family arrived. Megan Louise Locatelli came home to take her spot in a basket on the kitchen table in the trailer. We all got up early and worked late into the night. Some people might have felt sorry for us, but we thought we were the luckiest people in the world. The toughness and family closeness that we developed while working together to build our own homes helped keep the disaster of Mirapex from splitting us apart.

After Vicki’s death we got on with our lives and finished the house. Amy and Mary were still staying in the tent when an early snow came in October. By November the 400 square foot recreation room was finished so we moved in there. We had all our beds in the room plus a table to eat on. Our sole source of heat was a wood kitchen stove that Helen also cooked on. After living in the trailer and tent, the recreation room was luxury. As it got colder in the fall we tried shutting the trailer windows at night, but condensation dripped on me from the ceiling. If we opened the windows the drafts were too cold. We moved into the rest of the house a few weeks before Christmas. We only had plasterboard on one side of a wall, but it was a palace to us.

To this day I would never stay in a travel trailer again. There was no shower in the travel trailer, only a small tub, and only a five gallon hot water tank. Baths were torture. When we finally got the bathtub hooked up in the log house we only had cold water at the first. I was really looking forward to a real bath in a real tub so I heated up a large bucket of water on the wood stove and dumped it into the bathtub. My mistake was that I first ran some cold water into the tub. When I mixed the hot water in the result was lukewarm water. I rushed out to the kitchen to heat more water to warm up the bath. When I got done heating the water again and dumped it into the tub the lukewarm water had cooled off and now the result was more lukewarm water. I gave up and got in the tub anyway. I never made that mistake again.

We completed the finishing work on the house in the spring and returned to our satisfying family routine of family get-togethers, camping and fun in general. We now were living only fifteen minutes away from the lot my parents owned on Pipe Lake in Maple Valley. It was a great place to swim and camp.

Helen’s mother had suffered from congestive heart failure for some time and now was spending more time at the doctors and in the hospital for breathing problems. Her doctor was in the Polyclinic on Broadway in Seattle. We made so many trips to the clinic for emergencies and extra doctor visits that we felt we lived there. Eventually Helen’s mother didn’t have the strength to fight off one more bout of bronchitis and passed away a week before Thanksgiving in November of 1986. We didn’t know it at that time, but we would soon be back at the Polyclinic.

That fall Mary had been complaining of cold hands that turned white. In January of 1987 she was diagnosed with Raynaud’s Phenomenon. It is characterized by hands that ache in the cold. Raynaud’s can be a single illness that is nothing more than an inconvenience, or it can be a symptom of more serious illnesses. In January we were hoping that it would remain an inconvenience. Helen had been operated on for Thoracic Outlet Syndrome and now in 1987 Mary was showing signs of the same problem. Thoracic Outlet Syndrome is where the top rib pinches the artery feeding blood to the arm. In serious cases it is almost impossible to raise the arms above the head without severe pain and muscle weakness. The doctors tried physical therapy on Mary but it made the problem worse so Mary had the same operation as Helen where the top rib is removed on both sides.

Mary had been showing signs of fatigue for several months. She just didn’t want to get up to play, but was lying around more and more. Her pediatrician didn’t think that was normal for a fifteen year old teenager. We had hoped the surgery would have cured her, but it wasn’t to happen. After a series of tests at a specialist her pediatrician sent her to, Mary was diagnosed with Systemic Lupus. Where was the office of the specialist? It was in the Polyclinic on Broadway.

Ever since man could think, he has tried to make sense of the good and bad that befalls him. Has he offended some powerful god? Did he not perform the right sacrifice? Man can not accept that misfortune can happen just by chance, a mere roll of the dice, so he looks for other reasons. It was the same for us. After Mary was diagnosed we tried to figure out why such a thing could happen to Mary, the kind and gentle Mary that loved everybody. We thought it might have been the odd smelling rug that Helen helped install while she was pregnant with Mary. After all, it is thought that one reason pregnant women get sick with certain foods or smells is nature’s way of keeping them away from substances that might harm the fetus. We also thought that Vicki’s death and the scare Amy and Mary got that day might have contributed to Mary getting Lupus. Maybe it was all those circumstances and Helen’s mother’s death that triggered it. Maybe it was everything, maybe it was nothing.

February 23, 2009: It’s 4:20 P.M. and I just finished compiling Mary’s history of what drugs she took while she was on Mirapex. It was quite a tedious task and I’m pretty tired and discouraged. We are trying to answer a questionnaire that the lawyers for Boehringer Ingelheim sent us. If we don’t get it done we will have no chance at any financial help from them, but Mary is so tired and depressed that I hate to push her any harder. Maybe we can finish the questionnaire this week by some miracle. Mary is not much help. She gets stressed anytime she thinks about what happened. I pretty much have to do it myself.

Chapter 4: Lupus Takes Over Our Family

Thursday, March 12, 2009: The sun is shining today after one last wintery blast from the Arctic. This is very unusual early March weather for Western Washington, but it is forecast to warm up by the weekend. Normally, such a bright day would cheer me up, but there is too much to worry about. Mary is still depressed and it is all I can do to be around her since she looks so sad. The flower shop is just hanging on by a thread. If Mary was her old self, the Mary that started and ran her own business, I feel we would be doing better. As it is, Mary gets her work done, but has no will to work to bring more flower business into the shop.

We sent out the questionnaire that the lawyers for Boehringer Ingelheim sent us on Sunday. We are desperately hoping for financial help from them, but have not yet received a reply.

I’m sure that we are not much different from other families that have a child diagnosed with a serious chronic illness. The plan is to try to not let the illness take over the family, but to live as normal a life as possible. We were a very active family and loved camping and hiking, and the Pacific Northwest with its mild climate was perfect for outdoor activities. We wanted to keep to this life as much as possible.

When Mary was diagnosed with Lupus there had been medical advances that helped with the management. However, the public perception had not caught up with the medical advances. If people of our parent’s generation new anything about Lupus it was never good. For them it was an early death sentence after years of suffering.

When our first daughter Amy was born, my mother naturally took over the responsibility of caring for her when my parents babysat. In my parent’s generation it was the mother that stayed at home and raised the children. When Mary came along my mother was older and it was harder to babysit a toddler and a baby at the same time. My father gladly stepped in and became Mary’s special pal. I struggled with telling my father about Mary’s Lupus diagnosis since he was so close to her. I didn’t want to give Mary’s illness a name since I was afraid that my father would misunderstand her chances for a normal life, and only focus on his outdated ideas about Lupus. Helen argued for telling my father the truth and trying to explain that Lupus was now better managed then when he was growing up. I took Helen’s advice and my father seemed to take it in stride.

Helen and I frequently worried about telling our parents things that might be hard for them to shoulder. It, most of the time, turned out that they were able to withstand hardship and sorrow better than we could. Helen’s mom, with her weak heart, was a special worry. When Helen’s sister-in-law Vickie was killed in the accident we were afraid that the news would kill her. We need not have worried about her. Her faith and stead-fastness during that ordeal helped all of us get through it. Perhaps it was going through the depression and World War II that toughened our parents up. Whatever it was we were glad for it.

We were told that too much direct sunlight could and would trigger a Lupus reaction. This was a problem as the Pipe Lake property was only fifteen minutes away from our new log home in Hobart. Mary tried to cover up as much as possible when at the lake, but what teenager wants to sit in the shade while everyone else is swimming and playing in the water. Consequently in summer Mary was in the sun too much. The odd thing was that I didn’t really think it really made any difference to how she felt, which was chronically tired and often nauseas. At the time I didn’t put too much importance on her lack of sun sensitivity. Only in the future, after Mary was married, had her daughter and was ambushed by Mirapex did that fact become important to me. Quinine had been used to treat the symptoms of Lupus. Now synthetic quinine was available called Plaqenil. Mary was taking that along with painkillers to help with her stiff and painful joints. Often in the mornings when she first got out of bed, Mary would walk stiff legged until she could limber up. We joked about how she would make a perfect Christmas tin soldier; after all, it was either laugh or cry.

I had good access to the early NET at the University of Washington where I worked as a scientist. I spent my spare moments scouring web pages looking for any information I could find on Lupus. Lupus is another of those mysterious autoimmune diseases where the body “attacks” its own tissue. Mary had the chronic fatigue and painful joints of a Lupus sufferer but not any apparent internal organ damage. I was encouraged to learn that if the internal organs were not involved at the onset of Lupus then there was a chance that the internal organs would never be affected. I hoped that this would be true for Mary. Otherwise, there was a dearth of good news to be found on the Net. Now everyone uses the term “online” but then the “Net” was new and now readily available to everyone.

We tried to carry on with our lives as best we could and not focus on Mary’s illness. We did have to make concessions for her. All of our beds were hand-me-downs. Helen and I were sleeping on two twin beds tied together with rope. Our springs and mattresses were the ones we slept on in high school. I remember that they were so saggy from use that I put pieces of plywood in between the mattresses and springs to firm them up. Our kid’s beds were no better. Once Mary became too achy to manage her old bed we went out and bought her an expensive spring and mattress set brought home strapped to the roof of our faithful Checker. This did help her sleep better at night.

I had a scientific conference in Vancouver British Columbia in August of 1987; the year Mary was diagnosed with Lupus. We thought it would be fun to travel around the Canadian Rockies after the conference with the kids. Our normal mode of traveling was sans motels. Helen’s brother Richard and his wife June gave us a generous gift certificate to Frederick and Nelson’s in downtown Seattle for a wedding present. Any Seattleites reading this will remember Frederick’s as the flagship department store in downtown Seattle. We never shopped there as it was above our budget. Richard and June expected us to buy some nice furniture or other household item, but we discovered Frederick’s actually sold camping equipment. We purchased a three burner Coleman stove, a family sized tent and an ice chest. I am proud to admit that the Coleman stove is still in great working condition in 2012 as well as the tent. This was one of the best investments in fun that we ever made.

We left Hobart on August 17 in the Checker with every nook and cranny packed with food, camping equipment, and clothes. The Checker had an enormous amount of legroom in front of the back set. I carefully laid a layer of suitcases, then the tent poles on top of the suitcases then the tent on top of that. This brought the floor level up to the back seat. The finishing touch was to open up the sleeping bags and lay them across everything making a bed out of the back of the car. This is the way the backseat kids rode on our trip. They all had to still wear seatbelts of course. I received a per diem stipend to pay for my meals and lodging while at the conference. By not staying at the nicer hotel near to the conference, but staying at a cheaper one further away and cooking our own food in a small microwave our whole family could stay in a motel instead of camping. Once we left Vancouver and the per diem it was camping only.

We camped the first night at North Thompson River Provincial Park. Mary was doing OK riding in the car, but she was pretty achy. The next day we drove to Jasper Alberta where we planned to also camp for the night. By this time Mary was feeling pretty sick from traveling as well as very achy in her joints. We didn’t have the heart to make her sleep in a tent and have to use an unheated outhouse, so we rented a small cabin in a place called the Pine Bungalow’s. Most people wouldn’t find the cabin much of an improvement over a tent, but it seemed like heaven to us to have Mary in a real bed. Despite the fact that we were in a cabin, however, Mary was so miserable that night that we came very close to driving her to a hospital. It was a scary night for all of us. We eventually made our way to Edmonton rotating camping with cabins when Mary was too sick.

In spite of being sick off ands on Mary was a good sport and we all had a great time together on the trip. Our family loved to hike and this trip afforded us with plenty of opportunities for doing it. We still hiked, but we adjusted our hikes so that Mary could still participate. This meant shorter ones with plenty of rest stops. Such was our life with Lupus being the seventh passenger in the Checker.

Mary was testing the limits of sun exposure the first summer she was diagnosed with Lupus, and seeming to get away with it. Helen and I were worried of course, but we were having trouble telling the consequences of being in the sun since Mary felt crummy most of the time anyway. We were warned by her doctor that excess stress or fatigue could possibly trigger a life threatening flare-up. That’s why we scaled back our hiking to paths that I could hike partway with Mary then wait with her while the others hiked on, or paths that were shorter and mostly level. Most hikes she soldiered on, talking, laughing and enjoying nature along with the rest of us. Mary was certainly not a complaining person.

During the whole time that Mary was diagnosed with Lupus one family hike really stands out in my mind. This was a hike to alpine lakes in Mt. Rainier National Park. As always Helen had made lunch for all of us; a special treat of bacon lettuce and tomato sandwiches; most of the time we had cheese and bread on hikes so we were pretty excited about the lunch. The weather was perfect; just cool enough to make hiking easier, but nice enough to sit around the lakes and eat lunch. To our surprise and especially to our young son Adam, the lakes were full of good sized frogs sunning themselves and jumping into the clear water. Adam was fascinated with the frogs and all of us enjoyed watching him play. Helen had brought all the ingredients for the sandwiches packed in separate containers. That way when she assembled them for eating the sandwiches were picture perfect, not a flattened slice of tomato anywhere to be found.

The trail up to the lakes was steeper than I thought it would be. We took it easy climbing, stopping often to rest. We constantly worried about Mary but kept this from our kids so as not to ruin their fun and to not upset Mary. We really worked at keeping family life as normal as possible. After Adam had his fill of playing among the frogs we packed up and headed back down. Normally Mary set a slow pace for us, but this time miraculously Mary and Adam surged ahead of us and disappeared down the trail. When we arrived at the Checker there were Mary and Adam sitting on the bumper grinning having beaten us down by quite a few minutes. Mary was especially thrilled as she mostly brought up the rear on hikes. We capped off a perfect day by stopping on the way home for dinner, a real sit down dinner not at a fast food drive in which was a staple for us on a limited budget. That evening Helen and I anxiously watched Mary for any signs of a serious flare-up. Thankfully one never came. This incident reminded me of what I read about a boy who had a deficient immune system disorder. He had to be kept indoors away from all germs, but once in the evening after a strong rain had cleared the air he snuck outside and ran barefoot in the in grass. His joy was immense. That type of moment was how I would describe the feelings contained in Mary’s grin as she saw us coming down the path.

Mary started her first year of high school in the Maple Valley. Hobart, where we had our log home, was only five miles from Maple Valley and did not have its own school system. Mary was a well liked and good student. Maybe because of having a chronic illness, or maybe just because of whom she was she befriended everyone, so her friends fell across a wide spectrum of students. Mary caught the school bus at the end of our road which was only a block away. In bad weather, or if Mary was extra tired Helen would drive the faithful Checker down the hill to pick the kids up after school. We were blindsided in December when Mary suddenly announced that she wanted to quit high school in Maple Valley and attend high school instead in West Seattle. West Seattle High School was 30 miles away! Thirty miles one way!

I commuted to my work as a scientist at the University of Washington by driving fifteen mile to Issaquah. There I transferred to a bus to take me north and west to the University District where the University was. Mary had it all figured out. She would ride with me to Issaquah. She would then catch a bus south and west to downtown Seattle. Once at downtown Seattle she could catch another bus to West Seattle. At night she would meet me in Issaquah for the commute home. She would have to leave home at six in the morning and not get back until late at night. Mary would have over three hours of commuting time each day. Taking the bus was not easy even for me. In the winter it meant standing waiting for the bus in mostly cold, windy and damp weather. The busses could be crowded and on rainy days steamy and damp.

We tried to talk Mary out of transferring. Her rheumatologist in Seattle told us he feared that if she tried such a tiring commute it would literally kill her. Needless to say this really scared us. Consequently we located a counselor in the nearby city of Renton who specialized in treating young people. Mary had four appointments with the counselor in December and three in January. We could not understand why she wanted to undergo such a strenuous and long commute and neither could her counselor. Mary was insistent that she would feel better going to West Seattle.

Helen’s mother had graduated from West Seattle High School in 1924, the first of a long line of relatives to do so. Over the years as many as eighty relatives including aunts, uncles, cousins and even Helen and me had graduated from West Seattle High. Mary’s best friend and cousin of the same age, Noelle Knapp, and her brother were going there as well. Perhaps it was these ties to the school that prompted Mary to go there. Or, maybe she just wanted to go somewhere where she didn’t have a memory of always being sick. Or? We didn’t know and Mary wasn’t able to articulate why. As January dragged on the start of the new semester at West Seattle would be starting soon. Neither the counselor nor we were making any headway with her.

We did not know what the right thing to do was. We were afraid that if we gave into Mary the commute would kill her. We were afraid that if we didn’t give in to her it would kill her also. Both her rheumatologist and counselor strongly recommended that she not transfer. Mary was insistent that she should. We were in a quandary.

Her Aunt Muriel Knapp and Cousin Noelle lived in West Seattle. Muriel worked so it would be hard for her rescue Mary if she collapsed at school. Our ace in the hole was Mary’s grandfather, my father. My father was now 81, but still drove out from West Seattle to help my brother and I with weekend projects. He shopped and kept house for himself. Since my mother had died he found a new group of bowling friends in West Seattle. He also visited relatives in town and helped his sister with shopping and other things. He was retired so he could pick Mary up at school if there were any health issues and she could stay with him until we could pick her up. Having my father there tipped the scales in Mary’s favor. With a decision to “let go and let God” we agreed she could try commuting. If it didn’t work out she could always transfer back. I don’t think that today Mary would have had any chance of transferring to a school so far out of her district and also being in a completely different school system. Then it must have not been such a big deal because on February 1, 1988; a day with a low temperature of 21 degrees and a high temperature of only 38 degrees we watched with trepidation as Mary started her commute.

We just finished Mother’s Day 2010 at the flower shop. Mary is gradually improving everyday and we did manage to deliver all the flower orders, but Helen and I had to deliver on Mother’s Day as Mary had trouble getting the flowers done. Previous Mother’s Days were spent doing something fun with our children. Today Helen and I are simply thankful that we survived the terrible Mirapex years with all our children still alive.

Chapter 5: A Good Scare

It’s now the evening of August 4, 2009. I originally mailed information on Mary’s financial and emotional disasters while on Mirapex to Vincent Lodato at Sills Cummins and Gross. Mary is such a trusting person. Even after all the problems she went through with Mirapex she still believes that Boheringer Ingelheim does really care about each and every patient that takes their drugs. Mary is sure they will help her financially after the train wreck Mirapex made in all our lives,

I’m not so sure, but Mary’s hope and faith in people has certainly affected me and given me hope. Everyone we contacted has been very nice on the phone and in emails. They really seem to care about what happened. However, I’m starting to worry since we keep getting moved to different law firms in our dealings with Boheringer Ingelheim. Suppose all this kindness towards us is just a sham to stall for time. We haven’t contacted any lawyers to act in our behalf as Mary is sure Boheringer Ingelheim will do the right thing.

There is a three year statute of limitations in Washington State in which to file a lawsuit in this type of damage. In a simple car wreck the three years starts at the time of the wreck when the physical damage occurred. Medical damage is more complicated since complications from an operation may not be apparent until months later. With damage from drugs the three years starts when the person taking the drugs first realizes that harm has been done. For Mary this was in the fall of 2008.

I would like to share my concerns about the intentions of Boheringer Ingelheim with Mary, but she is in such a fragile mental state that I’m afraid to do it. Mary is just hanging on by a thin thread. She manages to go on with her life, but there is a sadness about her that suffuses everything she does. I suppose just knowing that she missed three years of her daughter’s life would be enough. Adding on the continual burden of bankruptcy, the sorry state of her partially remodeled home and our financial problems is close to pushing her over the edge. I don’t need to add to her misery.

Commuting 60 miles a day in a car and two busses just to attend high school would be unusual for most modern day students. But, commuting 60 miles a day in a car and two busses is unheard of in a student diagnosed with a chronic disease. Just as Lupus now was the seventh passenger on all out family vacations, Lupus was the constant companion on Mary’s commute.

Compounding our worry over the damage the commute was having on Mary’s health was the issue of driving the 45 minutes into Seattle for school functions. One benefit of this, however, was that my father could come with us to events. So we turned what could have been a burden into an opportunity to see family and friends.

My wife Helen has always kept detailed notes on each day’s events on a calendar sold by Seattle Children’s Hospital. The proceeds go to fund worthy programs at the hospital. Helen was started on this right after we were married by both my mother and Mom’s sister Carolyn. Both of them kept similar records on the same calendar and each year Mom bought a calendar for Helen. Now Helen continues the tradition by buying calendars for her daughters.

In the course of writing this book I’ve made extensive use of Helen’s calendars. I’ve scoured them for details of health problems and other disasters during Mary’s high school years, but I couldn’t find any. Helen and I can’t remember any that stand out either. Except for the long and worrisome commute and her chronic tiredness and often nausea Mary’s high school years were pretty normal for a teenage girl. Admittedly, she felt at times like she was caged– a fifteen year old caged in an eighty year old body. Because there were no outward signs of her illness, other than extra rosy cheeks from time to time, it was hard for her friends to understand why she tired so easily or why she couldn’t quite keep up with them. Mary fell for boys just as any teenage girl did. Her first “loves” were infatuations where the boys didn’t know how she felt. In her junior year she met JaJa who became a real boyfriend to her. JaJa’s name had African origins. His father was of African and Native American descent and his mother’s people were Scandinavians. Soon JaJa became a regular fixture around our home on weekends.

Mary kept up an active social life at school. She was in the honor society. Mary even played the maid Edith in the school production of Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward. Mary had to work hard to memorize lines as she was always fighting chronic fatigue, so we were surprised and pleased she choose to participate in the play. My father especially enjoyed going to the performance.

Mary also joined Earth Corps at the high school. Work consisted of volunteer-based and contracted restoration projects on public lands in the Puget Sound and Cascade mountains. I remember driving Mary up to a Douglas fir tree planting project in the Cascade foothills. The day was gray and rainy and Mary was covered in mud when I picked her up, but she was a “covered in mud” thoroughly happy and satisfied teenager. Mary never let Lupus get in the way of what she wanted to do in spite of the fact that the next day probably would be spent in bed recovering.

Mary’s difficulties in memorizing made it hard for her to master a spoken foreign language. Instead she took Latin which is primarily written. Soon Mary was correcting the few Latin phrases I used in my science career. To this day I can tell you how to properly pronounce the famous phrase “veni, vidi, vici” or “I came, I saw, I conquered”. That phrase pretty much sums up the way Mary made it through her high school years.

West Seattle is one of several neighborhoods that make up the city of Seattle. Every summer most neighborhoods hold celebrations that normally involve picking royalty to ride in parades, having street fairs, and classic car shows. West Seattle’s was called Hi-Yu. The name was taken from the Chinook Native American language meaning “abundance”. We were delighted when Mary decided to run for one of the royalty spots. If this were a made up tale Mary would have actually become the queen or a princess. Real life doesn’t always work that way. We did have the fun of watching Mary riding in the Hi-Yu parade. We were a little surprised at how regal she looked in the parade. Our skinny teenager had grown into a beautiful young woman. And so with a grand graduation party at our Hobart log home on Saturday the 9th of June 1990 Mary’s high school days ended and so did the worrisome commute.

When Mary’s older sister Amy went to college at the University of Washington we provided room and board for her at our home in Hobart. She commuted with me to the University of Washington where I worked. This arrangement saved us a lot of money. Even so, we could only afford to give her money for half the tuition and books. The same was true for Mary. She was also expected to pay for half. Mary had gotten several small scholarships when she graduated from high school. She wisely decided to use them at Bellevue Community College where the expenses were much less than at the University. Mary took her first day of classes in September of 1990 majoring in Interior Design.

Bellevue Community College was only ten minutes away from Issaquah where during her high school years Mary had caught the bus to Seattle and I to the University. Now Mary’s commute was easier as we could both catch the same bus from Issaquah which stopped on the way to the University district at the community college.

It was nice for me to have Mary riding the same bus. I could watch her getting off in the morning and get on my bus at night. It was much more stressful when Mary was commuting into Seattle for high school. During the high school evening commute home I arrived in Issaquah ahead of Mary on my bus from the University. A few minutes later Mary would arrive on her bus from downtown Seattle. I was continually apprehensive waiting for her bus to arrive. The evening Seattle bus was always full of passengers. I anxiously watched the stream of people departing hoping to see Mary. I suppose any parent in my position would be a little anxious even if their daughter had normal health. It was much worse with Mary’s chronic illness.

Mary’s early college years were mostly uneventful. She found part time work at a mall in Bellevue, not far from the community college. Mary’s chronic fatigue did not improve as she grew older. We didn’t really expect it to, but we knew of cases where Lupus had gone into remission for other people. We also knew of young people who had died form Lupus. We were happy just to go along as we were. Mary’s often nausea was also still there. I did all the cooking on the weekends. My specialty was pot roast mashed potatoes and gravy. Our kids loved it. What they didn’t know is that it was a most economical way to cook meat. I perfected a method where even the cheapest and toughest cut of meat could be transformed into something tasty and edible if I cooked the hell out of it. Before dinner Mary would often complain of nausea. However, once dinner was on the table she consumed a meal that would choke an ox. I could get a little nauseous watching her eat. I never could figure out how she was able to do it; eat and feel sick at the same time.

Mary and JaJa were still going together and when her classes got out early on a Friday she would hop a bus to downtown Seattle and meet him for a movie or just to bum around Seattle. When we lived in Seattle we spent Sunday’s after church exploring the city. We hit all the free events, museums, art galleries, and waterfront activities. Our kids loved it and it imparted in them a love of Seattle in all its variety. Mary had time after high school let out to hang out with JaJa before she had to take the bus out the Issaquah. They got into the habit of going up to the Broadway District which has long been the center of all things eclectic in Seattle attracting a wide variety of artist, poets, writers, students and all sorts of hanger-on’s. People-watching was fantastic there and the shops were as varied and interesting as the people. Another favorite high school spot for them was the International District.

When I was at West Seattle high school in the 1960’s my best friend Mike was of Japanese descent. Once in a while he would take me down to the Kokusai theatre in the International District to see Japanese samurai and gangster movies and eat real ethnic Japanese food. That was before the name was changed to the International District. Then we referred to it as Chinatown. Mike’s family was sent to camps during World War II and I believe Mike, or at least his older sister was born there. Mike and I never talked about that. I saw him as one of the more popular boys in school and I felt privileged to be his friend. Only later did I become aware of discrimination against the Japanese that lingered after the war. Mary’s like of the International District brought back many nice memories for me.

It didn’t seem unusual to me that on the Friday of October 25, 1991 Mary planned to travel into Seattle to meet JaJa and see the newly released movie Ricochet. JaJa always waited to see that Mary got on the right bus from downtown Seattle to Issaquah so, when I waited at the park and ride in Issaquah that night for Mary to arrive, I wasn’t especially nervous. The bus I thought she would be on pulled up at the stop. I watched the commuters depart, but Mary was not among them. I wasn’t too surprised as busses were not always on time and they were easy to miss. A few minutes later the next bus from downtown Seattle arrived, but no Mary on that bus either. I began to get worried. There were several additional busses from downtown Seattle that came during the computer hour every few minutes. After the evening commuter time the busses only came every hour, then even at longer spacing. I waited with a sinking heart as bus after bus disgorged passengers, but no Mary. My mind turned to dark thoughts of horror, of Mary abducted or worse. Suppose she had a Lupus flare-up and was laying somewhere sick and unattended? Only a parent that had a child go missing could understand what I was going through.

Cell phones were not available in the 1990’s so I had to make do with calling Helen on an outdoor payphone at the park and ride in Issaquah. I didn’t have much change with me to keep feeding the phone and I was afraid to leave the park and ride lot for fear Mary would finally turn up. I called Helen when Mary didn’t arrive during the main commuting time. It was cold and damp but I stuck close to the payphone. At least Helen could call me if she heard anything. I expected Mary to meet me around 5:30 PM, but now it was after 7 PM and no Mary. I have never felt so alone and forlorn in my life as I did that night. I tried to push any awful thoughts away, but couldn’t do it. I had to keep enough money to call Helen if Mary turned up, so all I could do was wait for Helen to call. While I was waiting police cars would occasionally cruise through the empty park and ride. Each time my knees would buckle and my heart would pound.

While I was at the park and ride Helen was trying to reach JaJa by phone. Today that would be easy as most everyone has cell phones. Then it was impossible unless JaJa was at home. Finally Helen did manage to reach JaJa at home. They had gone to the movie as planned but he had a dentist appointment afterwards so he wasn’t able to wait for Mary to get on the bus out to Issaquah. Mary or JaJa didn’t think anything about him not waiting as Mary had uneventfully commuted through four years of high school. Helen called Seattle Metro to see if they could contact the bus drivers leaving Seattle to see if anyone had seen Mary getting on one of the busses. This was a long and drawn out process at that time. Today I suppose it would be faster with better communication available.

Meanwhile I was slowing dying at the park and ride. I wanted to drive into Seattle to look for her just to do something, just to do anything but I knew I needed to stay put. Helen was on the phone with Seattle Metro when the Seattle Police interrupted the call. Mary had been found in Westlake Center in downtown Seattle and was now sitting in the police station in Seattle. Today on the news a favorite ploy of newscasters when interviewing survivors of disasters or other victims is to ask how they were feeling at the time. Most of them can’t give a good answer. I know why. When I heard that Mary was safe I went numb. I had no feelings to describe. I got into my car and drove the fifteen miles into the police station. The trip in to Seattle gave me time to compose myself. I didn’t want to overly excite Mary when I saw her.

I went in the door of the police station and there was Mary sitting on a chair knitting, looking happy and perfectly normal. After verifying that I was indeed her father, Mary and I left for home. Mary remembered going to the movie with JaJa and saying goodbye to him when he left for his dentist appointment. She had time to kill so she sat down on a bench in Westlake Center which was in the center of the downtown shopping district. Mary remembered becoming confused about why she was there, and then not knowing what to do, stayed sitting on the bench. It became dark and as the shoppers and workers left for home the square was taken over by homeless people. Several sat down next to her. They could tell she didn’t look homeless. One offered her a candy bar as she was shivering from the cold. That slight nourishment started to bring her out of her confused state. Rowdy young people were in one corner of the square and policemen had stopped to check them out. The homeless man that had given her the candy bar asked her if she had any reason to be afraid of the police. Mary answered that she didn’t think so and on his urging she walked over. As soon as the police heard her story they took her down to the station where they called Helen. By the time I got there that candy bar had brought her back to normal.

Mary didn’t seem any the worse for her ordeal. We chatted on the way home about the movie. When we got home she told Helen that she was really confused when she was sitting on that bench. She knew her mom would be worried about her and could see a pay phone but couldn’t connect the idea of calling her mom to ease her worry. She was cold and had a coat sitting right next to her on the bench but couldn’t connect the idea of putting it on to get warm. By now, though, everything seemed normal and that’s the way Helen and I kept it. However that incident started a round of doctor visits and more worry of what Lupus might be doing to her.

Today Mary and I were returning from delivering flowers in Auburn. It’s September 2009. On the trip back to Enumclaw where the flower shop is Mary received the call on her cell phone we had been waiting for. It was from yet another new set of lawyers that were representing Boheringer Ingelheim. I could tell how Mary was collapsing in front of me that it wasn’t good news. I pulled over to the side of the road to listen to her side of the conversation. Mary seemed stunned and was in tears. She couldn’t talk. Mary handed me her cell phone. I explained to the caller who I was and that Mary was emotionally fragile and couldn’t continue talking.

The most they could offer in financial aid was only $2000 and probably not even that. Their “experts” had found that Mirapex was not the cause of Mary’s compulsive behavior. Their “experts” had determined this without interviewing her doctors, her family or Mary. In addition the warning she received with her first prescription of Mirapex was adequate to warn her about any such side effects. This was in spite of the fact that compulsive behavior was never mentioned in that warning. I was livid with anger, but knowing that they were probably recording the conversation managed to keep my cool. I don’t really know if they were actually expecting Mary to accept such a paltry amount today and in addition sign a non discloser agreement. Maybe they just wanted to beat her up in anticipation of a future settlement.

Mary had never filed a lawsuit or obtained a lawyer up to today. Mary was unable to talk anymore on the phone. I thanked the lawyer for her call, but made it clear that this was unacceptable to Mary who would not settle today. She told me that she would contact her lead lawyer and get back to us. We never heard from them again.

Today the awful truth hit me. Boheringer Ingelheim all this time was most likely playing us for fools and simply trying to run out the clock. They took advantage of the basic goodness of Mary and her faith in people. They browbeat an emotionally fragile woman into submission during their call today. I don’t know people like them. I can’t understand them. I don’t know how they go about their lives among family and friends unashamed of their actions. They are no different than the snarling lion that snatches the bleating lamb from its mother’s arms and devours it with no pangs of conscience. Now I know what has to be done. We need to find our own snarling beast to fight them. Today we start looking for a lawyer to represent Mary, the meaner the better.

Chapter 6: Sickness, Death and New Beginnings

Helen and I felt the night Mary didn’t turn up at the Park and Ride took several years off of our lives, but Mary seemed none the worse for wear. She never felt afraid, even among the homeless people. Mary just couldn’t figure out what she was supposed to do. She knew she was cold but despite the fact that her coat sat on the bench right next to her, she didn’t realize that she could put it on and get warm. She thought that perhaps her mom might be worried about her and noticed a pay phone, but couldn’t figure out that she could actually just go make that phone call and save her mom from worrying.

Occasionally Helen will become shaky and weak when she hasn’t eaten. A quick snack of cheese remedies the situation. Mary had the same problem with not eating on a regular basis, but she would complain that along with feeling weak she would have trouble thinking clearly. A quick snack would be the cure as happened when she was offered the candy bar by the homeless man.

Helen and I felt this was serious enough to warrant another trip to the Polyclinic in downtown Seattle. Mary’s Lupus doctor was also concerned and recommended that Mary go see the neurologist Dr. Stillmen. Mary had to yet undergo another series of unpleasant tests including a spinal tap. As other parents of children with chronic illnesses can relate to, it is a struggle to maintain a normal family life. We felt we were doing a pretty good job of it, but this new concern added to the struggle. Nothing conclusive came from the tests, but Dr. Stillmen was certain that Mary probably had in addition to Lupus, Central Nervous System Lupus. This is where Lupus is affecting the brain, mostly in not so good ways. So, here we go again with another illness to worry about.

Mary seemed to us at the time no different than she had been before the incident and to this day she never has had a repeat of the terrible night. But when a smart specialist is concerned, that made us concerned. Dr. Stillmen decided to put Mary on a type of medication, Depakote, which would necessitate frequent blood tests to monitor the level of the drug in Mary’s body. Mary would have to keep taking increasing doses of the drug until the level in her blood stabilized at the right level. Dr. Stillmen carefully explained that the drug would be ineffective until the correct level was reached.

I was scheduled to go on a field trip to the Midwest in February through March to study winter storms. As always we planned to take all our children, except our oldest daughter Amy who was living with her husband in Colorado. On these extended trips we enrolled the kids in the local public schools and attended the local churches. This was great experience for all of us and a wonderful way to get to know the new communities. Mary was in junior college and she would only have to miss one quarter. With all that had happened we were afraid to leave her alone. Mary was doing OK with the doses of Depakote so far, but the levels in her blood were not high enough. Dr. Stillmen was fine with Mary coming with us on the field trip as long as we could arrange to have Mary’s blood drawn weekly and the results sent to him. We arranged this before we left on our trip.

On January 22, 1992 our faithful Checker loaded with Helen, Mary, Adam, Megan, children’s toys, household stuff and me at the wheel chugged out of the driveway of our Maple Valley log home and headed east. We arrived at noon on the 28th in Overland Park, Kansas. All of the rest of the research crew from the University of Washington were lodged in an extended stay motel where beds were changed and rooms cleaned and meals were eaten out.

We were staying at a new development called Pointe Royal in a nice two floor condo with bedrooms for everyone. Of course, to fit within the research budget we had to cook for ourselves and keep our own house, but we preferred that. We quickly settled in as I had to be ready to start chasing storms the next day. Mary and Adam were delighted to discover that right next door with adjoining patios was a friendly Boxer dog called Frazier. Helen and I were overjoyed to learn that we must keep the heat on at 72 degrees at all times, day and night, and that every room had real rugs. This was a treat for us since we only heated a few rooms in our log home in Hobart, never at night, and all our floors there were cold wood.

We were soon very glad that we had decided to take Mary with us. Dr. Stillmen was increasing the dosage of Depakote trying to obtain the necessary levels in Mary’s body. These new increases were making Mary even more nauseas than she normally was. The weekly blood draws were bad enough, now she had to suffer increased nausea. After Mary’s episode in downtown Seattle she had returned to her normal chronic tiredness and minor nausea. However, Dr. Stillmens insistence on the necessity of Mary taking Depakote pushed us forward.

Mary was now questioning Dr. Stillmen on how much longer the nausea would go on. He wanted Mary to continue the increase in dosage until the levels he wanted were reached. This meant enduring the nausea until that time, then hoping that when she was on a steady dose eventually she would feel better. It was torture watching Mary endure this new assault on her body. In our spare time on field trips we always visited every museum, park and local interesting place we could find. Overland Park was right next to Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas. There was one road where going one way we were in Kansas and going another we were in Missouri. I would load us into the Checker and drive around and around up one way then down the next going from one state to another laughing all the time. We even saw the Hallmark Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. We still had fun in spite of Mary’s trials with Depakote.

Mary was beginning to really question the wisdom of continuing with trying to obtain the proper levels of Depakote. She didn’t feel like she had Central Nervous System Lupus and she was more certain everyday that her episode was due to lack of food and the tendency of Locatelli women to be susceptible to blood sugar swings. Dr. Stillmen was more and more insistent that she continue with Depakote and Mary was more and more nauseated. Finally Mary had had enough and decided on her own to stop taking Depakote. There was never any definitive test that Mary took that showed she actually had Central Nervous System Lupus and that helped Mary make her mind up. Since Dr. Stillmen was not OK with that decision Mary stopped seeing him also. Mary soon got over the extreme nausea, but she feels her stomach has never fully recovered from Depakote.

Another Christmas has come and gone. Goodbye to 2009. We are having no luck finding a lawyer to take Mary’s case. It seems most lawyers are no longer taking Mirapex cases. I’ve sent detailed information to several but to no avail. Later we found out from a kind person that worked in a law office that some lawyers were being required to sign agreements to not take any further Mirapex cases if they were granted settlements for their clients. But we didn’t know any of this at this time. All we knew was that Mary and her family were in the middle of bankruptcy, Helen and I were falling behind on our house payments due to the financial burden of helping Mary, and they were stuck in a very small cabin with no reliable heat, moldy walls and a leaky roof.

Our Enumclaw flower shop had lost about $29,000 dollars in 2009. This isn’t helping us. But as I write this Helen reminds me to be thankful for what we have. As we enter 2010 Mary and Joe are still married and our granddaughter Julia seems well adjusted and is a bright student doing well in school. Our extended family is still tight knit, supportive and solid. We have all our children and grandchildren together for every holiday and family birthday. Helen, me and Mary are working long hours at the flower shop for no money, but working there with her understanding parents has brought Mary back. She can never return to her lucrative business, but could be successful in creative endeavors.

Now that I’m writing the story of Mary’s struggle with the drug Depakote it really brings out the contrast for me between her experience with Depakote and Mirapex. Mary’s doctor, Doctor Stillmen, was insistent that Mary continue taking Depakote until the required dosage was reached. Mary was able to thoughtfully consider how she felt against the weak diagnoses of Central Nervous System Lupus. Helen and I were fine with Mary’s decision against her doctors wishes, to discontinue taking Depakote. We felt that she was capable of making an informed decision for herself.

In contrast, Mirapex robbed Mary of the ability to understand what was happening to her. She was oblivious to the destruction she was causing around her. Neither bankruptcy, nor a neglected daughter, nor a falling apart home could shake her optimism. Mary would have never continued on Mirapex, just as she made the decision to stop taking Depakote, if Mirapex hadn’t taken over her mind. Mary never considered a lawsuit against the manufacturers of Depakote since she understood that all drugs can have side effects and she was capable of deciding if the side effects were worth the benefits.

The rest of our stay in the Midwest was normal family time for us. We were, however, initiated into Midwest weather. Cold fronts passed through the Pacific Northwest in winter just as they did in the Midwest, but there the cold air was warmed by the proximity to the Pacific Ocean. Often in the Pacific Northwest cold frontal passages only meant the temperature dropping from 45 degrees to 40 degrees. We soon learned that it was a different story in the Midwest. When we looked north from our condo in Overland Park all that stood between us and the Arctic was a few stunted trees. I was on duty from early morning Monday the ninth of March to about noon watching the radar and routing research aircraft through interesting weather. I came home and went to bed to catch up on my sleep from being up all night. Helen and Mary were going to walk north up to Rosana Square to do some shopping. I warned them that a cold front would be coming soon, but they assured me that they would be home in plenty of time. Consequently, they left in only t-shirts as the temperature when I got home was in the 70’s. Later when I woke up I found out that while they were inside at Rosana Square the temperature dropped to the 30’s. They had a very cold and windy fast walk home. Such was our first introduction to Midwest weather. The other introduction for Adam was the tornado shelters at his school. Thankfully he never had to experience them first hand!

In March the temperature did reach into the 70’s more often and the outside pool at Pointe Royal was opened. Seventy degrees or so seemed warm to us as that is a normal sunny day in Western Washington in the summer. So, we made good use of the pool on nice days. At least the days seemed like outdoor swimming ones to us, but apparently not to the locals who didn’t use the outdoor pool at all.

Helen wrote to my father every week about what we were doing. We had asked him to fly out and visit us in Kansas, but even though he was in very good health, he was reluctant to leave his home unattended in the winter. When we started the drive home on Wednesday the 18th of March my father was ready for us to return. We visited our daughter Amy and her husband Mark in Boulder, Colorado. Mark was there working on his doctoral thesis. Visiting relatives in Butte, Montana was next where they helped us dig up some Mastodon teeth in a spot just outside of town. Then it was onto Western Washington and home. However, just before home I noticed that the front of the Checker was shaking more than usual. We stopped at a rest stop a few miles before Snoqualmie Pass and I noticed a bulge on the side of one of the front tires. With four kids and a scientist’s salary I had to make tires stretch as far as possible before replacement. I drove much slower from then until home. We drove through our gate on the 28th and the 30th I replaced the tires.

We drove into West Seattle to visit my father on the 29th. It was nice to be together again. We walked to the local beach along Puget Sound and had dinner together. Mary stayed in with my dad for a few days and we went home and returned to our daily routines. Mary’s grandfather took Mary on a tour of all the old places he had been in Seattle. He showed her the apartment that Mom stayed in when she first came to Seattle, the hill where he and Mom, when they were dating, watched cars sliding down in the winter when it snowed, the house he lived in when he came to Seattle as a young boy, the schools he attended and other important memory places. My father was still living in the house he custom built in 1949 and was able to drive Mary on that memory tour. On April second Helen brought Mary home to Hobart.

My father and I worked together on weekends on projects around our house and my brother called him every day at noon to talk. My brother couldn’t reach him at noon on April 9th, but we weren’t concerned as he had an active social life. When my brother still couldn’t reach him in the evening we became concerned and asked the neighbor Peter Lange to check on him. Peter found the house dark except for the TV flickering in the kitchen. My brother started into town and Peter used the hidden key to get into the house. My father was lying alongside the kitchen table. He died while enjoying the view from his kitchen table. We arrived just after my brother did and Helen and I kept Mary, Adam and Megan in the bedroom while the funeral home picked up my dad. The next day Mary came into our bed in the morning and we just lay there stunned at his sudden death. Thankfully Helen was able to take charge of the situation, call the necessary people, and start the arrangements for consultation at the Catholic Church in West Seattle and the local funeral home.

We were all saddened at my father’s death, but Mary took it the hardest of all of us. She had been the closest to her grandfather since she was born and especially so after Mom died. Looking back on my father’s death we realize it was a nice way to die. He was still in his own home. He dreaded having to leave it and move into an assisted living place, and he had just spent a wonderful time with Mary. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Helen and I were afraid the earlier sudden deaths in the family might have triggered the onset of Lupus in Mary. Now along with the sadness of my father’s passing we were very worried about Mary. She had weathered the trauma of Depakote and stood up for herself against a persistent doctor. She had done really well in her first quarter at Bellevue Community College. Now the shock of her grandfather’s death threw Mary off of the goal she had for being an interior designer. Mary was always artistic and creative, and where Lupus kept her from being as physically active as she wanted it didn’t hinder her creativity. Now Mary switched to an AA degree with the goal of transferring to the University of Washington. It was a more ambitious and strenuous goal, especially for someone with a chronic illness. Helen and I fully supported Mary in her decision, but that didn’t mean we didn’t continue to worry if she would finally overdo and relapse into a more serious case of Lupus.

On Saturday April 18, 1992 my family and my brother’s took my father’s ashes and distributed them on Mt. Walker, a mountain my father could see daily from his West Seattle home. He loved the mountains and once mentioned to me that he would like his ashes there. Some of his ashes we saved and they were buried along side of my Mom at the Catholic Cemetery in Seattle’s University District. With that ended a long chapter in my life and an important one in Mary’s.

Life goes on and so did ours. Mary continued to finish junior college, but had to go a little longer due to her change in plans for a major. Part of the routine of our lives was the too often trips to the Polyclinic in Seattle for Mary’s frequent checkups. Lupus was always there, but thankfully not getting any worse. Mary continued to work to help pay for her tuition. Mary was accepted at the University of Washington on June 3rd of 1993. She would start university in the fall. Mary had commuted with me without any further incidents all through the rest of community college. Now we would travel together to the University where I could be there for the complete commute. Helen and I were no longer as worried about Mary as she had shown she was certainly capable of weathering the challenges of college and work even while burdened with a chronic illness.

With some of the inheritance from my father our family built a four car garage with a 1,200 square foot dance hall on top of it next to our Hobart log home. As always, we did all the work ourselves from drawing the plans, getting the permits, and installing all the plumbing and electrical. We started having dances for family and friends every month. That is where all our kids learned to dance. Mary loved to participate, but tired out quickly. We had friends from church that played in a Cajun band. One memorable dance they played while anyone that couldn’t dance shook noise makers, rattled bells and “strummed” washboards with their fingers.

It’s an old and tired cliché that life happens while we are making other plans, but I’m always amazed how small happenings in our lives can lead to life changing events. I had always done my own car repair including fixing the Checker after it had been totaled in a car accident. That car had been too faithful a companion to let it die in a crusher. When it was time for another brake job I figured it would be easy, but was I in for a surprise. The brakes were no longer available so I had to jack up the Checker, take off all the brakes, and then have them relined. I had done this several times before so I wasn’t expecting any problems. Anyone familiar with cars of the 1960’s would know that there were different length shoes for each wheel. The primary brake shoe which was smaller came on first, then the friction against the rotating wheel helped pull on the larger secondary brake shoe. This acted like a power brake where the momentum of the car helped stop it. This was pretty standard on all cars of that era as disk brakes were unheard of on domestic cars when the Checker was manufactured.

When the brake shoes came back with new linings I was dismayed to see that all the shoes were the same length. I immediately called up the company that redid the shoes, but they assured me that it would make no difference. I put them on, but the first time I tested them the Checker didn’t stop very well and it took a lot of pressure on the brake pedal. It seemed that the same length shoes were not working as planned. As the Checker only had non power brakes it always had been a little hard to stop, especially for my daughters. We drove the Checker as it was, but it was even harder to stop. Luckily Helen was very strong and could still stop the Checker.

On December 23, 1994 Helen was driving Adam, Megan, and Mary to Southcenter shopping mall when the brakes failed on the Checker. No one was hurt as Helen was able to get it over to the side of the road without incident. We had AAA, a necessity for a family with ancient cars, so a tow truck soon arrived. I will always believe that the increased stress on the braking system from the same length brake shoes had caused it to fail. Driving the tow truck was a young man, Joe Magalhaes, Mary’s age. Mary and Joe hit it off on the spot, it appeared to be “love at first sight”. Someone had to ride in the tow truck to show the way home and Mary jumped at the chance. What a chain of important events that botched brake repair shoeing started.

Joe had been in the Marines and had intended to make a career of it. He was well liked but during training began to fall behind his fellow Marines when stamina was needed. At first they thought he was faking and even pushed him harder. However when he ended up in the hospital they diagnosed an internal bleeding problem that was making him anemic and fatigued. The military doctors were unable to diagnose the cause for the bleeding and Joe was honorably discharged. When he returned home Joe was given a job at a high school friend’s towing company. Joe worried that he would have trouble finding a girlfriend with his undiagnosed condition. Mary was in a similar circumstance with her Lupus diagnoses. That certainly played a part in their mutual attraction. Christmas 1994 came with a new man in Mary’s life, one that would still be there as I write this chapter in 2010.

July 14, 2010. I’ve almost given up on finding a lawyer, but feel I need to fight back at Boheringer Ingelheim using the only resource I have; that is my 40 years experience as a scientist. I had suggested that we might try putting up a video on YouTube asking for help in tabulating the compulsive behaviors caused by Mirapex in order to counter the claim that one of Mary’s compulsive behaviors, excessive sewing, did not fit a Mirapex side effect. We also hoped to find allies in our so far lonely fight against Boheringer Ingelheim. I made the video a few days ago. Adam helped film me with his digital camera. We were warned by friends and relatives that the video might bring exposure we didn’t want to our family. So we started to call the video our “nuclear option”. An option we would employ as a last resort. Sitting here finishing this chapter I feel we have run out of other options. We are pretty much financially destroyed by Mirapex. We have a daughter struggling to keep up with their bankruptcy payments and now in danger of loosing their truck I just pushed the key to upload the video. We need to be prepared for anything to happen.

Chapter 7: Marriage, Bed Rest, a New Granddaughter

May 28, 2010: Mary and Joe are falling behind on their bankruptcy payments mostly due to the struggles we are having with the flower shop and Mary’s inability to look for other work outside of our supportive family business. Mary and Joe are in a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, but may be forced to convert to a Chapter 7. Some of the bankruptcy payments are to pay off the truck Joe uses to commute to work in. Helen and I don’t understand what’s happening with the bankruptcy but live in fear that Joe will lose his truck.

We are trying to help Mary and Joe financially, but we are continuing to fall behind in our own house payments. I haven’t had any responses to the video I posted on YouTube. I was worried right after I posted the video that I would be swamped or criticized or both. Now I’m worried that no one will respond. The days are turning sunnier now, but I’m having trouble enjoying the better weather. I must be slipping into some sort of depression for the first time in my life.

Life continued on for all of us, but now it also included Joe. It seemed fitting that our Mary and Joseph met two days before Christmas and the birth of Christ. Mary was sick, of course, as always. But I had a steady job at the University of Washington, Amy was happily married, Adam and Megan were doing well in school and Mary had found a soul mate in Joe. Her first year at the University had gone very well. She now had fall quarter under her belt. Mary started in her junior year at the University and decided to major in Anthropology. Anthropology was one of the smaller departments at the University of Washington and that along with the emphasis on the study of people and their cultures appealed to Mary. I believe that since Mary had to battle a chronic illness on a daily basis it made her even more able to empathize with others. The tradition in our family was to celebrate New Year’s Eve with our immediate family playing board games. Then on New Year’s Day we had a smorgasbord for the extended family. We all were looking forward to 1995 and Mary graduating from the University in the spring.

Mary continued to work part time to help pay for her schooling. When Mary transferred from Bellevue Community College the Disabled Student Office at the University of Washington had an opening for a work study student. Mary jumped at the chance to work with other students in similar situations to her. Lupus qualified Mary for help as a disabled student also. Mary could have extra time on tests and she was able to bypass the spoken language requirement. As a consequence she was required to take additional upper level classes all dealing with one culture. Mary chose to be immersed in Chinese culture. This worked out well except for one class in ancient Chinese history. The class was taught by a Chinese Professor which made him hard to understand when he lectured. Mary started out with fifteen or so classmates, but the difficulty in understanding the professor and the work load of the class took its toll. Soon there were only five students left including Mary and two who were graduate students auditing the class.

The number of students was now down to the minimum required for a class to be viable. If one more student dropped out, the class would be cancelled. Mary was struggling along with the remaining students and was seriously considering dropping out of the class. However, the professor made an emotional appeal to the remaining students to stay. It seems his career was already negatively impacted by so many students already dropping out and it would be a severe blow to have the class cancelled. Since she was a little girl Mary always thought about others first and this time was no exception. Mary stayed in the class and in the spring graduated from the University of Washington.

I had been promoted to the Research Faculty at the University of Washington and was now a Research Assistant Professor. This was highly unusual as I had never completed my graduate studies. I became bored with graduate classes and wanted to try my hand at working on problems that hadn’t already been solved. At the time I was promoted I was told that only one other Research Faculty member besides me had just a Bachelor’s Degree. Since I was on the faculty I could participate in the yearly graduation ceremony. The faculty marched in at the start of the ceremony and took places on the stage in front directly behind where the graduates would be receiving their degrees. I don’t think anyone besides parents of a child with a chronic illness could understand how Helen and I felt during that ceremony. The daily struggles with the chronic tiredness and nausea seemed far away. Relief, happiness, pride, along with emotions there are no words to describe were there when Mary stepped onto the stage and received her diploma with honors and a GPA of 3.8. That afternoon on June 10th we had a joyous and fun graduation party in the dance hall of our Hobart log home.

It’s late summer now in Maple Valley, August 2010 actually, and I still haven’t gotten any responses to my video, and today I can admit it, I’m very depressed for the first time in my life. Mary and Joe can’t pay for the payments on their truck. Helen and I can’t meet our house payments. We are barely meeting our expenses at the flower shop and struggle to find extra money there to pay our personal bills. There is one bright spot however. While viewing my video on YouTube Mary notices another one by H. Lee Thompson, an Ohio lawyer. In that video H. Lee Thompson is asking for people to contact him that have been damaged by Mirapex. Mary just emailed him and will be talking to him on the phone shortly.

I’ve survived my parent’s death, the rigors of building our own homes while working full time, and Mary’s chronic illness. What has kept me out of depression during all that time was continued hope in the future that I can succeed in if I work hard enough. Now I can’t avoid thinking that the pharmaceuticals are so powerful that they can prevail over us and for the first time in my life take my future away.

When Helen and I were first starting out and just had Amy and Mary we were like lots of young couples and had little extra money. We were in our second home and Amy and Mary were sleeping in a small room that had a closet built out from the side. I had drawn the plans and obtained the building permit to add three bedrooms to the house, but had no money to rent power equipment to dig the foundation. I was feeling stymied, but I beat the stucco off of the outside of the closet and tore the closet off of where the kids slept. We didn’t even have money for plywood to seal up the side of their bedroom so I picked up some old doors that had been discarded on the side of the road and used those to board up the side of their bedroom. I plugged up the keyholes in the doors with paper, and then started to dig the foundation with a pick and shovel. I just had to start doing something.

Even in the midst of this depression, writing this book about Mary and the terrible impact of Mirapex is my way of still “doing something”. It must be helping as today I can still sit here and write.

Mary looked for work the summer after graduating from the University of Washington and found it in the local Maple Valley school district. She started in the fall of 1995 as a substitute teacher’s aid. Mary would have made an excellent teacher, but at that time there was no avenue for outstanding college graduates to bypass the teaching courses and teach as there is now. Mary substituted in both the high school and junior highs, in regular and special education classes. With her empathy towards the unfortunate Mary was especially suited to help in the special education classes. She enjoyed helping with those children. However, the special education teaching was physically taxing for her. When a disruptive student had to be removed from the classroom it was the task of the teacher’s aid to take the student out and control them. Mary had to physically hold one particular boy from hurting himself or others until he calmed down. After such encounters she would come home with bruises.

Joe had been ready to marry Mary the first time he saw her. Helen and I cautioned them that it is better to get to know each other for at least a year until becoming engaged. That way they would go through all the seasons and get a chance to see how the other handled life’s various problems before committing. So they did, and on December 16, 1995 Joe took Mary on a dinner train ride to a winery north of Seattle. He proposed on the way back and Mary said yes! A child’s normal progression in life from toddler to college graduate to a young woman engaged to be married is wonderful, but to parents of a child with a chronic and potentially dangerous illness they are momentous; especially when the outcome of the child’s whole life is in doubt.

Mary was ready for a break from working at the schools and took the summer of 1996 off. It seemed the teachers that needed the most breaks were those that worked in special education. Mary’s substitute jobs were more and more all about controlling difficult special education children. This was too physically taxing for her and the low pay of the work added to her stress. Mary spent some of her time off with my elderly Aunt Carolyn down on her farm outside of McCleary Washington. Carolyn had been widowed many years before and had given up on raising beef cattle a few years after my uncle had died. The farmhouse was built in 1913 and still was heated with only wood fireplaces and a wood stove in the kitchen. If any smell can bring me back to good family times it’s the smell of dinner cooking on a wood stove. Mary and Carolyn were good companions as Mary was also limited in her physical abilities and energy. Both liked to do hand work and they would sit by the wood fires at night, talk and knit.

Mary and Joe planned for a June wedding but didn’t have the money for a honeymoon. However fate stepped in, in the form of a fire in an apartment house a few blocks from the University of Washington. The apartments were saved but the oak flooring on two stories was charred and water damaged. Years before I learned from an old carpenter how to steal flooring in a hurry, not that I ever stole any. He perfected his technique during the depression when house with nice hardwood flooring were abandoned. Long wood wedges were cut from two by fours. The first few boards along the side of a room were ripped up and discarded. Then the wedges were tapped underneath the remaining first board. One of the crew would walk down the line of wedges giving each one a tap with a sledgehammer. As the boards “walked up” the wedges and fell off the butt end the other crew would hurry them into a waiting truck. If all went as planned a good sized house could be cleaned out in one night.

I hurried over to the apartment house and got permission to remove the wood flooring for free as they were going to have to pay to remove it anyway. My son Adam helped Joe with the removal which went easily as planned. It went so easy that it crossed my mind to start stealing hardwood floors on the side. However, my thoughts on stealing hardwood floors changed when I started removing the nails from the floor boards. They had to be removed by using a special pair of pliers that pulled the nails through the boards, pointed side first. This did less damage to the boards and was possible because the nails were ones with small heads. I firmly gave up on the idea of a lawless life after spending many cold nights after work in the garage pulling nails. Finally that torturous work was completed and Joe and I planed down the finished side of the boards to remove the water and fire damage. The over $2,000 dollars we made when we sold the boards more than paid for Mary and Joe’s honeymoon.

Mary was still working for the Maple Valley School District in the winter of 1997, but that work was becoming more and more taxing for her. In January Mary applied at Microsoft and started work there in February. Mary was a paralegal assistant. The legal department was in the same building as the office of Bill Gates and Mary would occasionally pass him in the hallway. The work there was not as physically taxing and paid much better. The only drawback was the long and tiring commute from our log home in Hobart. No matter how old Mary was Lupus was a constant companion that impacted every aspect of her life.

Mary and Joe found an apartment in Redmond, Washington which thankfully shortened Mary’s commute to Microsoft. They were married on June 21, 1997 at the church in West Seattle where Helen and I and her older sister Amy were married. They left the church in a hail of rice to depart in; you guessed it, a friend’s shiny tow truck. Their reception was at the Aquarium on the Seattle waterfront. Mary and I danced a waltz and they were off to their, thanks to an old crook, floor financed honeymoon.

It is now September 14, 2010 and our anniversary. This year we celebrate it by having Mary and Joe’s truck repossessed. We have some hope now as H. Lee Thompson has agreed to look at Mary’s case. All the Mirapex lawsuits have been transferred to the Federal court in Minneapolis Minnesota. This is called a MDL or Multidistrict Litigation. This streamlines the court process as only a few judges preside over the cases.

November 8, 2010: I receive the first reply to my video. It is not from another Mirapex victim, but it buoys up my spirit. Here is the letter which I feel is worthy of showing here in its entirety.

“Just watched your video on you-tube.  Sorry, I don't personally have a Mirapex story but I just wanted to wish you the best of luck in your search for some kind of justice.  I'm in my first year of nursing school and came across  your video looking up info for pramipexole (mirapex) for my pharmacology class.  I'll tell you one thing: you've got alot of moxy putting yourself out there against a giant pharmaceutical company.  The way these businesses have influence over our elected leaders is downright scary.  It's always amazing to me how in most of their television ads (which, by the way, are quite indicative of health care driven by profits) everything looks so beautiful and resolved with their drugs.  There's mention of "possible" side effects, but how can you pay attention to them when all you see is a family laughing around a campfire, or a smiling retiree hugging her cute grandson?

Anyway, I didn't mean to bother you with a rant on the current state of pharmaceutical advertising.  I was touched by your plea and I'm so sorry that you and your family were so badly affected by a product that was supposed to be of some help.  Good luck to you and I hope that your message will reach the right people!”

This was my reply.

“Sorry I'm so tardy in getting back to you, but we are still struggling to recover from my daughter's bout with Mirapex.  We bought a small flower shop in Enumclaw, WA to help rehabilitate Mary after she finally was able to get off of Marapex.  This has helped her greatly, but takes up all our time and many nights I'm too tired to  check my email.   I can't go into details, but I can tell you that BI cares as much for their customers as ordinary people care about cockroaches. It's all about money.   Mirapex is more dangerous than most drugs because it takes over the mind to the point that the patient thinks that they are doing great, even fantastic, where the reality is a physical, mental, emotional and financial train wreck.  Even worse when confronted with what's happening they get angry and refuse to quit.  Our daughter finally quit after spending two days in the hospital from a physical collapse brought on by continued manic activity.

 My family really appreciates your email and kind thoughts.”

Mary continued to work at Microsoft through the fall of 1999. She was working full time and the physical stress of daily work was too demanding. She loved her job and got along great with her co-workers. She enjoyed the free snacks and drinks and the yearly picnics with all the food and drinks provided for free. But Mary was gradually wearing out. She and Joe really wanted children, but with Lupus having children was fraught with danger. Pregnancy could send her Lupus into a full fledged life threatening flare, and these words were the encouragement from her doctor.

Mary left Microsoft and they moved to Issaquah where they purchased a condo. This way they would only be about 20 minutes from our house. Our trips to take care of Mary while Joe was at work were becoming more and more frequent as her health wore down. Now at least the trips would be less that an hour for us. We also hoped that if Mary could find part time work her health would improve to the point where pregnancy would not be so dangerous.

Joe continued working as a tow truck driver and Mary took a part time job at a chiropractic clinic in town. Mary’s health improved with a lower work load and no driving commute, as she could walk to her job at the clinic. Mary announced her pregnancy in June of 2000. Helen and I were excited to have another grandchild on the way but scared also. One bad thing about having so much information available on the Net is that too much information is available on the Net. I knew too much about how Lupus could impact a pregnancy. Soon Mary had to quit her job at the clinic as her doctor put her on bed rest. This was a double edged sword as she would be resting, but everyday we worried that Mary would lose the baby anyway.

On February 17, 2001 our granddaughter Julia was born. Mary had faithfully kept to bed rest and delivered without incident. Julia was almost a month early, but with modern medicine this was not a problem. Except for bed rest, Mary’s pregnancy was normal and it didn’t cause her Lupus to get worse. We had a slight hope that her pregnancy would cause Mary’s lupus to go into remission but this didn’t happen. Life went on for all of us with Lupus still riding along but now we had a new passenger with us, our granddaughter Julia.

November 1, 2010: Helen and I are in the middle of compiling all the information H. Lee Thompson needs to decide on whether to file a lawsuit or not. We have to document everything and we need to copy all Mary’s income tax returns, doctor records, her druggist prescription records, affidavits from us and her siblings documenting her compulsive behaviors, her business records, and pictures of their unfinished home. To file a civil case against the pharmaceuticals in federal court Mary has to document at least $75,000 in damages. To do this we have to tally up all the money we loaned her and Joe to help them keep their home and qualify for bankruptcy. This means days and days of compiling and copying receipts, bank statements and check copies. I need to get back to writing on the book, but getting the records together along with working at the shop is taking up all our time and energy.

November 17, 2010: We just mailed off a large box full of all the papers H. Lee Thompson required so that he could make a decision whether to file a lawsuit. Helen has been working very hard to obtain a loan adjustment on our home. The going is very tough as they keep losing the papers we send them. The last batch of papers we sent by American Express and they were signed for at the mortgage company. They claimed they never got them. I tried contacting them, but it is impossible to get past the people that answer the phones for them who are obviously in another country. They just kept repeating over and over again that they never received the papers and that we were in arrears again. We would need to now give them all the papers we had originally sent plus a new analysis of the income from our flower shop. I was so frustrated that I was almost in tears on the phone. It seems any good news we get is ruined by bad. H. Lee Thompson is our only hope we can cling to.

Chapter 8: New Job, New Home, Bright Future

My parents had owned the property on Pipe Lake since 1953. After my mother died my father passed it on to my brother and me. My brother didn’t use the property much so he signed it over to his two children. They were married and had their own children. We have known several friends that grew up with vacation property and as the siblings grew up and got married tried to keep the property and share it. Eventually the problems of maintenance and sharing become too burdensome. The same was true for us as all our families were becoming bigger and older with more friends added to the mix. The other problem concerned the trees on the lot. The Douglas fir and Maple trees were growing taller every year and some were tall enough to hit the neighbor’s house if they fell. Compounding the risk was the layer of clay and wet soil on top of that layer that underlined the property along the lake edge. This made for shallow roots and rotted tree trunks.

About the time Mary had Julia, Helen and I were having trouble making the house payments on our Hobart log home and paying our share of the property taxes on the lake property. Building our own houses over the years was both emotionally and financially rewarding. There is a lot of satisfaction in standing on the floor of homes we built knowing what got us there was our own hard work. However, by building and selling we ended up with a 6000 square foot log home that was worth way more than my salary could have afforded. Consequently, our property taxes were much higher than normal for my income.

Problems with sharing the lake and our own financial problems made us start thinking seriously about what to do. One choice was to sell the lake property and stay in the Hobart log home. The other choice was to sell the Hobart log home and build on the lake property. After discussing it with our family Helen and I decided it would be better to keep the property that has been in the family since 1953 and sell the Hobart log home. We planned to also build the new home out of logs. In 2001 I started drawing plans for the new home. This time the process would be more complicated. New energy requirements adopted since we built the Hobart log home would mean extensive calculations on the energy losses through the window and walls as well as the method of heating. Further complicating my “do it yourself” project were the new earthquake codes. Western Washington was in a high probability of earthquake designation. Now, as I had in the past, I could no longer do my own calculations for beam sizes, but had to hire an engineer to calculate them for me.

Because of all theses knew requirements I had to first draw the plans and then submit them to an engineer. The engineer figured out all the special connectors and extra bracing I would need for earthquake protection and then I had to redraw the plans to incorporate them. Luckily I was able to calculate the heating and insulation requirements on my own and to justify the number and size of the windows and doors we had wanted.

December 26, 2010: The New Year is almost here and I’ve just received my first reply to my video from a person who took Mirapex. I’ll call him John to hide his identity. He was still taking it, but was hoping to stop soon. He has suffered many of the same reactions as Mary. Because of the personal nature of his reply I don’t feel that I should provide any details about him or his heartbreaking story. John did confide that if it wasn’t for “a loving and supportive wife and family” that he would be dead by now. I’ll try to be as supportive as I can when I reply

.

January 18, 2011: John just emailed me and he has stopped taking Mirapex for about a week. He is going through a living hell on earth. Studies have shown that Mirapex withdrawal can be as severe as withdrawal from cocaine. It is called DAWS or Dopamine Agonist Withdrawal Syndrome. I’m going to devote a later chapter of this book to explaining the research showing how Mirapex affects the brain and why it causes compulsive behaviors that differs among victims. I’ll also explain DAWS in more detail and if I get enough responses to my video show the compilation of the different compulsive behaviors.

Here is the email I just sent back to him:

“Have hope---Mary is proof that there is life after Mirapex.  She had a rough time coming off the drug as she couldn't understand that 3 years had passed and she couldn't remember who had died during that time and who wasn't still alive.  She had a lot of catching up to do.   I did get one of the first smiles out of her when (after quitting Mirapex) I told her that I didn't want to bring her more bad news about people that died, but----- president Abraham Lincoln also was dead. 

 She also couldn't tell time on a regular clock.

 

She had to relearn how to find addresses.

 

She couldn't figure out how her daughter had gotten so big

 

She went through a stage where she thought every one in the family were geniuses (really---- but she soon leaned otherwise)

 Now she is over the physical effects of the drug, but she has trouble talking about what happened to her. Our thoughts and prayers are with you also.

John”

Mary Joe and Julia are happy in their condo in Issaquah, but it has no yard and Mary loves to garden. She has put pots on their small deck. Anyone who is a gardener would know that a deck with pots just is not the same as a yard to landscape and work in. Mary still did not have a lot of spare energy, but gardening did seem to refresh her. Her health was still a big factor in her life and Helen and I had to make frequent trips into Issaquah to help out with Julia and take care of Mary. From the point of view of ease of maintenance the second story condo made good sense. But emotionally Mary’s heart was still yearning for a yard. Being at Pipe Lake, near water, also made her feel better. Maybe Mary felt the spirit of her grandfather there or just liked the smell, looks and feel of the water. Whatever it was, when she was there she felt better.

Helen and I were going to move to the lake, but we had to draw the plans, get them approved and then build the home ourselves. That would be in the future, but we started thinking of Mary and Joe moving into the neighborhood of our lake property. That way they could have a yard and use our property for lake access. Property on the lake was expensive and out of their price range, but away from the lake there were lots of houses they could afford. So Mary and I started looking for homes on my days off while Joe worked. Anything we found that Mary liked, she and Joe went back to look at.

Mary and I looked at a lot of houses in the neighborhoods surrounding our lake property, but they were having trouble finding what they wanted. I knew that we could rebuild them to be more like what they envisioned, but the basics were not there. Looking back on the search I now think that it was the neighborhoods compared to actual property on the lake that was keeping them from finding what they liked.

We were still looking in the summer of 2001 when a small cabin popped up for sale on the lake. The cabin was only about a block east of our property. It was very small, just on bedroom, a small kitchen and dining room and no basement. It was very cute, but would need some foundation and extensive insulation work before it could be lived in over the winter. Mary was smitten. Joe was more cautious as the burden of building a real home there would fall on him. Mary had lived through several episodes of our own homebuilding and was fine with that. She had helped me when she was able putting up logs and pulling wires through walls. Mary was not at all dismayed at the prospect of eventually building. Several people were interested in buying that property and small cabin, but were held up with getting estimates from builders and architects. We didn’t need that kind of advice as we already had years of home building experience under our belts.

January 21, 2011: Mary and Joe just got the notice today that their bankruptcy has been discharged. This is very, very good news as now H. Lee Thompson can complete the filing of a lawsuit against the manufacturers of Mirapex. Until the bankruptcy was discharged the creditors could try to claim any settlement Mary received. Since a settlement was problematic at that time the bankruptcy was discharged and Mary and Joe were finally free from that onus.

Mary and Joe were able to get the jump on the other buyers and Mary felt that her love for the lake and our long history there also helped tip the purchase in her favor. On August 25, 2001 our family came together and helped Mary, Joe and Julia move into their new home on the lake. Mary was now only fifteen minutes away from us. This would make it way easier to help her and when we moved we would be only a minute walk away. Once we starting building our own lake home we could use their bathroom and wouldn’t have rent a Sanican as we did when we built the house in Hobart.

We were just in the process of cutting down the trees on the property to save the wood for future bonfires when they moved into their new cabin. In spite of Mary’s chronic illness all our futures looked good. Mirapex was also in the future. I don’t think that we would have been so happy if we would have known that because of the effects of Mirapex, 11 years later they would be trapped in an unfinished home with leaking roof, and all of them would still be sleeping in the same small bedroom.

February 15, 2011: Another email arrived today. It is from a man that is taking Mirapex for Parkinson’s disease. It is the only drug that has helped him and he does not have the devastating compulsive behavior side effects that Mary and John experienced. Helen and I have a friend that has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s so I passed the information along to her.

Not everyone that takes Mirapex develops compulsive behaviors, and this new email is proof that the drug helps many people with Parkinson’s. Modern medicine saves many lives and Mary has depended on modern drugs to survive Lupus. We just want them to clean up the mess they made in our lives.

We started to put in the footings for the new lake home in May of 2002. We were able to stay living in our log home in Hobart while we built. The foundation work turned out to be a lot harder than we planned. Pipe Lake is situated on the top of a rise in the local topography. The lake sits in a bowl in the middle of this rise and the land slopes down in all directions away from it. To the west and east, where the outlet of the lake is, the slope is pretty steep. A layer of clay is why the lake is there and underground springs feed the lake from underneath. In summer, when the lake has warmed up the springs can be felt by the plumes of cold water hitting our feet. The temperature at the bottom in the deepest part of the lake year-round is in the high 30’s. These springs cannot originate from the small rise at the rim of the lake, but have to travel long distances underground from the surrounding hills and mountains in underground channels until they surface in the lake.

When we dug for the foundation it was spring, but not a particularity wet one. We immediately ran into the clay layer as it sloped up and away from the lake bed. Unfortunately for us the exposed clay layer contained several small springs that dripped from the newly exposed bank behind the footings for the foundation. We struggled more than a month to contain the water, but finally gave up and hand dug a trench for an additional drain a foot below the traditional footing drains. This did the trick, but was pretty taxing for me in the process. After all, I was no longer in my forties as when I was building the Hobart log home. I found I had to pace myself more.

We were making steady, but slow progress on the lake house and Mary was making changes in her life also. In August of 2002 Mary decided she wanted to go back to work to help out with their finances and save up money for building on their house. The small cabin was OK for the time being since Julia was still a baby, but once she left the baby stage they would soon outgrow the single bedroom. Mary had extensive experience with administrating contracts at Microsoft so she took a position with Accenture as a Contract Administrator. Her work was part time which fit her need for more rest than the average person. Lupus never missed a day at her side.

We continued to work on our lake house all of 2003. By December of 2003 we were getting close to completion. All the plumbing and wiring was in, the plasterboard was up and the rooms painted. The front deck that ran the length of the house was also done. We had cantilevered the deck using four by twelve’s. We did this on purpose so we would not have posts underneath getting in the way of the lake view from the basement rec-room. The window and doors were ordered, but hadn’t arrived yet, so we had plastic over the openings.

On December 4, 2003 disaster struck. Maple Valley, where the lake home was located, is right up against the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. Occasionally high air pressure east of the Cascades and low pressure west of the Cascades forces air to blow over the mountains and down into the communities along the foothills. This is not uncommon in the winter when storms move in from the Pacific Ocean over Western Washington. However, the winds do not often reach destructive speeds. This time the low pressure was especially deep and the high pressure higher than normal. Also the structure of the atmosphere was well suited to the development of mountain waves in the air forced over the mountains. Mountain waves bring down higher velocity air down to the ground from upper levels of the atmosphere.

We were in the Hobart log home when the power went out at 5:15 in the morning and with it the phone. I purposely built the Hobart home away from any trees knowing about the possibility of strong east wind events from my work at the University of Washington. Helen was supposed to pick up Julia and take her to pre-school in Maple Valley that day and I was going into work. I stayed home to drive her instead as I was worried about the wind. Normally the drive from our Hobart home to the lake was about fifteen minutes. We took our truck which turned out to be a very wise decision.

With the power went the phone connection and we didn’t have cell phones at that time so we couldn’t contact Mary. As soon as we got out of our neighborhood we realized how bad the winds were. Trees were down across the back road to Maple Valley but they were tall and had hit trees on the other side of the road so we were able to squeeze underneath them. The steady wind was close to 50-60 mph and the gusts were close to 100. It was the gusts that were bringing down huge clumps of trees. We struggled along until the main road was totally blocked by fallen trees. We turned around and took a back way along the Cedar River. This was more sheltered and the road, besides being covered with limbs, was passable.

Helen was becoming frightened for Mary and Julia because they were alone in the little cabin on the lake. We had cut down the tallest trees on the lake property when we built, but there were two left between our house and the neighbor’s to the east. On the other hand Mary’s cabin was surrounded on all sides by very tall and large Douglas firs. The firs made the cabin seem in the woods, but now I was starting to get worried myself as I saw the destruction around me.

We came out of the protection of the river and emerged in a neighborhood with trees down all around. One spot was very open to the wind and the trees to our left were whipping all around in the gusty wind. All of a sudden a big gust hit and several roared down right in front of us. Several limbs hit the top of the truck, but didn’t make it through the roof. We turned around and tried another route. In one stretch of road we noticed that the highest gusts were every so often so we waited until the gusts died down and then we dashed alongside the highest trees. It took us over two hours of terror to reach the lake.

We found Mary and Julia huddled in the basement of our almost completed lake house. The basement was constructed of 8 inch thick concrete walls so it was safe from the storm. Mary had fled there from her house after several giant firs crashed down in the front yard. She and Julia were terrified as they made their way down the street in the strong wind to our basement. While they were huddled together the large fir to our east crashed down on our deck pushing our cantilevered beams up through the floor above Mary and Julia. The fir was so large that it smashed our deck and crunched the roof of our neighbors to the west. When we found them they were crying in each other’s arms. The neighbors took in Mary and Julia and while the storm was still raging the neighbor and I cut the tree away from his roof and temporarily patched it. Mary’s and Joe’s house had been spared, but our deck and front room were a mess with half the deck broken and hanging off the front of the house.

This really set us back on construction, as we couldn’t install the windows along the front of the house until the deck was fixed and we couldn’t fix the deck until the insurance was figured out. The insurance problem was compounded by the fact that the deck had been cantilevered and now several of the beams were busted off at the edge of the house. The only way to fix the deck and keep the cantilevered design was to jack up the house and slip in new beams, a tremendous and expensive undertaking. The insurance company was troubled by this and kept sending more adjusters. I was getting anxious to move as we had sold our Hobart home and the buyers were also getting anxious. We had already moved in a lot of their stuff into the dance hall.

Finally I got tired of waiting for a settlement and my son Adam and I jacked the deck into place using whole house jacks. We put a beam under the length of the deck and added posts. We repaired the front room floor and sistered two by twelve’s on the cracked beams. In a week we had the damage repaired but the deck was no longer cantilevered. That got us going again and we spent our first night in the new home on June 29th, 2004. Now our plans were complete. We were just down the street from Mary and could more easily help her when she needed it.

February 17, 2011: H Lee Thompson filed a lawsuit today on behalf of Mary and Joe against the manufacturers of Mirapex. They are Boehringer Ingelheim, Pfizer,. Pharmacia & Upjohn Company LLC, and Pharmacia Corporation.

Chapter 9: Her Own Business, Building Plans

Mary had battled chronic fatigue and nausea since she was a teenager. This had been a constant in her life. In spite of her chronic illness she persevered. In all of this Helen and I traveled along with Mary. Sometimes we tried to talk her out of decisions we felt would be harmful to her, other times we were encouraging. Always we were there to help when fatigue and nausea got the better of her. Working was especially hard for her since she couldn’t always lie down when she needed to. She needed a job where she could work from home, lie down when necessary and be there to take care of Julia. It turned out that during the years we were building on the lake home Mary was working on this problem and in doing so planning a new and better future for her family.

A large company, such as Microsoft, had contracts with a myriad of different companies. Some were small, as with vendors that provided candy machines, and others were for millions of dollars. Once the details of a contract were worked out, the contract had to be reworded into a binding legal document. While working for Accenture as a Contract Administrator Mary had noticed that the contract rewriting in many cases were being handled by expensive law firms at hundreds of dollars of fees per hour. Mary began thinking that she could do the same for a lot less and still improve her financial position. I was busy building and Mary was working on this idea all on her own. I know that parents of children without a chronic illness are happy when their children move out on their own and start building their own lives. Parents of a child with a chronic illness will understand how thrilled Helen and I were when Mary did the same.

Mary researched the requirements for starting her own business. She determined that there was a market for the contract services she would offer. She obtained her business license and started Magalhaes Services on March 25, 2003 and in October Mary started on her first contracts. Mary’s yearly income before she started her own business varied, but was on the average below $20,000. This was because of her need to work part time to preserve her health and strength. Magalhaes Services really brightened he financial future. Now she was averaging over $90,000 per year and getting to work from home. I was just down the street working on the lake home and when I visited Mary she would often be in her bathrobe busily working away on her computer while Julia played nearby. I was so extremely proud of her.

Mary’s business was also a big benefit to Helen and me. Once we were married Helen had stayed home and taken care of the kids. We liked it that way as Helen was free to come on the various University of Washington field trips that came along over the years. Also, with Helen home to clean house and take care of the other domestic chores our weekends were free for other pursuits. After the first set of kids was grown Helen had taken a job at a local farm, Farmer Dan’s, which gave tours to school children from the city. Helen was never keen to pick up animals, but got used to taking children to the pens, picking up the goats and other animals and telling the children about them. Occasionally Mary helped there also, but this was for only a short period of our life as the owner soon moved to the East Coast. Otherwise, Helen stayed home.

Once Mary completed a contract it needed to be taken to Microsoft offices in Issaquah, about a 30 minute drive away. There was also extensive copying to be done. Mary was not always up to make the Issaquah trip, or endure the physical work of copying contracts. Helen took over these chores for Mary. In the past we had helped Mary when necessary, but now Mary could pay Helen. Soon Mary’s siblings were working part time for her also. Mary not only lifted her own family’s financial prospects she also lifted her extended family’s. With the income from her new business Mary was in a position to move forward on the building of her home on Pipe Lake.

March 7, 2011: Another email just came in. Mirapex caused compulsive behaviors must be a world wide problem. Living in the United States it is easy to see things just in terms of our own country. Getting this email from another country is eye opening for me. I want to protect the privacy of the person who emailed so I will only include this excerpt as it was sent.

“There is no doubt among medical Personnel that it was the medicine that made me start with the gambling.

But getting the court to understand that you are so crazy in your head because of the medisine. That you are not able to stop i by yourself, is not easy.

 I'm sure there are many out there who have experienced these side effects, but choose notto tell anyone about them. Because they are embarrassed and are afraid that they are notbelieved that it’s the medicine that makes them crazy.”

This email tells about yet another sad story of a life and plans for the future ruined by the compulsive behaviors caused by Mirapex. I try to get Mary to read these emails, but she is not emotionally up to it. I think that corresponding with other victims would help both of them, but asking her sends her into crying into another room. I’m trying to help the people who are emailing me and Mary at the same time. The emotional burden is taking a toll on me. Never before in my life have I given up and I don’t plan on doing it this time either but too many of the emails I’m receiving are from people that are considering ending their own lives as they see no future for themselves.

Our financial burdens are crushing me. We are trying to get a home loan modification, but are so far unsuccessful. The flower shop is not making any money. I frequently deliver flowers to viewings for the deceased. I’m struck with how peaceful they look laying in their coffins. I fantasize about how nice it would be to just lie there and be done with all these problems. But I know how devastating suicide is on the victim’s family who can’t understand why someone that loves them would want to prematurely leave them. My family and Mary need me. I have to shake these thoughts.

From our own experience and from the emails I’m getting it is clear that the Mirapex caused compulsive behaviors are very different from other drug side effects. All the victims I’ve heard from so far and including Mary were rendered incapable of understanding what was happening to them until extreme damage was done.

We finished building the lake home in the summer of 2004 and I turned 59 in July of that year. I had been building on homes in every decade since I had gotten married in my third decade. Now in a year I would be starting my 6th decade and I was ready for a break. In 2004 Mary started the preliminary planning for her home rebuild by hiring a surveyor to verify the property lines on their lake property. This was necessary since in a survey before we built our own log home we found our property lines to be off by several feet. We were just a half a block away and we were afraid the problem would carry through the intervening property to Mary and Joe’s. The surveyor confirmed our suspicions and the modified property lines were marked out.

With the new property lines established the way was cleared to begin developing house plans. I had always drawn the plans for my own homes and gotten the permits myself. This had saved us thousands of dollars. In order to do that the rules were such that the actual home owner had to draw the plans. I could help Mary in the drawing, but she would have to physically draw them herself. Mary knew I was tired from building the lake house and her improved financial position made it possible for me to help when necessary, but not be the principle person everyone depended on. Mary and Joe went to the Seattle Home show and stopped at the booth of an architect that specialized in remodeling older homes. Subsequently he came out and looked over their cabin on the lake. He crawled underneath and looked at the property. He agreed to act as their architect. For the first time in my life I could relax and have the fun of being in on the building without the hard work.

Magalhaes Services made it possible to start building on their redo of their cabin. It also made it possible for Mary and her family to have better vacations. In October of 2003 Mary had celebrated the starting of her new business by treating her family to a trip to Disneyland. Throughout 2004 Mary’s business had been thriving and in May of that year they traveled together as a family to Hawaii. Friends had provided a condo they could stay in for free. Joe had been stationed in Hawaii as a Marine. This trip meant a lot to him as he could show Mary and Julia around the island and recall the good times he had in the military.

As 2004 ended we were all feeling great. Mary’s business was helping us out with our finances as Helen was still working for Mary. Mary and Joe were looking forward to starting building in 2005. All our children were with us on New Year’s Eve. Mary not only had survived Lupus but had thrived in spite of it.

Helen and I were really enjoying living on the lake that first year. We used to come out to the property quite often in the summer and occasionally in the winter when the lake froze over. But now, spending all year gave us a new perspective on lake living. When we moved there we purchased a plastic paddle boat, the kind that is unsinkable; where two people sit side by side and pump bicycle type pedals. The paddle wheel is hidden undercover between them; no splashing and plenty of fun. It’s great for the grandkids as they can’t tip it over. We used it all year around, even in winter. The week between Christmas and New Years of 2004 we paddled around at night looking at the Christmas lights people put out on their docks. Some lake owners even had lighted Christmas trees complimenting the lights. We didn’t have a dock, but Helen bought some lit-up deer that we put down in our yard.

We had good friends that we went dancing with. Before they visited our finished house for the first time at Christmas, Sharon mentioned that all the lighted deer that people put in their yards at Christmas really “drove her nuts”. We all had a good laugh over that one.

March 8, 2011: Only one day later and I’ve gotten another email in response to my video. This is by far the worst one yet. Here are excerpts from her email that show the living horrors of Mirapex, but hide the identity of the victim who I will fictitiously call Jean

“  As I look around and survey my house, I see the remains left by a person who was driven b an unseen force to leave the house as early as 4:30AM in the morning EVERY DAY (including

               Xmas, New Years, etc.) and bring home furniture, clothing, appliances, food, luggage, shoes, linens, sporting equipment, construction materials, tools, jewelry, household goods, chandeliers, lawn equipment, medical equipment, books, toys, stuffed animals, office supplies, etc.

               without regard for :

          *     weather  -  frostbite on fingers (still healing)

          *     personal safety  -  Fell upside-down in a dumpster last Sept. breaking my hip

                                                  (still healing)

          *     my family  -  They cannot sit at a table to eat, or in a room to visit with anyone. Why ? Because they are drowning in a sea of   COMPULSIVE  LITTER.”

Jean had quit taking Mirapex and is under a doctor’s care for severe withdrawal symptoms. The good news is that she stopped all compulsive behavior and she has the support of an angel of a husband. It seems the people who survive the compulsions of Mirapex have supportive families.

Mary’s house plans were finished and the building permit was approved in the spring of 2005. Joe had started to remove the decks that surround the cabin and they have paid to have the necessary trees removed. I’m not sorry to see the trees go after the terrifying experience during the windstorm. There was a single car carport right next to the road that also had to go. It was in good shape so we had a family workday, took it apart, loaded it in a rental truck and drove in West Seattle to my daughter Amy’s house. This replaced a rickety carport behind their home. Another family work day later and the carport was successfully reassembled on their property.

The building permit for Mary and Joe’s cabin was for a remodel instead of the building of a completely new home where the other one stood. This saved a lot of money and made it possible for them to stay in their home. We had done a similar thing with our second home in West Seattle so it seemed natural for Mary and Joe to do it. The plan was to dig a new basement under the one story cabin using the old floor of the cabin where possible. The new basement was to be about twice the size of the old foundation so the cabin would have to be supported by columns (cribbing) of stacked four by fours over nine feet high while new basement walls were built outside of the cabin. We had built log homes where we had to lift log joists ten inches in diameter and sixteen feet long two stories high, but digging out underneath the cabin and supporting as we dug seemed too much to tackle ourselves. Thank heaven that Magalhaes Services made it possible to pay to have it done.

In August 2005 the digging started. A friend of one of the construction workers that was digging the foundation lived across the road from our lake home. He wanted to extend his from yard and level it so the extra dirt from the digging was trucked there. I liked coming home from work and walking down to see the progress. I watched them put in place a steel I-Beam under the front of the cabin which they temporarily supported on house jacks. Then they lowered the beam and the front of the cabin onto two stacks of four by four cribbing. The cabin had a glass sliding door from the front room opening onto a lakeside deck. Now if anyone stepped out of that door they would plunge over nine feet to the ground. Everyday I was very thankful I could watch instead of working.

March 15, 2011: It is only eight days later and there is another heartbreaking response to my video on YouTube; more marriages in tatters due to the compulsive behaviors caused by Mirapex. I want to remove my video and hide from the world, but hiding will not fix our problems. I want Mary to read this and respond, but she can’t bear it. I can hardly bear it. Helen will at least read them, but she has trouble responding. I should be glad that I’m adding to my compilation of Mirapex caused compulsive behavior, but I can’t seem to build up much enthusiasm for it. I’m depressed every day. I wake up depressed and go to bed depressed.

I wish I could print these emails just as I received them, but I shouldn’t. Here is my reply.

“Thanks for your detailed and nice reply.  My daughter has almost fully recovered from the effects of Mirapex, but it's been two years. She is still depressed over what happened to her however.  Her problem was spending every waking hour and most of the night either looking for bargains on the Net, or sewing clothes that she never finished.  No sex and gambling.  We now have a lawsuit against the manufactures of Mirapex and I can give you the contact info for her lawyer if you would like.  I also understand that there is a class action lawsuit against Mirapex in Canada.”

I’ve started out giving victims the contact information for the lawyer that is handling Mary’s lawsuit. H. Lee Thompson cannot solicit from victims directly but they can contact him. I haven’t yet heard that anyone has contacted him but I don’t suppose it would be legal for him to tell me anyway.

My years as a scientist taught me to put aside any emotional connection to my research and strictly stick to the facts in front of me. Sometimes that meant agreeing with other scientists that I could hardly stand to be in the same room with, but such is the making of a good scientist. I’m trying the same technique with these emails I’m receiving. I’m trying to treat them as pieces of data, like the temperature or the make up of clouds. Unfortunately Mary’s experience has made everything to do with Mirapex personal for me. I’m hiding my true feelings from everyone around me. They know I’m depressed but they don’t know how badly depressed I am. I think everyday of dying. I can’t afford to break down.

In November of 2005 Mary and Joe’s home was not completely supported on the temporary cribbing. The back of the cabin needed to be reset on the steel I-beam that now supported the back of the cabin. The cribbing was braced, but I wasn’t convinced that a severe earthquake wouldn’t shake it loose. The digging and bracing had cost more than Mary had budgeted for that phase of the project. This did not surprise me as my sister-in-law had hired a contractor to remodel her West Seattle home. Much to her dismay the costs ran way over the original estimate. These cost underestimates also seem to normally plague public work’s construction. Mary took the sensible approach of asking me to help Joe with some of the work so she could save money.

Joe and I decided to finish firming up the cabin on the temporary cribbing, then quit for Christmas. For the first time in my life I was scared working on a building project. It was frightening standing under their cabin with the I-beams supported by the cribbing. I wondered how fast my 60 year-old legs could run if an earthquake struck while we were working. I pictured being squashed like a bug. I had seen a picture of someone in Africa that had been run over by a tank. It was a cartoon-like image of a person several times normal size and flat as a piece of paper. This is how I thought I would look if the cabin fell on me. An earthquake didn’t happen, and using a house jack I inherited from my father, Joe and I completed the bracing before Christmas as planned.

March 28, 2011: Jean and I have been emailing continually as she is suffering from DAWS (Dopamine Agonist Withdrawal Symptoms). Mary has finally agreed to at least read some of the emails I’ve been receiving. This is a big step forward for her. I’m forwarding Jean’s emails to Mary today.

Chapter 10: Starting Mirapex

Lupus, along with chronic fatigue and nausea were Mary constant companions. They were there when she went to bed and there when she got up. They were there during school and on her wedding day. Only someone with a chronic illness could understand what that meant. I would periodically check the Net for any new treatments available. Luckily Mary’s Lupus didn’t involve her internal organs, at least not yet. There were stronger drugs available in that case, but their side effects could be severe and they didn’t seem worth the risk unless Mary’s life was threatened.

While Mary was pursuing life she was constantly on the lookout for something or someone to make her feel physically better. Mary tried eliminating some foods from her diet to see if that would help with her fatigue and nausea. This was not too successful, but she did feel that cutting out pasta products might have helped. Mary was never overweight so losing weight was not an option toward better health. Mary couldn’t try heavy exercising since her joints would stiffen up, but she remained active and hiked with our family and attended our dances.

Mary was always on the search for a doctor that could help her and after going to one doctor for several years with no improvement, she would locate another. Each new doctor would keep her on Plaquenil, but would differ on what pain killers Mary would take and what supplements to try. Mary was particularly hopeful when she started going to a naturopath along with her regular Lupus doctor. Unlike busier doctors, the naturopath spent a lot of time listening to Mary. This was helpful to Mary’s mental health and she liked the emphasis on her whole life, instead of just her specific Lupus illness. As only people fighting chronic illness can know most often they search for a cure, but never find one. Mary’s try at naturopathy was also unsuccessful.

Mary was excited when she started going to a doctor that had Lupus herself. That doctor seemed to be able to keep her career going while having Lupus. Mary had done the same in her life and now she hoped that the new doctor would better be able to understand her hope for less fatigue and nausea. Her hopes were dashed, however when this new doctor had nothing more to offer, but the admonition to get on with her life.

By 2005 Mary had settled in with two doctors. One was a general practitioner who handled Mary’s normal health needs and the other was a rheumatologist for her Lupus care. Mary’s two doctors consulted when necessary on her care and Mary was satisfied with both of them. Mary’s rheumatologist was convinced that Mary’s Lupus had gone into remission as all blood test showed that it had quieted down. However, Mary was still plagued by chronic fatigue and hurting muscles and joints. This puzzled her doctors. Mary’s Lupus tests had always been borderline positive, but this is not unusual in an illness that is hard to definitely diagnose. Her rheumatologist wanted to keep Mary on Plaquenil to prevent Lupus from flaring again, but was concerned that Mary was not feeling better.

Both doctors suspected that something else was happening and began a search to find out what it was. After extensive tests and ruling out most everything else they settled on a probable diagnosis of Fibromyalgia. This made Mary feel better to have a name for her fatigue and pain, but the problem was still there. There was not a satisfactory cure for her new illness. A drug, Mirapex that had been approved for use in Parkinson’s and Restless Leg syndrome was being testing around the country by doctors with Fibromyalgia patients. Results were promising. A local doctor was also actively promoting Mirapex for Fibromyalgia. After consulting with both her doctors Mary decided to try it. On January 9, 2006 Mary took her first dose of Mirapex and soon was up to 5mg per day. We had no qualms about this new drug as the warning that came with it seemed standard with no special warnings that stood out, just the standard boilerplate. We didn’t worry about using Mirapex to treat Fibromyalgia since the second sentence under common usage read “It [Mirapex] may also be used to treat other conditions as determined by your doctor.” We knew that many drugs found new and helpful uses through such prescriptions. Here is the partial scanned image of the warning Mary received with her first prescription of Mirapex.

[pic]

March 31, 2011: More terrible stories are arriving every day of the compulsive behaviors caused by Mirapex. Some victims have just stopped taking Mirapex and others are still taking it, but wonder if it could be the cause of their behavior. For those still taking Mirapex my advice to them is that Mirapex is most certainly the cause of their destructive behavior, but that they need a doctor’s care to wean off of it since withdrawal can be so severe.

I read a litany of horrors: life savings gone, retirement accounts gutted, getting up in the middle of the night to gamble, divorce, compulsive eating, families broken apart and more. Making the horror even worse if that is at all possible are the illnesses, Parkinson’s and Restless Leg that the sufferers also endure. Mirapex can help with these illnesses, but what good does that do if lives are destroyed in the process? Mary is reading some of the emails now, but can’t yet bring herself to answer any of them.

H. Lee Thompson tells us that the whole process will take four to six months. There will be a settlement conference at the end of that time which should result in a settlement Mary and Joe would be satisfied with; somewhere in six figures. The first trial against the manufacturers of Mirapex took place in 2008 after hundreds of cases were bundled into the MDL for Mirapex lawsuits. This was chosen to be a “bell weather” case as the outcome of the trial would give an indication of the results for future trials and could make settlements outside of a trial harder or easier to obtain. The verdict was for $8,000,000 in favor of a man who compulsively gambled of which about $7,000,000 was punitive damages against the manufacturers. The rest was for financial loss from gambling and for pain and suffering.

Mary and Joe have no expectations for that type of settlement, but simply want the mess Mirapex caused in their lives cleaned up. H. Lee Thompson asks, once in a while, for more information and more affidavits from me, Helen and Mary. The legal process seems to be going along as planned. I’m not very concerned as there were over 500 cases in the Mirapex MDL and the only one that went to trial was the first one. All the others must have been settled outside of court as I can’t find any record on the Net of dissatisfied lawsuit filers. Of course it is virtually impossible to get information on settlements since to receive a settlement it is a requirement for all parties to sign a non disclosure agreement or NDA.

We noticed a difference in Mary soon after she had increased her dosage to 5 mg per day. For the first time since she was a teenager Mary started feeling better. We often had family dinner parties at our home for birthdays and holidays. All our children and their families came, but Mary would normally spend some of the time lying on the couch in the front room or on the bed in the guest room. Mary would get up to eat with us and she would try to participate in board game playing. If we watched a movie together she would be able to do that with us since she could sit. After Mirapex Mary would hardly sit down to eat with us and would quickly disappear into our basement where she had set up a sewing table. Mary had always been a sewer, but now it occupied all her spare time. We attributed this new behavior to Mary finally feeling good for the first time in a long while and just excited to actually feel like doing something. We were happy for her.

As spring came to Maple Valley we started to see more changes in Mary. Mary told us she still felt great, but now Mary couldn’t seem to remember to take her medication. The other problem is that she also couldn’t remember to order more prescriptions when she ran out. This was true of all her medications including non-Lupus related ones. This was very worrisome to us as she had to consistently keep taking Plaquenil for Lupus. Mary had always kept her pills in a case that has days of the week in separate sections. Helen and I devised a plan where we had two identical pill cases. One case was at Mary’s house and the other we kept at our house. That way when she forgot to order new medication Helen could keep her going with our supply. We were trying to accommodate Mary as she was so happy to be feeling that once in her life she had energy.

As far as Helen and I knew Mary was still working on her business, but other odd behavior started occurring. In May Helen found Mary at home sewing, but her home was a shambles. Helen had to mostly deal with these new problems Mary had as I was still working full time at the University of Washington. When I did have spare time I was helping her husband Joe with trying to get their cabin on a solid foundation. Everyday I worried that an earthquake would bring their house down.

Helen and I felt that we could tolerate Mary’s new quirks in order to finally have her free of chronic fatigue and nausea. However new problems kept cropping up. Mary never drove much because of her chronic fatigue. Mary would drive to local stores, but never into Seattle. About the longest trip Mary took was the fifteen miles to Issaquah. Otherwise Helen or I drove her. In July Mary started falling asleep at the wheel on the drive to Issaquah. I thought it was due to Mary staying up too late at night sewing. Mary didn’t drive to Issaquah very often anyway so we tried to solve that problem by having Helen drive her there.

July came. I’d become worried that Mary was not spending enough time on her business and too much time sewing. The other disturbing thing was that even though Mary was sewing constantly she didn’t complete any sewing project. Mary liked to show off what she was making and model the clothes, but all of them stayed pinned together.

March 31, 2011: I’m still getting a slow, but steady stream of emails from other Mirapex victims, some of whom are probably contacting H. Lee Thompson, but I don’t know for sure about that. Today a woman contacted me, that among other compulsions, is compulsively sewing like Mary did. I’m given her Mary’s email and Mary will try to reply, but maybe Mary won’t be able to.

April 2011: Joe and I have been working in their basement putting up boards to fasten plasterboard to and Mary is going through boxes trying to consolidate what they are storing. Mary is finding some of her sewing projects from her time on Mirapex. Mary is an excellent seamstress and Mary is appalled at the sloppy and crazy work she’s finding. Mary throws most of them right into the garbage.

Mary’s older sister Amy was also worried about Mary and she and her husband took Mary’s daughter Julia for a week in early August so Mary could concentrate on her business and catch up on her contracts. That plan went array when Mary found an ad online looking for someone to take care of a blind and deaf dachshund. We didn’t know it at the time, but Mary was spending a lot of time on the Net going through Craig’s List looking for bargains. That’s how she found the notice about the dog. Mary already had a cat and a dog in her small cabin. None of us could see how she could handle a blind and deaf dog and her daughter. Joe could help at night, but he worked during the day. We were right. It was a disaster and Mary had to find another person to care for the dog. Consequently not much work on her business got done that week.

Mary had been having trouble concentrating on her work and now towards the end of August it got worse. On August 29th Mary couldn’t seem to figure out how to bill Microsoft for work she had done. Helen had to help her with that task that Mary had always done for herself.

Mary had been working the first half of 2006 and did have income she could use for finishing the foundation. Joe and I had been hand digging the dirt out from under the cabin to make room to put in the forms for the footings. When money was available we rented a small dirt mover from the local rent-it shop. Work progressed slowly, but steadily. At first I was scared to be working under the cabin with it held up on steel I-beams and piles of four by fours. By the time I had spent ten months under their home I was getting used to it, but still didn’t like it. Joe and I finally got the forms in place. Before Mary was on Mirapex she had researched what forms to use and settled on a new kind of form that was made out of plastic. The footing forms were hollow rectangles with slots in the sides. The forms would function both as the forms to pour the concrete into and would also be the footing drains.

I designed the Hobart log home and the one on Pipe Lake so that there would be sufficient room on the sides to easily lift up building materials and logs onto the walls. I also designed room to drive a small tractor or large-tired forklift around the sides to aid in heavy lifting. Mary and Joe’s home was to be built on a narrower lot than the other homes and the architect, wanting to maximize the size of the home, only left the minimum distance to the property line on the sides. This was the one disadvantage to having someone else draw the house plans. In order to actually put in the footings and then build up the forms for the concrete basement walls more dirt had to be dug out around the foundation to make room to work. Consequently, we couldn’t drive around the house with any size tractor.

This made pouring the forms really difficult. The cabin, on top of the cribbing, blocked use of a concrete pumper truck with a boom to move the hose over the footings and there was no room to drive around. Instead, we used a long hose several inches in diameter that we had to hold by hand and move over the footing forms while the concrete poured out. I tried to pick up the hose before it was even filled with concrete and it was almost too heavy to lift. Once the concrete started flowing through the hose it was like a writhing impossibly heavy snake. It took Adam, Joe, me and Mark to hold it down while Helen, Mary, Amy and Megan started to smooth it out to the right height. Compounding the problem was the iron rebars sticking up from the footings. This was physically one of the hardest building jobs so far and eventually we had to do the same thing when the forms for the walls were built. But then the hose would have to be lifted up nine feet to the top of the wall forms. Somehow we managed and on September 7th, 2006 using an all-family work party, the footings were poured.

More bad news came in September. Mary was starting to get complaints from Microsoft over her handling of the contracts, but she did’t seem to be all that concerned. It was nice to see Mary energetic but if we were going to get her home off of the cribbing and onto an earthquake safe foundation we would need her extra income to do it. In September Mary contacted a construction loan specialist. He sat down with Mary and went over her finances. We met with him also. He determined that if Mary could pay off a $50,000 credit card debt he could then get her a home construction loan to finish, not only the foundation, but the whole home. During all these discussions with the loan officer Mary was like the old Mary who had made it through college in spite of the odds against her.

What we were hearing from both Mary and the loan specialist seemed to make sense to Helen and me. We then agreed to take out an additional $50,000 mortgage on our home so Mary could get the building construction loan. I had worked all my life to build up the equity in our homes through building ourselves, so that we could retire into a nice home and, if we needed it, get a reverse mortgage to help with our retirement finances. We didn’t think that the extra $50,000 would make much difference to these plans as we had built up a lot of equity over the years. Besides, we were driven by the worry of their family living in a potentially dangerous home if we could not get the foundation secure under their cabin. It had practically made us sick seeing the cabin up on the cribbing, though I didn’t tell Mary that as I didn’t want to scare her. On October 16th the loan on our home was finalized. We had to borrow more than the $50,000 to pay off the credit cards as we didn’t have the cash to pay all the loan finance charges up front.

Disaster struck in October, but we didn’t know it at the time. Mary had quit working on her business all together. Mary had been neglecting her business for several months prior to October. It had been a slow slide into her other compulsive pursuits and away from her lucrative business, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when Mary stopped entirely, but I was. However, we didn’t find out until November when Helen started to realize the extent of Mary’s financial problems.

Helen discovered that Mary had simply stopped paying any bills. Mary just stashed them all over, but never opened them. Joe and Mary had divided up the monthly bills between them including two different mortgage payments. Joe kept paying his, but Mary gave him no indication that she wasn’t paying hers, nor working on contracts. The first time any of us realized what was happening was when delinquent payment notices started coming in the mail. Mary didn’t open them either, but Helen found some of them helping Mary clean up. Helen then started the tedious and laborious task of going through all the unopened mail and Mary’s credit card accounts. The date was November 14, 2006.

It was a grim December for us. Mary had no income, the footings were poured, but there was no money for building the forms for the basement concrete walls. Without the walls the cabin would stay up on the cribbing. And now it hit Helen and me. Mary was too far in debt to even think about getting a home construction loan. In December Helen continued with the grim task of sorting through all Mary’s unpaid bills.

Christmas 2006 came and, as always we celebrated together as a family. So far we had been successful at keeping our family together and the holiday celebrations helped. Mary, Joe and Julia started coming over to our home on Christmas Eve once they moved into the cabin. Their cabin was pretty small and we had a large Christmas tree in the front room that could hold all the presents. Helen and I were up late putting more presents under the tree and filling the stockings after everyone had gone to sleep. Since our children were little we had a rule that they could get up early Christmas morning, but they couldn’t start opening presents or wake us up until 8 AM. After we let them knock a few time on our bedroom door while pretending to be sleeping everyone gathered in the front room. It was our tradition to read the Christmas story from the Bible before we started on the stockings; then we dug into the presents opening one at a time starting with the youngest. In the afternoon our daughter Amy’s family came over and I cooked Christmas dinner for everyone. In spite of everything our family persevered.

June 10, 2011: Helen and I receive notice that our loan modification has been approved. It has been an awful and stressful struggle as our papers were lost several times and we had to start over on our application. We are relieved, but cautious at the same time. We are living on my retirement income from the University of Washington and from my Social Security. There is virtually no income from the flower shop and any extra goes to help Mary. We can keep our home for now, but our new equity is too little to qualify for a reverse mortgage. Goodbye plans for a secure retirement. Now I fear unless Mary can get a settlement and pay us back, I might work at the flower until I die. Ugh!

Chapter 11: Mary Starts a Flower Business

I didn’t see much to be happy about starting 2007, but Mary was enthusiastic. She continued to have lots of energy; she had lost weight and is back close to what she weighed in high school. I think she looked very nice in her clothes, but Helen was afraid she was starting to look too slender, but Mary was very pleased she could fit into some of her old clothes she saved. I was pretty upset that Mary had quit working on her business, but Mary wasn’t. Mary was convinced that she knew just the right job for her; one where she could stay home and make lots of money. Mary was going to start a flower shop in our basement!

Mary had done her research and found out that Maple Valley had only one flower shop where as similar sized regions had several. There was a new grocery store going into a brand new shopping center and Mary approached the owner about supplying flowers for them. All grocery stores had started having floral sections so it seemed natural for this new one to have one also. The owner was specializing in high quality and harder to find fruits and vegetables and Mary’s idea of providing better quality flowers than the regular grocery store would provide fit right in. The major grocery store chains have contracts with the growers, but they save money by taking the seconds from the fields. Independent flower shops buy from the wholesale companies that have the premium flowers from the fields. Mary located a wholesaler in Kent, Washington, about 30 minutes from our house. She found a sales person there she could work with.

July 2011: We are hoping to hear from Mary’s lawyer H. Lee Thompson about the lawsuit. Waiting is awful, especially since the flower shop is not making any money much beyond expenses and Mary and Joe’s home is in limbo. The roof is leaking. I don’t know how much longer we can put on temporary patches. The roof is starting to look like an old patched pair of jeans: more patches than jean. The house is still without a good source of heat, and Julia is out-growing the makeshift bed stuffed into their single bedroom.

Mary was so enthusiastic about starting her own flower business that she convinced me. Helen and I always tried to support our children in everything that they tried. Once Mary had made the decision to commute into Seattle for high school we fully supported her. I felt this was the same. Besides, Mary had gotten a business license, researched the market, and found a supplier, and she was full of energy. It did make sense as now she could work from home again and only need to drive locally. On January 1, 2007 Prancing Bee Designs was open for business.

Mary’s cabin was too small to run her business out of so we converted a room in our basement into a flower shop that we had intended some day to be a home theatre. It wasn’t a shop in the sense that people would come there to order flowers, but a working space so Mary could store and arrange flowers there. We located an old display cooler for free and moved it in. I built a working table for Mary, custom made for her height out of a door panel and two by fours. I put in overhead lighting and tapped into a water pipe so she could fill vases. Now all Mary needed was orders.

Mary started to make up arrangements to put in the up-scale grocery store. Chain stores also have cut flowers in their store to purchase, but Mary concentrated on arrangements. Mary also put out advertisements for weddings and custom arrangements. All this necessitated trips to the wholesale house for flowers. Most of the time it was Helen or I who drove Mary there; Helen mostly as I was working full time still. The first time I went there I was overwhelmed at the size of the walk-in cooler that held the flowers, and the variety of flowers that were in there. It was enormous and suitably cold. A few minutes in the flower cooler and I was ready for warmer climates.

Janet, Mary’s wholesale sales person, was extremely helpful in getting Mary to know what flowers would last the longest and which ones would look nice, but be more economical to purchase and sell. Mary had a natural talent for flower arranging and soon was selling flowers at the grocery store. Mary also started to get orders for custom arrangements, corsages and weddings. Mary also learned a major drawback to selling perishable items. All arrangements that didn’t sell in a timely manner had to thrown out. Mary needed to sell enough arrangements to make up for those losses and still make money. The main problem was that she was just starting out and hadn’t developed the sales yet. She needed funds she could draw on to see her through the starting up phase, but of course neither Mary nor Joe had them. Helen and I were her “bankers of last resort”.

August 21, 2011: H. Lee Thompson has recommended that Mary hire the forensic economist Don Frankenfeld to compute her monetary losses. Lee has used Don before in other lawsuits and Lee feels he has gravitas with the defendants. I’m leaning towards hiring a local forensic economist that we can meet with personally. One issue is what Mary’s earning capacity will be in the future. A local forensic economist can at least interview Mary. I have already made by own calculations based on Mary’s yearly income before she started Magalhaes Services, her income after losing her business, and what she owes Helen and me. I have used Mary’s expected life expectancy and expected years of working among other information. My rough estimate is over a million dollars.

The business settled into a pattern. Mary would buy flowers which we would pay for. Mary would sell the flowers and Helen and I would let Mary keep the money so she could pay her bills. We could manage this on my salary if we cut down on our own spending. We were hopeful that Mary could make a go of this new business and both Helen and I got to know the owners of the upscale grocery store. The upscale store was a family enterprise with the husband and wife working together to run it. The location was a little hard to get to as customers had to drive through another parking lot and around the back of the lot to reach the store. There was some regulation that prevented a driveway being put directly into their parking lot, and I worried that this might hurt their sales.

Mary’s daughter Julia was six now and going to school. She caught the school bus almost right in front of our house so we could check to see if Mary and Julia were making the bus on time. We started to notice that Julia was not always dressed properly for the weather and on February 2, 2006 Helen noted in her calendar that Mary wasn’t taking care of Julia. Consequently, Helen had to take over more and more of the daily care for Julia. Helen had to see that she was properly dressed and washed, and ready for school. Mary was busy, busy, busy with the flowers and her sewing and looking for bargains on the Net to repaint and sell. Mary was also working in her garden late into the night and going to the local thrift store at all hours. We were struggling to keep up with her.

August 2011: Lee is continuing to be insistent that Mary retain Don Frankenfeld and she has to pay around $750 up front! This means Helen and I have to somehow scrape the money together if we want to move forward. We can’t even contact Don Frankenfeld since he is actually retained by Lee. I’m getting good at cutting down on our home expenses. I can buy a #10 can of tomato sauce at Costco that can make a two week supply of dinners for Helen and I. One week is spaghetti (heavy on the spaghetti) and the next week is Spanish rice (heavy on the rice). This works well as by the end of the week we are sick of the same thing for dinner and eat less!

Helen was worried enough to talk to Mary about her work performance and brought her to tears. Mary was earnest in her desire to make the flower business a success and promised to concentrate on that instead of her other pursuits. Unfortunately she was soon overtaken by her other desires. On March 3 the business license for Magalhaes Services expired. This event went unnoticed a as that business was over months ago.

Helen had been diligently sorting out Mary’s finances and our basement was covered with piles of bills and correspondence. Helen had finally tabulated the extent of Mary’s debt and gave me the bad news. Helen knew that Mary was not earning anywhere close to the salary she made form Magalhaes Services and could not get out of debt anytime soon. Mary had all sorts of bills that hadn’t been paid including doctor and dentist bills. Mary could not get out of debt and their cabin would not be secure on a proper foundation unless they had help. The only place Mary could get help was from us. The last refinance on our home hardly put Helen and I in financial trouble, but the sum we needed to now increase our mortgage for was a different story. We would need enough money to pay off all her debts, which included back payments on her share of the mortgage, stabilize her cabin on the new basement, and build as much of the house as possible.

October 2011: All at once things are starting to move fast with the lawsuit. Settlement conferences are being tentatively scheduled for November 1-3 in federal court in Minneapolis.

I wasn’t worried about our ability as a family to complete the basement, but working was getting harder for me as I was turning 62 in July. I could still work a full day on construction, but then needed to rest in the evening. No more 16 hour work days for me anymore. What worried me most was the taking on of additional debt. The saying being between a rock and a hard place is so used it has lost it meaning. However, that is exactly how Helen and I felt. If we didn’t help Mary out of her financial mess they would surely lose their house and since it was just up on cribbing the house would have no sale value. They would lose all their equity they had built up and we would lose the $50,000 or so dollars from our first attempt to help Mary. On the other hand we would be putting ourselves in financial danger. After a lot of discussion and soul searching in May of 2007 we decided to look for a lender for an additional mortgage.

October 8, 2011: I’ve been emailing “Jean” regularly, but Mary has not been up to doing it. With the possibility of meeting Jean in Minneapolis Mary has finally contacted her. This is a big step for Mary and I hope it will help her heal from the traumas of Mirapex. Here is her email to Jean: “This is Mary.... I sure know how you feel. I can't put it into words, but I know exactly how it feels to be in your head. My head was an extremely crazy place to be when I was coming off of Mirapex. I still struggle, but not anywhere near how it was at the beginning. It is amazing that I survived the withdrawal, realization of what happened etc. I had one episode when I took off on a really cold night and walked really far and lay in the snow on the side of the road. Fun times! I am so glad that you are ok. I was really sad when I saw your e-mail. I know so much those dark thoughts. It is hard for me to talk about Mirapex but wanted you to know I am thinking about you all the time and can hardly wait to meet you. Do you want to try and stay in the same hotel?”

October 10, 2011: Helen is booking five plane tickets for the settlement conference that will now start the first of November. Mary and Joe, their daughter Julia and Helen and I will be going. Helen and I have compiled everything needed for the lawsuit and I have been in close contact with Lee. It is pretty certain that I will be going into the conference with Mary and Joe. I really want Helen with me for comfort and support. Besides, Helen has experienced most of Mary’s behavior first hand. We thought about driving, but we cannot close the flower shop for long enough to drive and Joe also has limited vacation to use. Helen and I are using air miles we had saved up from the building expenses for our home on the lake and from what we spent on Mary and Joe’s building. We had hoped to use them for travel when I retired, but Mirapex has ended this dream, at least for now. Mary and Joe’s conference is scheduled for November 2 from 8:30 to 10 in the morning.

October 27, 2011: We just received a severe blow from Lee this morning. The defendants cannot meet the third day schedule for the conferences. The conferences are now only two days long and Mary’s case had been deselected for a conference. We are stunned!

October 28, 2011: After a horrible night for all of us, Mary has informed Lee that we will still be coming as planned and that we will sit in the courthouse waiting for a chance to be heard. . We would lose the tickets anyway and we hope to get a hearing if we show up. Jean is still scheduled for a conference as is another man I’m in contact with.

I was already concerned about Mary’s erratic behavior, but she still seemed capable. After all, Mary had started this new flower business all on her own, but now Mary was sometimes depressed. With this new twist of sudden depression I became more concerned. I begin to research all the medications Mary was on. Thank heaven for the Net. Most all of the drugs Mary was on could actually cause depression in rare cases. Even the ones to fight depression were capable of that. There wasn’t much information about Mirapex on the Net, just the standard warnings, but I did find a few references to compulsive gambling. Mary wasn’t gambling, but she was busy, busy, busy all the time. Also I found that the drug Ranitidine Mary was taking for chronic heart burn could increase the side effects of Mirapex.

I tried to talk to Mary about this but she resisted and insisted that everything was fine. I wanted to accompany her to the doctor to discuss her medications, but she would not allow it. Helen normally checked to see if Julia was getting on the bus. Helen could just stick her head out the door of our house to see if Mary and Julia were at the school bus stop. In early May I was home working on a car project in the driveway. I had always fixed our own cars, doing body work and painting them when necessary. Helen was gone into town to visit Amy and I was the designated Mary watcher. I kept checking my watch, but Mary and Julia were not heading down the street towards our house. It was only less than ten minutes from the arrival of the bus. I was in my dirty work clothes and I did not want to have to drive Mary and Julia to the bus.

Finally out of exasperation I put down my tools and started down the street. With five minutes to bus time I found Mary trying to fit a dress she was sewing on Julia. The material was pinned around Julia, but nothing was sewn yet. Julia’s little arms were sticking out of unfinished sleeve holes. I was stunned. I asked Mary what she was doing, working hard to not scare Julia in the process. Mary answered that she was sewing a new dress for Julia to wear to school and that she could finish it in plenty of time to catch the bus. I really didn’t know what to say. I talked Mary out of finishing the dress. She put Julia in something else and we drove Julia to school. On the way back I wondered why Mary didn’t realize that there was something strange about her behavior.

After more badgering Mary finally consented to have me accompany her to her Lupus doctor. We went together a week or two later and I discussed her strange behavior with the doctor. The doctor didn’t know about the possible reaction between Ranitidine and Mirapex. She looked it up in her drug references on the computer and found out I was right. We discussed Mary’s strange behavior, but she had no idea that could be caused by Mirapex. She surmised her problems were caused by the combination of the two drugs. Mary almost begged her to let her stay on Mirapex. I wasn’t sure what to do either as Mary did not want to go back to chronic tiredness and nausea. Mary decided it was OK to decrease the Mirapex from 5 mg/day to 4.5 mg/day. This was a decrease of only 10%. She also changed her heart burn medicine to Famotidine. Later, Mary’s husband Joe told me that Mary was really angry with me for going with her to the doctor that day.

October 31, 2011: It’s ten in the morning and we have just gone through security at the airport in Seattle and I’m struggling to put my shoes back on while helping Julia with hers. I’m pretty stressed over this whole trip, but I’m trying not to show it. We are spending money we do not have on the hotel and food. Can it get any worse?

October 31, 2011: It’s 4 PM. We landed safely and are in the Mall of America looking at the sites and also looking for cheap food. This will be a good trip for losing weight though we have to feed Julia. We are trying to keep everything as normal as possible for her sake. We plan to go to the courthouse in the morning. Lee will try to get us a hearing if possible.

Along with being enthusiastic about her various pursuits Mary was now going through bouts of depression. She realized that she wasn’t earning enough money to pay her bills and that her flower business wasn’t working out. In June, Mary made the first of several visits to the local emergency room when she was overwhelmed by depression. Sometimes Helen took her and sometimes I did. Mary would see a doctor who would take the time to talk to her and determined if she was in danger of harming herself. Once they determined that she wasn’t, she was released with a recommendation to find a doctor to help her with her depression.

We acted on this and Mary, on the recommendation of a close friend, started seeing a psychiatrist in Issaquah in July of 2007. Mary had been taking antidepressants for helping with the Lupus-caused joint pain and with the Fibromyalgia muscle pain. Mary began to visit him on a regular basis and those sessions seemed to help. Helen had to add another doctor we had to pay for and drive Mary to.

November1, 2011: We just finished lunch in the Federal Courthouse in Minneapolis. Things are rapidly going downhill. We arrived at the courthouse at around eight in the morning. We met Jean and her family on the light rail train traveling to Minneapolis. It was beneficial to all of our families to finally meet Jean as we all have shared similar terrible experiences due to Mirapex. Jean was traveling in a wheelchair due to Mirapex-caused compulsive behavior. Jean had a scheduled conference the next day in the morning.

We were sitting in the large entryway on the main floor when we met a young man (I’ll call “John”) who was one of the Mirapex victims waiting to go to his conference with Lee. He had gambled away hundreds of thousands of dollars in a short time once on Mirapex. Mary had gone to find Lee and on the upper floor and she met another man (I’ll call “Mark”) I had been emailing with, also there for a conference.

We waited for Mary to come back and we were there when John came out of his conference and was leaving the courthouse. He was close to tears and very dejected. The defendants had only offered John a few thousands dollars and he turned them down. The defendants were putting forward a litany of “boiler plate” objections: Mirapex had not been shown to cause compulsive behaviors; Mirapex came with adequate warnings, etc., etc. We tried to comfort him as best we could. John left, but we got his email so we could remain in contact.

It is clear that the defendants never intended to put forward even a remotely reasonable offer to John, but only wanted to make him spend money he didn’t have to fly to his settlement conference only for the purposes of “beating up on him”. Nice people!

Before noon Mary came back downstairs with Lee. We introduced ourselves. After lunch, Lee wanted us to wait upstairs on the upper floor right outside the judge’s chambers where the conferences were being held. If time allowed we might get in. I’m not very hopeful. Judge Noel would be holding the conferences for all of Lee’s Mirapex clients.

November 1, 2011: It’s in the afternoon and I’ve been talking with Mark, the Mirapex victim I’ve been emailing with. He is waiting for his conference to start, but from what he’s learned from other plaintiffs he feels there isn’t much chance of getting a settlement. He excessively shopped while on Mirapex and lost his marriage because of it. He had taken a tremendous financial hit.

During this new crisis with Mary we continued to look for financing on our home. This wasn’t easy as we would not qualify for a loan under most circumstances. Fortunately or unfortunately the banking crisis was month’s away and sub-prime loans were becoming more and more available. Lenders were conspiring with realtors, who were conspiring with appraisers, who were conspiring with inspectors to make these loans go through. We found a lender and amazingly qualified for a sub-prime loan and low initial payments. We were now desperate as Mary and Joe’s financial crisis was getting worse. Fall was coming and winter would stop our building. I did not want them living in the cabin on cribbing through another winter. On my birthday, July 31, 2007 the loan went through. Now we had the money to get going on their home.

On September 8 we stopped the foreclosure on their cabin and paid up all the penalties and back payments. I took vacation and Joe and I worked hard on their home with help from Helen. Helen had lots of experience from building our other houses and she was a great help. The forms of the basement walls were made out of foam blocks that stayed in place once the walls were poured. They were not hard to put together. The hardest part was cutting and wiring the iron rebar in place inside the forms. It didn’t take us long to get started once we had money to continue. On September 28th, using another family work party and some extra paid help, we poured the walls with only one glitch. The foam forms had to be carefully poured or else they could split from too much sudden pressure. In spite of hiring an expert in this type of pour to supervise, the forms broke open in a corner. Panic started as the concrete gushed out onto the ground. Soon, however, we had a patch secure in place and the concrete shoveled back into the wall. We continued to finish with the pour.

After we got the loan it became apparent that if we used our loan money to help Mary and Joe with their future home payments and other expenses it would be gone with no lasting investment to show for it, and they would still be in financial difficulty. I did a lot of research on the Net and figured out that they could save their home by going through bankruptcy and keep most of the equity they had in it. They could also cancel out most of the debt that we hadn’t paid off with our loans. It seemed a way out, where all the hard work we put into their home could be saved. The downside was the embarrassment and the temporary blot on their credit record. I discussed this with Mary and Joe, but naturally they were reluctant to take that step. They did agree to talk with a bankruptcy lawyer.

Things had been going downhill with Mary’s flower business which Helen and I were virtually supporting so Mary could have some income. The upscale grocery store was failing, due to a lack of customers for the more expensive product, the poor location of the store, and the lack of easy access. The owners finally called it quits in early September and with the store closing also went Mary’s flower business. Things were not all bad. The owner of the only flower shop in Maple Valley had seen Mary’s work at the grocery store and offered her part time work at her shop. We were pretty excited as Mary would be actually making a salary again and we would not have to support her flower business. Mary started there in September, just after the grocery store closed.

Our hard work continued as we had to build the center bearing wall on which the new floor joists would rest. The joists ran from the top of the new basement walls along the old joists holding up the floor of the cabin onto the new basement bearing wall. This construction was not easy as we had to work our way around the existing cabin. Our son Adam helped with this part of the construction when Joe had to work. In October the cabin was ready to be supported on the new center wall and joists. This entailed pulling out the steel beams holding up the house and hoping the house wouldn’t squash us like bugs. We drove out some of the four by four cribbing to slightly lower the beams. The longest beams had to be cut in smaller pieces as the new basement walls blocked removing them. Once the beams were on the ground we ran ropes under them and carried them out of the basement and up to the street. We eventually sold them for scrap.

November 1, 2011: We got our chance at a settlement conference at 5:30 PM. Mark was coming out as we were going in. He shook his head as we passed him in the hallway. Lee came out and escorted me, Mary and Joe into a separate conference room where we could talk privately for a few minutes. While on our way in Judge Noel came rushing out looking for Mark. He wanted him to consider one final offer from the defendants. Later I learned that Mark had turned down the Judge and walked out since he was disgusted with the way he had been treated by the defendants and was sure they would not deal in good faith.

Once in the private room Lee described the procedure for the conference and we had a chance for the first time to see Don Frankenfeld’s economic analysis. Judge Noel was anxious to get started because he had another engagement that evening so we could only glance at the report. I don’t think that Lee had seen it either. We all were shocked to see a total of 2.3 million dollar total economic damage.

Lee escorted us into the conference room and sat us down at a long table. Lee, me, and Mary and Joe were seated on one side facing on the other side six lawyers representing the defendants. Judge Noel sat at one end of the table. We were introduced to the other lawyers. Lee described the case and Mary was then allowed to make an opening statement. I had already seen Mary’s statement so I carefully studied the faces of the other lawyers for their reactions.

They were a line up of living clichés. One man looked like a bulldog. He was overweight with sagging jowls. Another man had small eyes and the narrow face of a weasel. I couldn’t believe it. There was one woman among them. I recognized her from earlier coming out of chambers into the hallway to get “drinks” for all the other lawyers.

After Mary gave her statement the other lawyers had a chance to make a statement. One of the lawyers had been picked to deal with Mary’s case. His only and main point was from Mary’s doctor’s notes from the visit I forced Mary into making where we discussed her compulsive behavior. At that time Mary clearly did not realize how destructive her behavior had become since she “begged” her doctor to keep her on Mirapex and only decreased her dosage by 10%. I reminded their lawyer that I was in the room with Mary and that I had already had written an affidavit to that effect. An affidavit where I detailed what happened at that visit he was referring to and how Mary did not realize that Mirapex was damaging her.

A small discussion between their lawyers ensued where they tried to find out where my name appeared in the doctor’s notes. I could see why Mark had walked out. None of those six lawyers were serious about settling this lawsuit. They hadn’t even closely read the doctor’s notes. This was clearly a “beating up” session with them doing the beating.

The meeting broke up and we retired to separate rooms where Judge Noel shuttled between the defendants and us bringing offers and counteroffers. Mary and Joe had to decide what initial offer to make, but Frankenfeld’s total economic losses had thrown us for a loop. Mary quickly came up with $475, 000. We thought this was a reasonable number compared to Frankenfeld’s $2.3 million. That amount would help clean up the mess Mirapex made in our lives, so we put forward this number in good faith.

Judge Noel took this offer over to the defendant’s lawyers. He quickly came back with a counter offer of only a few thousand dollars. We were stunned. None of us can remember what our next offer was, but they didn’t budge in their next offer. Judge Noel looked exasperated.

If Mary knew Mirapex was damaging her at the time of our joint doctor visit, then her lawsuit would have been filed past the allowed time of three years for filing. But, in addition to my affidavit from our joint doctor visit we also had the notes from Dr. Shaw, Mary’s psychiatrist. Those notes clearly showed Mary hadn’t begun to realize that Mirapex was damaging her until late fall of 2008. His notes are the only written record of what Mary thought during the time she was taking Mirapex and the legal issue is when the person taking the drug realized damage was being done; not when other people did. Judge Noel asked us if we thought they could get the case dismissed on the statute of limitations. I quickly answered no and the settlement conference was over.

On October 26, 2007, almost two years from the time the cabin was first placed on the cribbing, we could stand under the now secure cabin. It was finally earthquake safe and I could rest easier. There was lots of work to do before the basement floor could be poured, but that would come later in the spring of the next year. Now we could enjoy Christmas.

I had a research project scheduled for the coming winter. I was going to study the character of snow flakes and to do that I had to live at Skykomish and work up at Steven’s Pass. I would be looking at snowflakes under a high power stereo microscope. The microscope made it possible to see the crystals in 3-D. It was easy to get lost in the beauty of the crystals. Most people are only familiar with the six sided star-like snow crystals seen on Christmas cards, but most snow crystals are three dimensional and amazingly complicated. Looking at these crystals was a way to forget all my problems for a few minutes.

Helen and the children had always come with me on research field projects, but now the kids were older and some with families of their own. They could no longer come. It would have been the ideal time for Helen and me to strike out on our own, but Mary needed continual help. So I moved up to a small home on my own. All my children got to visit and Helen did stay overnight occasionally. That was nice. I was up at the pass when I learned that, after delaying as long as they could, Mary and Joe filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy. I was relieved.

November 2, 2011: We are at the Mall of America trying to have some fun in the midst of a dismal trip. The settlement conference was a joke! Earlier we met up with Jean and her family. They had gone through the same disappointing meeting. The defendants had made us spend money on conferences they knew were only for “beating up” on us. Jean had come in a wheel chair.

November 3, 2011: Our plane has just landed in Seattle. Mirapex had pushed us down to our emotional and financial limit. Now the defendant’s lawyers were continuing to “kick” us when we are down. I do not know people like them. No one I know is like that. I do not know how those lawyers and the people that set the legal policy can go home at night and kiss their loved ones, or hold their heads up high at family dinners, or go to church. I don’t know people like that at all.

Chapter 12: Seizures

Mary unrealistically believed that she could still recover from losing Magalhaes Services by starting yet another flower business called Prancing Bee Floral. Nothing came of this new business as Mary was, since 2006 when she started to take Mirapex, too wrapped in all her endless activities: sewing, gardening, scouring thrift shops, looking for bargains on Craig’s List and E-Bay, and hatching plans for new and “better” businesses. Somewhere in all of these activities Mary forgot to take care of her own daughter, and this task fell to Helen.

In January Helen and I cleaned out the flower cooler and the rest of Mary’s flower business from the storage room in our basement. So ended Mary’s second try at her own flower business.

Mirapex did not hurt Mary’s creative ability so her flower arranging at Carol’s flower shop in Maple Valley was excellent. However, Mary had to be continually prodded by the owner to “keep focused”. Helen was working there part time at the front desk. This gave us a little extra money and Helen could help keep Mary on track.

January 4, 2011: Judge Noel is allowing more time for settlements to take place. The latest offer from the defendants is up to $10,000. After all the expenses are paid (including the expenses from the wasted trip to the settle conference in Minnesota) Mary will be left with nothing and we will get nothing paid back to us either. For nothing we will have to be forever silenced after signing the non discloser agreement. Mary and Joe turned it down.

In January 2008 I was still living in Skykomish and doing research up at Steven’s Pass. Because I was gone all the time all the burden of Mary fell on Helen, I was having my own problems at Skykomish. The winter of 2007-2008 was one of the worst in Skykomish in history. The snow had built up so high in town that the city had to ask for help in moving the excess snow out of town onto an airfield. The snow had also built up so high on my rented home that I was afraid the roof would collapse. I was shoveling most of the time trying to keep our research trailer clear of snow when I was working at the pass. Now I was shoveling full time at the rented home when I should have been relaxing. The snow on the roof was a real worry as a neighboring trailer and several homes in the town had roofs collapse.

My research called for spending time in below freezing temperatures taking snowflake measurements, sometimes 24 hours or more at one stretch. When it stopped snowing and I could finally get down off of the pass and to the rental home all I wanted was to get to bed in a warm house. In January disaster struck and the chance for a warm house waiting for me. The rental house had an oil furnace and the oil tank was topped off before winter at the time we rented it. The oil would have lasted through the winter if the winter had been a normal one, but that winter was anything but normal and the oil tank ran dry.

At first I thought that the furnace had malfunctioned, but no such luck. My first job to get a warm house again was to locate the oil tank and the filler cap. Any other winter this would have been easy, but the yard was under six feet of snow and the company that filled the tank could only give me a vague idea of where the filler cap was. Before this happened I was only shoveling out the research trailer, and the roof and driveway to my rented house. Now I added shoveling out the side yard to find the filler cap. The only good thing about shoveling was it kept me warm.

By the end of January I was pretty worn out between all the shoveling and long cold research hours. I needed to get the roof shoveled off again and I still could not find the filler cap. The problem with shoveling the side yard was having to move the snow away from where I was shoveling onto areas that had already over several feet of snow on them. I was down to a patch of snow about seven feet square in the side yard when I gave out and called for help.

On January 30 my son Adam and Amy’s husband Mark came up to help and was I glad to see them! Mark started on the roof and Adam and I continued the hunt for the filler cap on the oil tank. Having the extra help gave me a shot of energy. Adam and I were down to a few square feet of snow left to dig when, clunk, Adam’s shovel hit the filler cap. This was the type of happening seen in comedy movies. The whole side yard was dug free of snow and the filler cap was in the last few shovelfuls of snow. I should have been laughing, but I wasn’t. Soon the oil tank was filled and heat returned.

When I was able to return home from Skykomish for a day or two I worked with Adam or Joe on Mary’s and Joe’s house. The cabin was secure on the new foundation, but there still lots of work to do under the house. The floor was dirt and before the cement floor could be poured the plumbing had to be dug in and connected to the existing sewer line. Because the cabin and eventual completed home was on a lake, all the water from the roof had to be run into a large catch basin, which was filled with gravel and buried in the front yard.

January 12, 2011: The latest offer from the defendants is now up to $25,000. Nothing has changed on our side.

January 15, 2011: Judge Noel has ruled that both the plaintiffs and the defendants can now file dispositive motions with limited discovery allowed for those motions. This means the both sides can file motions asking for summary judgments, motions to dismiss, etc. Discovery is where each side has to turn over to the court and to the other side the information they have that pertains to the motion and its defense.

Summary judgments are granted by a judge where one side feels the evidence is so overwhelming that any jury would find in their favor. For instance the defendants could ask for a summary judgment based on when Mary knew Mirapex was harming her. I’m afraid they might throw motions at our lawyer just to make him spend time and money defending them. They have all the time and money on their side.

In early March 2008 the research project ended. Helen and the kids helped me pack up and Helen and I drove a U-Haul truck home on the 5th. As it turned out our “research” adventures were not over yet as the rental truck broke down on the Steven’s Pass highway a few miles west of Skykomish. Helen and I had a few hours wait before a mechanic could get to us. Luckily we were close to a MacDonald’s so after a fast food dinner we killed time by walking out on country roads. I had diagnosed the problem so the mechanic could bring the correct replacement part. Once he came we were quickly on our way and ten thirty that night we were home. I returned to all the problems with Mary and their house; out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Joe and I with help from Adam were now working using every spare moment away from work and my yard chores on my house, on Mary and Joe’s home. When Mother’s day came around in May we took a welcome day off and went to the town of Snoqualmie for a train ride with all the family, then back to our house for a meatball, new potato and apple and peach pie dinner. It was a great day and a nice break. At the time we didn’t know that this Mother’s Day would be the last normal one for us for a long time.

The work on the catch basin was very hard. We could just get a small tractor around the side of the house to dig it out, but did not have any good way to get the gravel into the basin. This we had to do by wheel barrow from an enormous pile of gravel out by the road. We took turns filling the wheel barrows at the pile, wheeling them down or wheeling them back up hill again. My cousin Garrett came to help. I could keep up with the young guys OK, but at the end of the day I was ready to rest while they still had energy left. Finally the pit, which looked huge to my eyes, was filled. The sewer connection had passed inspection earlier in the month so on May 27th we finished grading the yard. The next job would be to ready the floor for pouring concrete. We were anxious to get the floor down as then the basement walls could be put up. After that all Mary and Joe’s items in paid storage could be moved in to the basement. Then Helen and I could get out from under the storage payments.

Mary and Joe had planned to have in-floor heating in the basement and Mary had purchased the necessary plastic pipe and gas fired heating tank when she was still successfully working at Magalhaes Services. We finished putting in the plumbing that was to be under the basement floor and successfully passed the inspection and pressure testing. We then laid the gravel on top of the dirt and leveled it. Again the gravel had to be wheel barrowed around the side of the house and into the basement; more hard hand work! Once the gravel was down Joe and I laid plastic panels down that provided the necessary vapor barrier and channels to run the in-floor heating pipe.

On July 31, because funding had run out, I retired early from the University of Washington after 41 years of working as a scientist. Counting my years of college at the University I had spent 45 years there. There was no fanfare, no Golden handshake, just the end of an era and a steady income. On Saturday August 2nd with help from friends and family the basement floor was poured. Now we could start on the interior basement walls.

Mary’s behavior had become more erratic as the summer went on. I was very worried that Mary’s body would not be able to continue her work schedule and her all night escapades. I repeatedly warned her about this. I told Mary that while her mind thought everything was fantastic her body would “know” better and not be able to continue at the pace she was driving it. My badgering had some effect on Mary as she reluctantly agreed to start tapering off of Mirapex on August 8, 2008. Mary did not really understand at all the damage Mirapex had done to Helen and I and her family, but Mary was beginning to not like the way she felt for the first time in three years. Mary’s crazy behavior was accelerating at a scary pace.

On August 13 Helen went down to check on Mary and found out that she had again stayed up all night sewing on a project she would never finish. On August 27th Helen took Mary to the dentist and the dentist discovered that Mary had a massive infection in her jaw and needed immediate root canals in three teeth. The dentist was surprised that Mary could even walk into his office in such condition. Apparently Mirapex driven compulsions had made Mary incapable of noticing her mouth. It was pure luck that the infection was discovered before it was life threatening. On August 31 Mary drove into West Seattle but couldn’t drive back home and Helen had to retrieve her. Mary was increasingly not feeling “right” and had driven in to find some normalcy in a place where she had many nice memories.

January 18, 2012: It has been snowing for several days. It is impossible to heat Mary and Joe’s house. We are trying to not run the heat in our house to save money. Helen and I jump out of bed into the shower. This warms us up enough to eat breakfast in the cold house, and then it is off to work at the flower shop. We don’t run the heat at the flower shop at night to save money. It takes hours to heat up the shop and lots of shivering to stay warm.

January 19, 2012: Disaster has really struck today. The snow has given way to an ice storm and then rain. Icy limbs hanging over Mary and Joe’s home have broken and stabbed through their rotted roof like giant spears. They have penetrated into the rooms below and now it is starting to rain. I’m heading down there now to try and pull out the limbs and patch the roof. Julia is sleeping on a raised platform along side Mary and Joe’s bed. If the limb had gone through the roof above her bed she would have been killed. We will have to screw plywood down over the holes and then glue roofing over the plywood. I don’t know how much more I can stand. The thought of the defendant’s lawyers all cozy in their offices in New York makes me really sad that people like that exist in this world. Is there even a God?

On the 5th of September all Mary’s behavior literally exploded in one final crazy incident. Mary had been obsessed with finding windows for either a green house or for her home. I told her that old windows could not be used in her house because of the building code and they were not really suited for a greenhouse either as old windows can easily break into dangerous shards. Mary was determined and through her constant scouring of Craig’s List found an old home that was being torn down with free windows. Mary loaded her daughter Julia in her car along with a crowbar and started out with the idea of taking out the free windows herself. What happened next is best told in Helen’s own words.

“Mary had always been a kind and loving daughter and a wonderful mother to Julia. She had always wanted to stay close to me and never refused to talk to me. She did know that I was becoming increasingly concerned about her wellbeing, because of the effect I felt Mirapex was having on her. She was becoming more agitated, especially if the subject came up about her getting off the drug.”

“On the morning of September 5, 2008 Mary took off in her car with my granddaughter Julia who was only 7 years old at the time. She armed herself with a crowbar and had every intention of driving miles away from home. Mary had seen an ad on Craig’s List for an old house that was being wrecked and she thought she could get windows and other things from it. I didn’t want her driving, and especially taking Julia, as she was becoming more erratic in her behavior and couldn’t be trusted to drive safely. As often happened, I had offered to drive her there rather than risk having her drive off on her own. Nonetheless, Mary drove off in the car against my wishes.”

“After she took off in her car I tried to call her on her cell phone. Normally, she would’ve answered her phone and spoken to me. This time, however, she would not answer her cell phone when I called. She was angry at me for wanting her to stop taking Mirapex and for interfering with her plans. I kept trying to call, but she would not answer and, as I learned later, told Julia not to answer either. This behavior was absolutely not like Mary and I was shocked and frantic to find them.”

“This was very hard and confusing for Julia. I always had a loving relationship with her and she had spent many hours with me because, as a result of being on Mirapex, Mary wasn’t always able to take adequate care of Julia.”

“After several hours, when it was getting dark, Julia finally answered the cell phone. I could hear Mary in the background telling Julia to not answer the phone or talk to me. This was upsetting to both Julia and I and I feared Julia would feel that she had to obey her mommy and hang up. Thankfully, Julia stayed on the phone for a couple of minutes. Several times, though, she hung up and I had to call her back. I felt as if I was a 911 operator. I had Julia tell me what she was seeing out the window and asked her if she could read any words on any signs. I had no idea where they were or how far they were from home. I was hoping that Julia could see a road sign or a freeway sign.”

“Julia said she was hungry and wanted some food. I told her that I would be happy to come meet up with her and her mom and take them to dinner. While Julia was talking with me she would often get interrupted by Mary who would tell her to hang up the phone. Finally Julia told me that they were going to go eat dinner at Denny’s. I told her that I loved Denny’s and really wanted to have dinner with them. I told her to ask her mom which restaurant they were going to eat at. Mary told her they’d go to the one in Tukwila which was about a half hour from our house. I eagerly jumped into the car and headed to that location.”

“It was no big surprise to me that when I got there they were not there. I was disheartened but again called Mary’s phone in the hopes that Julia would answer. Thankfully, she did answer. This time she told me that they were going to the Denny’s in Kent, another 15 minutes or so away from my location. I told Julia to tell her mommy to quit driving and park and then I’d come to have dinner with them.”

“When I got to the Denny’s in Kent they were not there either. I felt dejected but was hopeful that I was at least closing in on them. Finally, Julia was able to tell me the letters on enough signs to point me to where they were actually parked. It was in the parking lot of another restaurant in Kent.”

“When I got to the car Mary was sitting in the driver’s seat and Julia was in the back seat. The car was filled with all sorts of junk and litter. It almost appeared like they were living in the car. Mary was completely exhausted and did not have the strength to get out of the car or drive any further. Julia was very happy to see me and I tried to act as normal as possible so as not to upset her further. Neither of them had eaten all day long and it was now evening time. It was very obvious to me that Mary would not be able to drive any more that evening, even after eating, so I called my husband and son to come down so that one of them could drive Mary’s car home.”

“Once they arrived, I sent them on home and told them that I was taking Mary and Julia to Denny’s for dinner. I knew that they needed to eat and also still wanted Julia to think things were as normal as possible. We went to the restaurant, had dinner and then went home.”

“Something must have finally clicked in Mary’s brain that night because it finally hit her that Mirapex was causing harm to her. It must have been the sight of her tired, scared and hungry daughter that finally hit her. The way she treated me also could have been a factor. However it happened, all on her own the next day she called Boheringer Ingelheim in Germany and asked for help (on September 6, 2008). This was the first time Mary had taken any steps on her own to try and stop taking Mirapex.”

That wild ride was indeed the turning point for Mary. Thanks to Helen, Mary and Julia were safe at home, but Mary’s trials in trying to grasp what had happened were just starting. Helen and I had planned a big party for family and friends on our 40th wedding anniversary coming up on September 14th. Mary was still on Mirapex, but she was trying to gradually taper off. On the 13th we had a tropical themed dance in our basement recreation room where we invited all our friends and family that would like a dance theme. That party lasted until 3 AM in the morning. Mary attended as did all our children and their families.

The next day we had planned a more formal open house for everyone who didn’t come the night before. Mary was still taking Mirapex and was still pushing herself beyond what her body could take. She had been up late making more flower arrangements for the next day’s event. On the morning of the 14th we got a frantic call from Mary’s husband Joe. Mary was having seizures in bed and couldn’t talk. Helen and I threw on hour clothes and rushed down the street. Joe had called 911 and Helen found a very scared Mary convulsing in bed, trying to talk but not being able to. We tried to stay calm, but we were very scared ourselves. Mary insisted on getting out of bed and walking outside to meet the paramedics because she did not want them to see the state her house was in. We were powerless to stop her. Helen thought that perhaps she’d had a stroke because she was unable to speak normally. Helen had been present when her mother had a stroke at her house just days after Amy had been born. One of the key symptoms was the inability to speak normally.

The paramedics arrived and tried to convince her to sit down. After quickly checking Mary out they transported her to a hospital in Auburn, about 30 minutes away. The seizures were causing a lot of pain for Mary as her muscles were jerked around, but the doctors attending her were afraid to give her any pain medication until they knew the cause of her problems. At the hospital Mary continued to have seizures that the doctors could observe. Mary couldn’t talk during the seizures, but remained conscious. She could also remember the seizures and descried how she felt during them. Because she could remember the seizures epilepsy was ruled out. Helen and I left the hospital in the afternoon as we had guests arriving at 2 PM, but our hearts and minds stayed back at the hospital. Somehow we got through the party and Helen went back and stayed the night with Mary.

On the 15th Mary had two more seizures and a MRI to rule out the possibility of a brain tumor. The MRI came back normal. They also did tests for Lupus and other possible causes of the seizures. Mary spent the next night in the hospital and on the 16th she had one last minor seizure. That day Helen, I and Joe gathered around her bed for a conference with her head doctor. He delivered a bombshell. He had ruled out all causes of the seizures including Lupus. In fact he doubted that Mary had even had Lupus at all as the Lupus tests were inconclusive. He also didn’t think that Mary had fibromyalgia or any of the other things Mary had been diagnosed with over the years. In fact, he said that she had been mistreated and misdiagnosed by the medical profession for over twenty years! This came as quite a shock to all of us. The seizures, in his opinion, were stress seizures most likely brought on by her Mirapex caused compulsions which had finally driven her body to collapse. Now I realize that they could have been caused by withdrawal from Mirapex which I will discuss in Chapter 13.

This was a lot to take in and we all stood there stunned. The doctor wanted Mary to taper off of all medications immediately which she immediately started to do at the hospital. Mary was ecstatic at the news and wanted to plan a big party at our house for close friends and family to celebrate. We brought Mary home to our house where Mary and Julia would stay until Mary could be back on her own. We called Amy, Adam and Megan and asked them to come to our house for a BBQ in the afternoon. I had reservations about what the doctor had told Mary but kept them to myself. I let Mary enjoy the feeling of not being chronically ill. After the elation of the party the hard work of returning Mary to her normal self began. Mary was in no shape to return to work at Carol’s flower shop and Helen had a full time task just taking care of Mary and Julia. Helen and Mary never went back to Carol’s.

Mary was tapering off of all her medications including Mirapex but was still not mentally right. She and Julia were staying in our main floor guest room and it had French doors opening out onto the front deck facing the lake. Mary was fixated on the idea that having a pet rabbit would help her recover. I though the idea was crazy as she was not capable of taking care of one and Julia was too little to do so. Mary’s mother-in-law thought that might help Mary and give her something positive to focus on. On September 21st she took Julia to a pet store and bought a rabbit. I came in the door and found Mary holding the baby rabbit. Mary must have seen the look on my face because she immediately took off down the street for her house holding the rabbit in her arms. I chased after her and persuaded her to return with the rabbit to our house.

I frantically tried to figure out what to do with the rabbit. We had eagles and other wild animals around that would find a baby rabbit a nice meal. I was afraid that if anything happened to the rabbit Mary might be “pushed over the edge”. I went to the hardware store and bought wood and chicken wire and I constructed a cage on the section of the front deck that Mary’s bedroom opened out on. I covered the top of the cage with chicken wire also. Now the rabbit was secure and safe and Mary could open her bedroom door to see him.

March 8, 2012: Mary has received a letter from Lee that was sent to Lee from the defendants. The letter states that the defendants agree to the offer made by Mary and Joe of $30,000 for a final settlement. One of the problems with this is that Mary and Joe never made that offer and did not agree to a settlement. Is this another ploy to wear us out so that we will finally collapse and settle for nothing? Why don’t they kick us some more? Maybe we’ll break and settle.

It would be tempting to give in and get the stress over with. But, I can’t afford to go to the dentist and the teeth are broken off on the right side of my mouth. The constant pain is good for me as it reminds me of the sacrifices we have all made to put forward some hope for justice, It hardens my resolve.

It is Mary and Joe’s suit and they will nave to decide when enough is enough!

While Mary was recovering at our home Helen and I worked to fix up her yard. We knew that we would probably not have the funds to finish her house construction, but we felt fixing up the part of the yard that faced the lake would give her a needed boost. We brought in top soil and made flower beds and rockeries. We bought sod and put that down and planted flowers and scrubs. When Mary was able to return home with Julia she had a finished front yard to enjoy.

Mortgaging our home to help Mary out financially had put Helen and I in financial difficulties and we needed extra income to get by. Mary also needed work, but was in no mental shape to find any. At the time we didn’t know it but Mary was suffering from withdrawal from Mirapex. Much later, after we filed a lawsuit against the manufacturers of Mirapex, would I learn all about the serious problems from stopping Mirapex. Then we were only trying to cope as best we could.

The woman who ran Carol’s flower shop was interested in selling the shop to Helen, but the price was too much for us to manage. We only had about $50,000 dollars left over from building Mary’s and Joe’s house. There was a flower shop for sale in Enumclaw, about twenty minutes south of Maple Valley where we lived. We could manage the price and the financials looked fine. Helen and Mary could both make a little income and it would give Mary a safe place to be rehabilitated. Her rehabilitation was the main reason Helen bought the flower shop as neither of us had planned to own a flower shop when I retired. Helen had always loved being a homemaker and had no desire to start up a career, especially since I’d just finally retired.

On October 13 Helen signed the preliminary paper work and on October 24 she and Mary started helping the owner at the shop to learn how to run it. Unfortunately Mary spent a lot of the time confused over what she should be doing, but Mary was insistent that she could do it so we continued. On the 7th of November Young’s Enumclaw flowers and Gifts came into being. We paid the previous owner to stay on and help for awhile as Mary was anything but back to normal. Mary was coming out of her “Mirapex fog” and starting to realize the disaster that had happened to all of us. Notes from Helen’s calendar are pretty telling: November 9,”Mary loopy”; November 10, “Mary loopy”; November 11, “Mary suicidal”; November 14, “Mary low”; November 18, “Mary off in car”, and so it went.

April 12, 2012: I’m just finishing up this chapter that ends in Christmas of 2008. Christmas 2008 is also where I started this story in the first chapter. The final outcome of Mary taking Mirapex at this moment is in the future for all of us. In the meantime I’ll start writing the chapter describing scientific studies describing and documenting how Mirapex affects the brain and causes compulsive behaviors in addition to describing Mirapex withdrawal. To write that chapter I’ve been reading all the relevant scientific papers. I’ve just emailed off a summary of the new citations I’ve found to H. Lee Thompson in case he has not seen them.

We thought we had seen the worst but the worst was yet to come. My son Adam had been helping with deliveries at the flower shop on December 10th. Helen was visiting friends and Mary was feeling despondent and was at home that day. Just as we were finishing up at the shop a very worried Joe called us with the news that Mary had wandered off. She had been suicidal off an on and I was frightened that she had thrown herself into the lake and drowned. All the way home I was trying to figure out how I would finds the words to tell Julia that her mother was dead. The ride home was unbearable.

It had been snowing the previous week and there was snow on the sides of the road and light rain falling as we drove. When we got there the neighbor witn a flashlight was looking down at the lake shore to see if Mary was floating there. A woman had previously drowned in the lake just after we moved in and her body did not surface for months as the lake is deep and cold at the bottom. Unless Mary was still alive I didn’t think that we would find her body in the lake. I couldn’t bear the thought of Mary being in that cold and dark water. Julia was outside also and I could hardly stand to see her suffering and confused.

Joe had just called the police and they were keeping a watch for Mary. We were out scouring the immediate neighborhood when the police called. Mary had been found! Once the police brought her home we warmed her up and got her to bed. Mary, feeling despondent and still suffering from the withdrawal from Mirapex, had left home to walk to the flower shop in Enumclaw. Feeling tired and cold from not being properly dressed she laid down on the side of the road in the wet snow. Mary somehow managed to get back on her feet and was trying to find her way home when the police found her damp, and shivering from the cold. I think that Mary would have died from exposure if she hadn’t gotten up off of the ground and the police hadn’t found her.

April 18, 2012: A few months ago Mary had signed up on PACER. It is a way to register online and keep track of filings to the Federal courts in specific lawsuits. We used it to see the initial filing and today I’m going to see what is coming up for us.

The latest document was filed on April 14 and it is a discussion of the status of the Mirapex lawsuits in the Multi District Litigation (MDL) that Mary’s suit is a part of. There are over a hundred cases in the MDL some of which have already been settled. Of those cases H. Lee Thompson represents 26 clients. Seventeen of Lee’s clients have settled. The defendants have asserted to the court in that document that Magalhaes (Mary and Joe) among others “have exchanged written settlement demands and written acceptances thereof” and that “Defendants are willing to provide copies of the written settlement demands and written acceptances thereof to the Court under seal for its in camera review if necessary.” “In camera” means that the documents are delivered to Judge Noel’s chambers for his viewing.

I guess they are planning to make up these “documents we have never seen or signed” out of this air. To his credit Lee has counter asserted in that April 14 document to the court that Magalhaes has not agreed to a settlement and until the others sight the relevant papers they have not also agreed.

So far no dispositive motions have been filed by the defendants against Mary and Joe. If their case is not dismissed by a motion from the defendants or settled by August 1, 2012, then the Judge has ruled that a pretrial schedule will be made and a period for discovery will be given.

This document is a prelude to a Case Management Teleconference to be held today, April 18th. If I’m still writing the next chapter on the scientific studies of Mirapex (dopamine agonists) I’ll include the outcome in that chapter. Otherwise I’ll write the ending to this story when I know it.

Chapter 13: Scientific Studies of Mirapex and Dopamine Agonists

I have now caught up to the present in my story. I will not have to use italics for writing about events as they are happening to distinguish them from my back story, but I will keep the convention of starting each entry with a date. In this and following chapters I will reserve italics for quotes from documents or other people.

The way we feel, how we think, what makes us human is made possible by neurons; cells of the nervous system. Neurons transmit the signals that move our muscles, signals that make us cry and signals that can turn us into serial killers. Neurons can transmit signals between other neurons by electrical and chemical signals. Electrical signals jumping between neurons are primarily how we move our muscles. Chemical transmission is how we feel.

Neurotransmitters are the chemicals that are released by a neuron and are then taken up by the adjoining neuron in locations called receptors. Science has identified over 100 neurotransmitters. Two of the most well known of these are endorphins and dopamine. The body releases endorphins in response to fear or trauma. Endorphins act as the body’s pain killers. Dopamine is associated with thought and pleasurable feelings. Drugs or disease can interfere with the receptors and neurotransmitters with both beneficial and catastrophic results.

Most people have had firsthand experience with receptors in the brain and drugs; specifically caffeine. My first cup of coffee had an enormous effect on how I felt. As I kept drinking coffee, that effect lessened. Soon I needed more coffee to get the same effect. My brain was working to return to “normal” by adjusting the receptors to account for the increased levels of caffeine. Thankfully coffee is easily obtained and is not illegal so most of us do not have to go through caffeine withdrawal where the brain has to re-adjust to no caffeine.

Dopamine agonists are drugs that can activate dopamine receptors in the brain without needing the body’s produced dopamine. Diseases that are associated with a natural lack of dopamine such as Parkinson’s are treated with dopamine agonists. Restless leg syndrome is also treated with dopamine agonists. Mirapex (Pramipexole) is a dopamine agonist. Requip (Ropinirole) is another.

Several unbiased published scientific studies have investigated the link between dopamine agonists and compulsive behaviors. One such study was presented at the 12th International Congress of Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders held in Chicago in June 2008. It was subsequently published in the Archives of Neurology in the May 2010 issue titled “Impulse Control Disorders in Parkinson’s disease: a Cross-sectional Study of 3090 Patients” by Weintraub et al. A total of 3090 Parkinson patients were surveyed in the study. It was found that impulse control disorders (compulsive behaviors) were common in patients taking dopamine agonists. Only 6.9% of the patients not taking a dopamine agonist had an impulsive control disorder. However, it was found that 17.1% of patients that were taking a dopamine agonist had an impulse control behavior.

The Weintraub study only surveyed four compulsive disorders; compulsive gambling, compulsive eating, compulsive sexual behavior and compulsive buying. These specific disorders were picked as they have established criteria for diagnoses. Accordingly, the study does not rule out the presence of other compulsive behaviors associated with dopamine agonists.

The article “Impulsive Smoking in a Patient with Parkinson’s Disease Treated with Dopamine Agonists” by Bienfeit et al., published in the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience in April of 2010, details the compulsive behavior of a patient taking a dopamine agonist. They describe a patient with Parkinson’s disease who developed an unusual manifestation of impulsive behaviors, including cigarette smoking, associated with an increase in dopamine agonist medication. They attributed this behavior to an overstimulation of mesolimbic dopamine receptors responsible for reward-seeking behaviors. There are several dopamine systems in the brain, but the mesolimbic is associated with motivation and addictions.

Yet another more recent article published in the July 2011 journal Physiology and Behavior is worthy of having the whole abstract repeated here. The article is titled “Pathological Behaviors Provoked by Dopamine Agonist Therapy of Parkinson’s Disease” by J. E. Ahlskog . Here is the complete unaltered abstract.

“The dopamine agonist medications, pramipexole and ropinirole, are commonly used to treat Parkinson's disease. These two drugs have a highly specific affinity for cerebral D3 receptors, known to be localized to the mesolimbic system. Herein is described a common side effect of these drugs, encountered in our routine clinical practice: pathological behaviors. This includes excessive gambling, hypersexuality, shopping, hyperphagia or obsessive hobbying, which may develop in up to 30% of people taking higher agonist doses. In contrast, treatment with the dopamine precursor, levodopa, in the absence of D3 agonist therapy very rarely provokes such behavioral syndromes. Although these agonist-induced behaviors have been called "impulse control disorders", the problem is not simply loss of impulse control, but rather a novel obsessive-compulsion directed at one or a few behaviors, often taking on pathological proportions. This experience points to the dopamine D3 receptor as a potential therapeutic target for gambling, sex or other addictions occurring spontaneously in the general population.”

Levodopa is commonly used in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, but it is not a dopamine agonist. Cerebral D3 receptors are dopamine receptors in the brain that play an important role in reinforcement and reward. Mirapex and other dopamine agonists have unique and selective affinity for dopamine D3 receptors. This abstract clearly describes Mary’s behavior in “clinical” terms as well as the behavior of the other victims who have e-mailed me in response to my video on YouTube.

All of these more recent articles give tremendous weight to the original ground breaking Mayo clinic study involving 267 patients treated between 2004 and 2006 in a seven-county area around the Mayo Clinic. The study was published in April 2009 issue of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings. The article “Frequency of New-Onset Pathologic Compulsive Gambling or Hypersexuality After Drug Treatment of Idiopathic Parkinson Disease “is by Bostwick et al. Of the 267 patients 38 were using doses of a dopamine agonist in the therapeutic range (greater or equal to 2 mg/day).

Seven of the patients taking dopamine agonists at the therapeutic range developed a new gambling and or hyper sexuality compulsive behaviors (an occurrence rate of 18.4 percent for this group). In five of these patients the compulsive behaviors were pathologic and disabling. Other compulsive behaviors were noted as well in those seven patients. They were compulsive lawn care, compulsive food and alcohol consumption and compulsive hobby work. The Mayo Clinic researchers found that the compulsive behaviors abated when the patients stopped dopamine agonist therapy.

None of these behaviors were seen in the patients not taking a dopamine agonist, or those taking less than a therapeutic dose of a dopamine agonist, or patients receiving treatment with carbidopa/levodopa alone, the researchers said. Importantly the researchers noted that because this is a retrospective study, cases may have been missed, and hence this study may reflect an underestimation of the true frequency of compulsive behaviors.

Even scarier results from this 2004-2006 study documented that two of the patients had severe enough problems to require extensive treatment for what were at first considered a primary psychiatric problems. Only later was the dopamine agonist cause recognized. My daughter Mary’s experience was the same. Mary’s psychiatrist felt that Mary also had primary psychiatric problems and at the time did not realize the cause was the dopamine agonist Mirapex. Another of Mary’s doctors also erroneously diagnosed her with bi-polar syndrome, a disorder she had never shown any symptoms for prior to or after taking Mirapex.

Thanks to the responses I have gotten from the video I posted on YouTube I was able to also tabulate the frequency and type of compulsive behaviors. The percentages I show will certainly change as the number of responses increases. However, my purpose is not to calculate exact percentages, but to bring to light the varied compulsive behaviors caused by taking a dopamine agonist, specifically Mirapex. The compulsive behaviors reported to me, in order of the highest percentage were: compulsive gambling, 31%; compulsive shopping, 17%; compulsive eating, 14%; compulsive sewing, 6%; compulsive sexuality, 4%; compulsive dumpster diving, 4%; compulsive chocolate craving,4%; compulsive smoking, 4%; compulsion to finish tasks, 4%; compulsion to start multiple new businesses, 4%; compulsive lying, 4% , and compulsive tinkering 4%. These percentages are in line with the gross observations of other researchers in that the most highly reported compulsive behavior is compulsive gambling. Most responders had more than one of these compulsive behaviors.

All of these varied behaviors were extremely disabling to the victims that took Mirapex. The conclusion from my study is that Mirapex (dopamine agonist) caused compulsive behaviors are as varied as the people that fall victim to dopamine agonists and most likely reflect behaviors specific to the individual’s likes and dislikes.

These studies I have so far described have thoughtfully and carefully correlated the use of dopamine agonists to the onset of compulsive behaviors. These studies have surmised how the dopamine agonists can stimulate the “pleasure centers” of the brain driving the victims into unwanted and uncontrolled destructive behavior. Importantly a newly published study establishes a direct link to dopamine agonists and changes in the brain. This study,”Dopamine Agonists and Risk: Impulse Control Disorders in Parkinson's Disease” by Voon et. al. (May 2011, Oxford journal Brain) now has positively shown that dopamine agonists physically alter the brain’s reaction to risk. The study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to “see” the responses in the brain as the subjects underwent risk taking choices.

They found that in patients with impulse control disorder, dopamine agonists were associated with enhanced sensitivity to risk taking along with decreased activity in the ventral striatal (one of the central areas of the brain’s reward system). Apparently dopamine agonists change sensitivity to risk in patients with impulse control disorder by impairing risk evaluation in the striatum. Their results provide an explanation of why dopamine agonists may lead to an unconscious bias towards risk in susceptible individuals. This helps explain why Mary was so complacent about losing her well paying business and anxious to embark on a new, but very risky venture of starting a flower business.

Another severe problem that users of Mirapex and other dopamine agonists may experience is DAWS or Dopamine Agonist Withdrawal Syndrome. Patients tapering off of dopamine agonists because of unwanted compulsive behavior, can experience anxiety, panic attacks, agoraphobia (anxiety in situations where it is perceived to be difficult or embarrassing to escape), depression, dysphoria (sudden feelings of sadness, sorrow and anguish), diaphoresis (excessive sweating), fatigue, pain, orthostatic hypotension (lightheadedness from standing up) , and drug cravings. A study “Dopamine Agonist Withdrawal Syndrome in Parkinson Disease” by Rabinak and Nirenberg, published in the Archives of Neurology in 2010, documents these effects.

In this study of 40 subjects that were treated with a dopamine agonist, 26 patients subsequently tapered off of the drugs. Of those 26 patients a total of 19% experienced DAWS. All the patients that experienced DAWS had compulsive behaviors from taking the dopamine agonist. A quote by one of the authors of this study, Dr. Nirenberg is very telling: "Impulse control disorders stemming from use of dopamine agonists can be detrimental to a patient's financial, social and physical well-being. Our research identifies another concern — namely that some patients experience severe, even intolerable, withdrawal syndromes when their dosage is reduced. In this context, it's very important that physicians and their patients use DAs [dopamine agonists] judiciously, and exercise caution when they are tapered".

Dopamine withdrawal syndrome is problematic in that it is often unrecognized and is attributed to a mental health condition such as depression and anxiety. This false diagnoses leads to ineffective treatments of the symptoms. The symptoms readily disappear when the patient is put back on the dopamine agonist, but this leads to the resumption of compulsive behaviors. Unfortunately, two of the patients in their study were unable to tolerate the withdrawal process and had to return to their compulsive behaviors.

Most of these studies that I have described have involved Parkinson’s patients. That is understandable since Parkinson patients are most likely to have received therapeutic doses of dopamine agonists. It is very important to note that Parkinson’s disease is not the cause of compulsive behaviors, but that the well documented cause is the treatment of Parkinson’s with dopamine agonists.

All drugs have side effects associated with them, although the percent of serious side effects that cause devastation in a patient’s life are normally very, very low. If this were not true then a drug would be too dangerous to take except in the most necessary cases. It is appalling that Mirapex is in a class of drugs that in the latest research are estimated to cause pathological behaviors (excessive compulsive behaviors) in over 30% of the users. I can only imagine the uproar that would be caused if the word “death” was substituted for “compulsive behaviors”. If over 30% of the users of Mirapex had “died”, the use of Mirapex would have been stopped cold.

The total financial and emotional devastation that Mirapex has caused on the victims that have e-mailed me their stories and the ones documented in these scientific studies are in some ways worse than outright death. At least outright death does not carry the extreme weight of shame and guilt unjustifiably felt by Mirapex victims and the victim is mourned instead of having to suffer a living hell.

May 3, 2012: We are now in the throes of trying to figure out what to do about the rotted and leaking roof on Mary and Joe’s home. We hate to waste the money, money we do not have anyway, to replace the roof if a settlement makes it possible to rebuild a larger structure on top of the new foundation and basement. However mold is forming on the ceiling of the bathroom and in and behind the kitchen cupboards. Something has to be done, but what?

Mary had just confided to me yesterday on the drive into work at the flower shop that during the first year after having stopped taking Mirapex she continually fantasized about the end of the world happening. I admitted I was doing the same thing. I suppose that way we could relieve our anguish without leaving loved ones to mourn us. That period is behind us.

The defendants have all the time and money on their side. I try to put myself into the mindset of the defendants to understand what they are thinking. To do that, I have to rid my mind of any shred of humanity, fairness, justice and empathetic feeling and focus on a goal of getting the smallest settlement possible regardless of the merits of the lawsuit. In that state of mind it is easy to understand why they are acting as they have. By parsing out ridiculously small offers they are trying to reset how we are viewing a fair settlement. We have all experienced this “reset” in expectations. An extreme example is of someone that loses a limb. At first they are depressed over the loss and focus on how their life has changed for the worse. However, within a year or two most will report being as happy as they were before they lost a limb. The defendants have honed their techniques over many lawsuits. They are in no hurry to settle. Time is on their side.

I fear they will squash all of us like bugs as the pressure becomes too much to bear.

Chapter 14: A Long Summer

Sunday May 13, 2012, Mother’s Day morning: Helen, Mary and I have just finished up three grueling days of work at the flower shop. Mother’s day is the busiest time of the year for us. We couldn’t have made it if we didn’t have family and friends helping. As it is we have to make a long distance delivery up by Mt Rainier on Monday and none of us want to do it. My cousin Kathy who came to help is just about ready to leave for home and to celebrate her own Mother’s Day with her son. We make money on Mother’s Day, but not on a lot of the other days and now we are coming into the “flower shop doldrums”. We have some weddings, but not enough to help us out financially. We could try looking for other jobs, but Mary will not be able to hold down a full time job anytime in the future.

Monday May 14: Another bombshell just landed as if we didn’t have enough trouble already. Judge Noel has ordered another settlement conference for August 23, 2012 in Minnesota and at least Mary has to be there. This means spending time and money none of us have. We don’t have any idea why Judge Noel is doing this. The defendants have to be there also but they do not have to offer any more for a settlement than they have already. The judge can’t do anything to them for having no empathy towards us. I fear the defendants will jump at the chance to make our financially devastated family spend money we don’t have just to come back and give them the opportunity to “land more body blows” on all of us. My son Adam is getting married at our house on August 17. This is not good timing!

Tuesday May 16: I stayed home from the flower shop to mow the lawn and plant tomato and pepper plants. I’m trying to keep my life as normal as possible but Mirapex follows me around and ruins everything. Mary just called me in tears. They have just changed the date of her settlement conference to August 15! She is afraid that she will miss her brother’s wedding if she’s gets stuck there. She is also afraid the trip will be for nothing but discouragement. She wanted to drive straight there to save money, but now she can’t. I don’t think that Helen and I have enough air miles left to help them. Her despair is playing right into the defendants’ hands, but how can she possibly help it?

Last time the defendants jerked everyone around when their lawyers couldn’t make some of the dates for the settlement conferences in November of 2011. I’m pretty certain that the defendants will do the same again. It’s a good tactic on their part. I don’t know if Mary can hold up until August and then what will happen if she gets deselected again?

July 9, 2012: If all the stress over running a flower shop with long hours for Helen, Mary and I with little monetary compensation, unsuccessfully meeting our bills, and trying to keep everyone on an even keel isn’t enough on our plates, a new bomb shell hits us. On June 29 the defendants filed a motion to have Mary and five other plaintiffs represented by H. Lee Thompson accept settlements that they never agreed to. I went to the Pacer site and downloaded the motion. There are no words to describe my feelings when reading their motion titled “Motion to Enforce Settlement Agreements”. I was incredulous to say the least.

After racking our brains we remembered a letter we had received from one of the many defendants’ lawyers Author J. Liederman. Mary had gotten the letter on March 8, 2012. In the letter Liederman acknowledged the receipt of a demand for a full and final settlement of Mary’s claim. We dismissed the letter as another devious ploy by the defendants to browbeat Mary into a settlement. Mary immediately sent the following email to H. Lee Thompson dated March 10, 2012.

“Hello Lee,

I did not agree to settle for the amount of $xxxxx. Please do not go forward with this settlement. Please also forward to me the reference present demand that you sent to Author Liederman.

Thank you! Mary Magalhaes”

When we didn’t hear anything else about it we put it out of our minds. Later we found out that at least one of Lee’s clients felt that they had to sign and accept the agreement. There probably was more that we didn’t know about. Thank heavens that we are not on our own, but have a strong family for support.

After I calmed down enough the read the defendants motion and make sense of it this is what I found out. On March 12, 2012 Lee had sent a list of demands by email to the defendants for each of his remaining 18 clients. The 18 clients included Mary and the four others named in the motion. Apparently it is only five clients that had never agreed to the demands that Lee sent, or at least five clients that objected. Those other four had also refused to sign the 19 page releases; releases that would absolve the defendants of further lawsuits, forbid under penalty the telling of their stories, and of disparaging the two pharmaceuticals in the future. The March 12 email was referred to in the motion, but it is not available to see on Pacer. It is “sealed” from public view because it contains the settlement offer amounts for all of the 18 clients.

The defendants are arguing in the motion that Lee’s demands for his 18 clients constitute enforceable contracts regardless of the wishes of the individual clients or whether they agreed to the demand amounts he sent in the March 12 e-mail. We don’t know if Lee included the settlement offer for Mary in his e-mail by mistake. We do know that he didn’t send us the e-mail as we asked, but this could have been due to the legal prohibitions. We may never know the answer. Right now that this is the least of our problems.

July 10, 2012: Lee asked Mary to send an affidavit to him that he would include in his response to the defendants motion. His response has to be filed before the hearing on the motion that is scheduled for July 30. Here is a copy of her affidavit that she sent Lee.

AFFIDAVIT OF MARY D. MAGALHAES page 1 of 3

I ____________________________________ upon oath state as a resident of the state of Washington and the county of King that I have personal knowledge of the following events.

July 12, 2012

To whom it may concern:

I’m writing this affidavit in response to “Defendants’ Motion to Enforce Settlement Agreement” (CASE 0:11-cv-00412-MJD-FLN, Document 47, Filed 06/29/12) and the “Memorandum of Law in Support of Defendants’ Motion to Enforce Settlement Agreements” (CASE 0:11-cv-0042-MJD-FLN, Document 50, Filed 06/29/12).

The defendants assert that:

1. On February 22, 2012 Mr. Thompson informed counsel for BIPI’s insurers that he was still awaiting word on settlement from certain clients and hoped to provide settlement demands from them within a week.

2. On March 2, 2012 Mr. Thompson sent to Nicole Washienko, representing BIPI’s insurers, an e-mail containing individual settlement demands for each of his 18 remaining Mirapex clients (excluding Sabaj), including the five Plaintiffs at issue in this motion.

3. All five Plaintiffs agreed to fully and finally settle their claims against Defendants and dismiss their pending lawsuits with prejudice.

4. Plaintiffs’ counsel possessed all necessary authority to settle his clients’ claims in full.

5. Their new-found buyer’s remorse notwithstanding, these Plaintiffs remain parties to binding settlement agreements reached through good-faith, arms-length negotiations by their authorized counsel.

I, Mary D. Magalhaes testify in this affidavit:

1. That between February 22, 2012 and March 2, 2012 I never authorized Mr. H. Lee Thompson either by e-mail, written letter, conversation in person or by telephone, or fax to put forward to the defendants a demand of $30,000 for a full and final settlement of my claim against both BIPI and Pfizer.

2. That Mr. H. Lee Thompson never discussed with me that he was putting forward such a claim either by e-mail, written letter, conversation in person or by telephone, or by fax before March 2, 2012,

3. That I never received a copy of the referenced March 2, 2012 e-mail from Mr. H. Lee Thompson to the Defendants.

4. That the first time I was made aware of this e-mail was on July 9, 2012 when my father John D. Locatelli logged onto PACER and read Document 47 and Document 50.

5. That when I received a copy of the March 8, 2012 e-mail from Arthur J. Liederman acknowledging the receipt of the demand of $xxxxx for a full and final settlement of my claim I emailed on March 10, 2012 to Mr. H. Lee Thompson that I had never agreed to that settlement amount (see the copy of the email on page 3)

6. That the defendants’ claim that I am “suffering from “new-found buyer’s remorse” is totally, unequivocally, absolutely unfounded as I never “purchased” the demand of $xxxxx for a full and final settlement in the first place.

7. That neither the defendants, Mr. H. Lee Thompson, nor the court will be able to produce any e-mail, conversation by phone in person, letter or fax that will show that I was aware of the March 2, 2012 e-mail to the defendants or that Mr. H. Lee Thompson discussed this demand with me before it was sent on March 2, 2012 as none exist.

Sincerely,

Mary D. Magalhaes

We are in constant e-mail with the other four victims and we are all pretty upset. Some of them are losing the will to continue. I suppose that is a proven technique that the defendants use; wear out and browbeat the plaintiffs. Some days, today is one of them, I feel like giving up. Then I look behind me to see if anyone is in line to take over. So----I guess I’ll keep going.

July 19, 2012: Lee had just sent his reply to the motion and I’m just reading it on Pacer. I’m impressed with his arguments against their motion and he makes it very plain that he didn’t consider any settlement final until he discussed it with his clients. There is a lot of discussion of what contract law to apply in this case. All the court procedure is from the Federal Court rules of Minnesota. However, in applying the law to individual cases, the law that applies is normally the one from the state that the plaintiff lived in when the damage from Mirapex happened.

It would be nice if the law was that simple----but----in the case of a motion that is against multiple people from different states it is possible to apply the law from only one to simplify the proceedings. The defendants are arguing through a complex, and not clear to me, argument that in this case New York contract law should apply to all. Lee has included Mary’s affidavit in his reply to the motion.

July 26, 2012: Thankfully Joe and Mary had insurance that will pay to have the ice-storm damaged roof repaired. The payout was enough to have the roof repaired by professionals, but today Joe and I are starting the repairs ourselves. This will enable us to repair more of the roof than was storm damaged. Large sections of the roof over the laundry room have rotted away and I can see down to the washer and drier from on the roof. Over the kitchen the roof is really spongy and has several leaks. It looks like the weather will be sunny for several days so we will remove the whole south half of the roof today. This is the section with the most leaks and also has the damage from the limbs.

The sun is going down and I’ve just gotten out of the shower. I’m still on my feet so that is good. Joe and I used the time honored flat shovel method to scrape the roofing off of the flat roof. Several layers of roofing were on top of the original tar and tar paper roof. I hope what doesn’t kill me will make me stronger, but it looks like at least three more days of grueling work to get the new roof on. All the years of building our own homes must have physically and mentally toughened me up.

July 27, 2012: It’s getting dark, I just finished my shower and I’m still alive. Today we had to remove the rotted roof boards that we exposed yesterday and sister-in and replace quite a few 2x6 roof rafters that were also rotted. Both Joe and I had one leg break through the roof, but thankfully we didn’t break anything important (roof or us). I went through first and just as Joe was finished laughing at me, he plunged through. All those repairs are done and tomorrow we will cover the whole south half with plywood.

July 29, 2012: Yesterday Joe and I successfully laid down the plywood, and today we will lay down the rolled roofing. I’m not looking forward to it as this will involve roofing tar and anyone that has worked with roofing tar will know it most likely means a big mess. When I was younger and had black hair, the blobs of tar that invariably stuck in my hair didn’t show. Now that I’m grey they do show up. It’s dark again and we are done! If it rains the house is safe. Today was a bridal shower for my son’s bride-to-be Sara and thankfully my son-in-law Mark drove out to our house from Seattle with my daughter Amy. With Mark’s help we were able to finish in one day. With all of the Mirapex caused problems at least we shouldn’t have to worry about slugs in Mary and Joe’s kitchen cupboards again.

July 30, 2012: The hearing on the motion to force the settlements is this morning. Mary had arranged last week to be present at the hearing by phone. The District Judge assigned to these cases is Davis, but he requested that the Magistrate Judge, Noel, handle and decide this motion. I’m really hoping that Judge Noel will ask questions of the plaintiffs and give them a chance to speak. Mary’s on the phone now.

It’s over and I’m pretty disappointed in the hearing. Mary said that each side repeated their arguments and the Judge never asked questions of her or the other plaintiffs present by phone. The Judge will now prepare his decision and it will be posted on Pacer. I don’t know how long this will take.

Mary has been trying to save up money to pay for the trip back to the settlement conferences scheduled for the 15th of August, but she hasn’t been able to buy the plane tickets yet. This isn’t good news as buying the tickets last minute will increase their costs. Some others of the five plaintiffs in the motion have already purchased their tickets. The conferences will be only two days before my son’s wedding and the wedding will be at our lakefront home! I keep picturing what a stroke from the stress will feel like. I hope it’s like a light turning off, but who knows. I don’t want to linger so I’m counting on a quick exit.

August 3, 2012: We just found out that the conferences have been cancelled! The defendants had argued that no matter which side wins the other side would appeal the decision, which would make settlement conferences at the scheduled time superfluous. This is good for us as we didn’t waste money on plane tickets. Unfortunately, some of the other four scheduled for conferences will have to eat the cost of their tickets. Attendance at the conferences is mandatory whether the plaintiffs can afford to go or not. However, it seems like the defendants are given preferential consideration for their schedules and last minute changes to give deference to them is always possible. I’m glad that we are not going back. Why give them another chance to jerk us around like the last time?

August 8, 2012: Judge Noel has just posted his decision. It is short, to the point and very infuriating. I’m trying to console Mary, and at the same time not smash everything around me in my own fury.

The judge ruled that any conversations and understandings between Mary and her lawyer H. Lee Thompson (the same for the other four plaintiffs) were not relevant to his decision. His decision was solely based on the applicable contract law. Apparently Lee entered into an enforceable contract (as the judge sees it) with the defendants as Mary’s representative, and the court can force Mary to take the settlement against her will. It doesn’t matter to the court that Mary never authorized that settlement amount, or for Lee to argue that he never intended the offers to be finalized until he discussed them with his clients and they signed the 19 page release forms. I can now understand why some people snap and go on a rampage, but I have to concentrate so I can figure out what to do next.

I’m totally taken aback by Noel’s ruling. Taken to the extreme any lawyer for a plaintiff could enter into an agreement with the defendants and sell the plaintiffs out for a cent and the plaintiffs would be forced to take such a settlement. This is true even if the plaintiffs specifically and unequivocally told their lawyer not to make that offer. Does anyone else think that there is something very, very wrong with this decision?

The Judge stipulates that each of the four defendants will settle their lawsuits for the amount that Lee demanded in the March 12, 2012 email; that they will sign a statement releasing the defendants of all future lawsuits from taking Mirapex and that the amount of the settlements will be sealed. Apparently all of the other prior settlement amounts have also been sealed by the court. I can’t find in his ruling any provision that would require the signing of the 19 page release favored by the defendants. I’m beginning to think that the defendants will never, never give Mary any justice. Lee will probably appeal this decision to district judge Davis, but that won’t matter anyway. If the defendants lose the appeal they will never stop filing motions to have Mary’s case dismissed and this will drag out forever. There will be no justice through the legal system.

August 14, 2012: I’ve just read Lee’s objections to Judge Noel’s decision. Lee has several objections to Judge Noel’s ruling, but they all stem from the Judge’s decision to completely ignore any plaintiff testimony. Here is his final statement.

“All plaintiffs object to the Magistrate Judge’s proposed report and recommendations because the Magistrate Judge’s ruling is erroneous, denial of due process of law as the Court failed to consider plaintiffs affidavits and declaration statement timely submitted to material terms and facts in dispute.”

It’s in the hands of Judge Davis now. Mirapex is the gift to our family that keeps on giving, giving grief that is. Helen has been noticing that her eyesight has been deteriorating for some time. We used to have good health insurance for her through my policy at the University of Washington, a policy that I could keep going after I retired. After Mirapex gutted our finances we struggle to keep up with the payments, but couldn’t manage it. I’m thankfully on Medicare now, but I have chosen an inexpensive plan that is heavy on prevention, but light on payments for serious treatment. Helen is without any health insurance. We are one serious illness away from total financial disaster.

We managed to sell a nice antique piece of furniture at our shop that Helen got as an inheritance from her brother. I talked Helen into spending the money to have her eyes checked. Evidently she has cataracts that are progressing. Now she can’t deliver flowers as she cannot see the street signs or addresses from the delivery truck. We went to a music concert at the church where my oldest daughter Amy sings in the choir. Helen couldn’t see which one was Amy from the pew we were seated in. Our granddaughter Annelies is taking dance lessons and I talked Helen into taking opera glasses with her to her last performance. Helen was crying coming out of the concert. They were tears of joy as she could finally see Annelies’ face as she danced. I was hoping that this meant that glasses would help her see better. We took a chance and had her eyes checked. The optometrist warned us that the glasses would not work as good as the opera glasses did. Unfortunately she was right. Mirapex keeps claiming victims.

While all the drama of the defendants ruling is going on Mirapex added more horror to my life. All through being employed at the University of Washington as a scientist I enjoyed good dental care. A toothache was promptly taken care of, and a broken tooth was fixed before a toothache could happen. Early in the year I busted a large chunk out of a right bottom molar. I quit chewing on that side and my tongue eventually stopped hurting from the rough edges of the tooth.

I hoped that being careful with chewing and good brushing and flossing would keep further trouble from happening. We had no money for a dentist visit, especially for the expense of fixing a broken tooth. A few weeks ago I developed a violent toothache in the broken tooth. I was hoping that “mind over matter” could help me endure the pain. I went on the Net and researched home remedies for toothaches. I imagined that eventually the infection would push out from being trapped in my tooth and the release in pressure would cause the pain to lessen. Several people suggested going to the pet store and buying antibiotics sold for goldfish, that way avoiding the expense of a dentist visit.

Instead I tried several other home remedies employed by other “down on their luck” people. Nothing much worked, but finally when the pain became almost unbearable the pressure on the nerve in my tooth lessened. Now I can bear the pain and get on with my life. I’m counting on the fact that humanity survived in spite of rotten teeth and no dentists. If we ever get back financially from the Mirapex wreck the first thing to spend money on is Helen’s eyes and then my teeth. The one benefit of the toothache is that it hardens my resolve to not quit. Every throb reminds me of how terrible the defendants have treated us and how disgusted it makes me to think how they pretend to care about each and every patient who takes their medicine.

Chapter 15: A Long Summer Gets Longer

August 18, 2012: My son Adam’s and his new bride Sara’s wedding was yesterday. So much of what I write about in this book is depressing that I’m thrilled at the chance to write about something fun and uplifting. As you know the house Helen and I live in was self built on lake property my parents bought in 1953; property that we used to camp on as my brother and I were growing up. Adam and Sara thought the family history, the nice setting, and the fact that our family built the house ourselves made it perfect for their wedding.

Sara had found a picture of an arbor on the Net that she wanted duplicated for their wedding. That arbor was made out of “found branches”. I’m delivering flowers for our Enumclaw flower shop most everyday so it gave me a chance to scope out places where I could find them. I wanted branches that were weathered and dry, but not rotted. In our Pacific Northwest climate any downed branches in the woods soon rot. Some of my deliveries are to the small town of Greenwater on the way to Mt Rainier. On that trip I pass several clear cuts where the residue left over from logging is bulldozed into piles; piles of sticks that have weathered in the open! After contacting the owners of the property Mary and I drove up and secured a nice bundle of sticks and a day’s work later the arbor was ready for use.

Sara had gone down with Mary and Helen to the wholesale flower warehouse to pick out the flowers she wanted for the wedding. It seemed fitting that our flower shop would do the flowers. Our neighbors on both sides are gracious people and they let us use their properties to set up tables on. In addition to the brides bouquet there would be flower arrangements on the tables and a beautiful arrangement on the top of the arbor. Sara’s family had made several long streamers that stretched from our neighbor’s and our lakeside decks to the fir tree that the arbor was under. Each streamer had pennants strung on it that were the colors of Utah, where Sara grew up, and Washington where Adam grew up. White lights were also strung down the streamers. As darkness fell the yard was turned into a fairyland of lights.

Sara and Adam wanted people to enjoy the lake so the first part of the wedding, from 5 to 7:30 PM was for “festivities”. People swam, played games, and went boating on the lake. Sara is very artistic and she handmade games and horses to ride for the little kids. She and her family also made decorated wands with streamers and ribbon for the little girls to hold and wave. After the ceremony and the dancing started it was fun to watch the big girls also enjoying dancing with them. In keeping with the “do it ourselves” life of our family they had friends and family make chili and cornbread. This was a big hit with the guests as they had lots of different versions to choose from.

Sara and Adam didn’t want someone to marry them that they didn’t know so they asked Adam’s youngest sister Megan to do the honors. Megan jumped at the chance. Sara’s brother David would co-officiate with Megan. For the procession down the aisle (Sara wore her handmade wedding dress) Megan played the ukulele, Adam the guitar and David the sax. Mary’s daughter Julia and our other granddaughter Annelies were flower girls. Sara had wanted Adam to sing his vows to her, but he told everyone that he would be too nervous. But he was secretly practicing at work and surprised us all with an original song for his vows. It was very nice having Megan and David do the ceremony as they did it using a poem that they wrote taking turns reciting it.

After Adam and Sara were pronounced man and wife, Mary and Megan sang a duet with Megan playing the ukulele. What a pleasure it was to see Mary like her old self before Mirapex ran a train through our family. Mary has definitely recovered from the ravages of Mirapex, but the emotional scars might never heal and the lost years with her daughter Julia will never be recovered.

Our four children had gone out for a “sibling night” and at an Irish bar listened to and met the featured singer. All our kids learned to dance when we built the dancehall at our Hobart home. When he played an Irish waltz Adam got up and danced with Megan. He took a liking to the kids and though he never does private venues he agreed to come and play for the dancing at the wedding. What a pleasure it was to dance with our children and it was a special pleasure to see Mary having such fun. When he took a break he turned the guitar over to Adam who played several songs and kept the dancing going. He invited Adam to come back to the bar and play.

September 29, 2012: We have just finished moving my son Adam and his wife Sara in with us. Sara will deliver our granddaughter in December and even though Sara can get six weeks leave from work to care for the baby, the leave is unpaid. They can’t continue to rent and meet all their other expenses. Since all of our other kids have moved out we have two adjacent upstairs bedrooms at the opposite end of the log bridge from our bedroom. I’ve installed a door in the hallway before the upstairs bathroom so they will have a private front room, bedroom and bathroom at one end of the house. Each room has access to a private covered deck. Our basement is now filled with their belongings that can’t fit in the upstairs rooms, but both Helen and I are happy to have them share our home. After Sara goes back to work they will look to purchase their own home. Adam has learned how to build and remodel houses from our long years of do-it-yourself endeavors, and Sara is very artistic and creative. It will be fun to see how they turn a new house into a home for themselves.

October 11, 2012: I’m sitting in the flower shop waiting for Mary to finish a bouquet so I can deliver it. I just checked on Pacer and Judge Davis has yet to post a decision to Lee’s objections. Lee sent a letter several weeks ago that if Davis’ decision went against us he wouldn’t appeal it to a higher court as he thinks that would be futile. If Judge Davis rules against Mary and the other four, then it’s lights out, game over. The flowers shop is not making it financially. Mary, Helen and myself are spending long hours for virtually nothing in return and we can’t go on like this. There is a smaller shop available in town, but we don’t really have the money to move. We don’t know what to do!

November 12, 2012: Another flower shop disaster! We have just decided to rent the smaller shop in town, but now someone else had beaten us to it. We could have saved almost one thousand dollars a month on rent and heat and lights. I would have had to build a new flower cooler out of the old one, but I figured out how to do it. Now we will try advertizing for someone to put their business in part of our shop and share the rent and utilities.

December 18, 2012: We haven’t heard from Judge Davis yet, but we finally have some good news in the midst of all the gloom and despair. My son Adam and his wife Sara just had our fourth grandchild; a healthy baby girl just named Georgia Moon Locatelli. Holding her makes me feel like the world might just be OK after all. Georgia is coming into a strong family as we have survived and stayed together through deaths and other trials and we will survive Mirapex as well.

December 25, 2012: We have just finished opening our Christmas presents. Adam, Sara and Georgia, who is celebrating her first Christmas, were here as well as Mary and Julia and Megan and Kyle (her significant other) who all stayed overnight. What a joy to have all of them here Christmas morning. I’m taking a break before starting to fix our traditional Christmas day dinner where our oldest daughter Amy and her family will join us for more present opening and festivities.

This moment away from the bustle of presents and cooking is a good time to remember what is important in my life. I may be beset by money problems and health problems that have to be put on hold for now, but I realize that I am rich in children and grandchildren. Many of our friends have children and grandchildren that live in other states. To have our whole family here around us is a real blessing. I know these sentiments are considered trite by some, but not by me. I mean every word. I am rich in ways that money cannot buy and I’m truly grateful for it

Chapter 16: The Pressure Becomes Unbearable

January 2, 1013: Mary, Helen and I are back at the flower shop working. Our brief Christmas and New Year’s holiday away from the shop was too fleeting. We haven’t had any bites on sharing our flower shop and Judge Davis hasn’t made a decision yet. Is the whole legal system just trying to break us down so Mary will settle? The waiting is wearing on us. Several of the other plaintiffs want to call it quits. Mary and her co-plaintiffs are all still emotionally fragile and this waiting isn’t helping. I feel like we have been bombarded on all sides by problems, but all of them are made worse or were caused by the train wreck Mirapex made in our lives. The glue that keeps me together is the strong love and bonds in our family.

Helen and I continue to suffer from health problems that could be fixed if our finances had not been eviscerated by Mirapex. Helen’s sight continues to deteriorate from cataracts. She now cannot go on flower deliveries by herself as she cannot read street signs or addresses from the delivery truck. My infected broken tooth has settled down into a consistent pattern. If I don’t chew on the right side of my mouth I can almost forget it’s a problem----but---one bite on that side and---wow-----it’s there all right. I’m conducting my own research project to see how “hunter gatherers” got by without dentists. I use it to remind me (with every throbbing pain) that I have to hold fast in our dealings with the lawsuit and not give in to threats and intimidation.

January 11, 2013: Our waiting is over. Judge Davis has issued his decision and just filed it with the court. Judge Davis conducted a “de novo” review, which is considering the original motion as if the court was considering it for the first time. This standard is used to consider questions of applications of existing laws. His decision was in two parts. Part A found that there was a written contract formed between Mary’s lawyer H. Lee Thompson and the defendants. In Part B Judge Davis found that in order to force the five plaintiffs (Mary included) to accept the settlement agreements apparent authority must be based on action or non-action by a client, not just the attorney. In other words even though Thompson gave the defendants the impression that he had the full authority to settle their cases, it apparently also matters if the plaintiffs had given Thompson either actual or apparent authority to make binding settlement offers in the amounts listed in his emails.

Mary had immediately responded to Thompson when she was confronted with a settlement amount that she had never authorized. I feel that her affidavit already filed which a copy is in chapter 14 should be sufficient to win in the hearing. After all the defendants will not be able to produce any record of Mary authorizing Lee to demand as a final settlement the $xxxxx he put forward. There seems to be a distinction made between authority Mary gave Lee to negotiate on her behalf and authority to put forward an offer without her permission. Mary never gave Lee the authority to negotiate a specific offer on his own unless she specifically gave him permission to do so. It seem we are on firm legal ground, but I’ve learned that there are so many exceptions to the law and seemingly conflicting legal rulings that anything is possible. One thing that I do know, that the defendants being devoid of all traces of humanity will take every legal opportunity to beat us up and smiling while doing it. Too bad there isn’t a law against being total “----holes”.

January 23, 2013: Now the Magistrate Judge Noel has filed his own order into the court records. He has ordered that the court will hold an evidentiary hearing on March 13, 2013 to address the questions identified in the previous ruling by Judge Davis. Both the plaintiffs and the defendants have to notify each other who they intend to call as witnesses and to disclose to each other and the court any exhibits they intend to offer as evidence by March 4th.

Mary’s affidavit that is already in evidence should be adequate without having her appear as a witness in person, but this whole hearing still makes me nervous. I have to fight my emotions back down and try to think clearly. Mary and Joe cannot afford to travel back to Minneapolis again. When I feel my emotions getting out of control I go and watch our newest grandchild Georgia peacefully sleeping. It calms me down and it helps me understand that life will go on in spite of our current troubles.

January 29, 2013: Well it happened! Why couldn’t we receive good news instead of all this bad? Thompson just sent Mary a letter stating that if her case was not settled before the court hearing she and her husband would have to be present as they would be called as witnesses by him. However the defendants (out of the goodness of their hearts) would maybe consider accepting an offer $10, 000 to $15,000 higher if only to do her the favor of forgoing the hearing. We bless their little black hearts.

February 5, 2013: I’m succumbing to hatred and cynicism. I can’t afford to do that. This will only get me temporary satisfaction and really accomplish nothing. I’m in constant email contact with the other four plaintiffs and they are all pretty much alternate between anger and despair as Mary does. Either they cannot financially or emotionally make the trip. The Court, and the lawyers on both sides are increasing the pressure to settle. It’s perfectly clear now that they all want these cases to settle before costs to them increase. I have to focus. I need to see Georgia.

I don’t know what is going on and I do not like being is that situation. I’m beginning to think that Lee is coming under his own financial pressure to get these lawsuits settled as best he can. He told me before that he has other clients other than Mirapex ones and he has to also spend time on their cases. I don’t know if he was surprised by the stonewalling treatment and beating up his Mirapex clients got at the first settlement conferences. At any rate, these lawsuits are costing him money in time he might not recover.

February 1, 2013: We have been advertising in Craig’s List and spreading the word in Enumclaw that we needed another business to locate in the front of our shop to share in the overhead expenses (rent, lights, internet, etc.). Across the street from us is an antique business with spaces for independent vendors. Their lease is up on May 1st. The owner of the shop also needs to cut down on her overhead and has been trying to negotiate a better deal on her lease. We just found out that her landlord is not interested, so one of her vendors now will move into the front of our shop and run her own business there. The original owner of the antique business will now just have a space in the new store. Their store will be called “The Vintage Garden” in deference to the combination of antiques and flowers. This is the break we have been hoping for. Now the hard work starts as we have to keep the shop running while moving counters, cabinets, point of sales systems, ribbons and all the gift items left over from holidays and everyday gift items as well.

Sara will be going back to work in March and we will be babysitting our granddaughter at the flower shop. I need to have a space ready to put a crib (I’ll be updating the crib all our children used as well as my brother and I). I also have to make her crib space safe and quiet as well as earthquake proof. Sara’s aunt has loaned us a playpen I can locate behind the new location for our register and counter. I have so much to do with too little time and too much responsibility.

February 13, 2013: I’m in constant email with the remaining four other plaintiffs that are fighting to not be required to accept the settlements that they never agreed to. They are coming under intense pressure from the defendants (the lawyers for the pharmaceuticals) to settle before the hearing set for the 13th of March. They are scaring them with the thought of testifying and having to endure cross examination from hostile lawyers.

Mary is also feeling the pressure. When she has to deal with a hostile email Mary withdraws into despair and depression. I have to read them and craft a response. Mary eventually can clear what I’ve done before it is sent and she makes changes, but it is hard for her. Some of the other four plaintiffs in the hearing are reaching their breaking points and will probably settle for anything to get the pressure over. Mary could reach that point too, but I’m afraid for her. I’m afraid that eventually Mary will really regret her decision to cave and that will be the feeling she carries for the rest of her life. But, can I hold up?

When I deliver flowers I take that opportunity to rant and rave out loud in the delivery truck at the circumstances that brought us to this point and to develop my strategy in combating the defendant’s lawyers. I can’t lay this burden on Mary or my wife Helen. Sometimes I think that all that is keeping me sane are these opportunities to let my anger simply go. My children would be ashamed to hear what comes out of my mouth.

March 13 2013: Today is Sara’s first day back at work. I have both the crib area and the playpen area all ready for little Georgia. I don’t know how Sara has the fortitude to leave her little one and go back to work. I don’t know if I could do it, but thankfully we can watch her here at work. I have trouble with all the new moms having to return to work by necessity and with no daycare provided as is the norm in other developed countries. These thoughts just add to my general misery over Mirapex and how this lawsuit is all turning out. I’m now working seven days a week to make the shop transition. I haven’t had a vacation in 5 years and all my days away from the flowers shop are devoted to Mirapex problems or catch-up work at home. Some days I can hardly get out of bed, but to quit now would be to throw away everything that we have strived and worked hard for.

March 14, 2013: Today is the scheduled date for the hearing to decide if Mary and the four others will be held to the settlements they did not agree to, but evidently the hearing has been postponed to a future date as yet to be determined. We gather from emailing with the other four that somehow the judge (Judge Noel) has gotten signals from the defendant’s lawyers and also from Lee that progress has been made in reaching settlements. If everyone settles then there will be no need for the hearing. However, all this talk of reaching settlements is news to us as Mary has not budged from her first offer of $xxxxxx and doesn’t intend to until the defendants come back with a counter offer that reflects her offer. So far this has not happened. Who is feeding all this crap to the Judge?

March 28, 2013: Mary just received an email from Lee giving the new date for the hearing. It is now scheduled for April 30th. Here is the email:

As you know, there is an evidentiary hearing scheduled for April 30th in Minneapolis, MN.  You are expected to attend that hearing if your cases do not settle before then.  If you are unable to attend this hearing, you must inform me in writing no later than Tuesday, April 2nd at 12:00 p.m.  If you have a medical excuse for traveling, you must provide me with a doctor's note.  The sooner I am able to notify the court, the better for your case.  If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me.

I have carefully studied all the decisions from both the District Judge Davis and from Magistrate Judge Noel. I strongly feel that there is no evidence that Mary ever gave Lee the authority to offer a number of $xxxxx for a full and final settlement because she never did give that authority. In addition, Mary immediately repudiated that supposed offer in an email the day she discovered the offer. So, no implied intent is possible either. We have neither the money nor the time to spend going back to the hearing. Helen and I have already depleted the air miles we had saved up over a lifetime of building houses; air miles that we had intended to use for travel after I retired. I recommended to Mary that she not plan to go back as the affidavit she has already sent to Lee should be sufficient to counter the claims of the defendants. I feel that the threat of having to attend is just a ploy to get her to settle before the hearing and for an amount she does not want to accept.

Since the first of the year I’ve begin to feel that that the chances of getting a just settlement out of the legal process was slipping away from us. I decided to make another video to post on YouTube that would use the wording and sentiments in the Preface to this book. I composed original music for the video which I play in the background while I will speak to Mary’s daughter Julia. In between the two parts where I speak to Julia there is an interlude where “Mary” sings to Julia. I plan to have my daughter-in-law Sara sing that part. I have to keep Mary, her husband Joe and Julia completely isolated from this story or my videos. My son Adam has agreed to put all the pieces together and produce it. Maybe this will draw attention to the potential dangers of Mirapex and keep others from going through what we did.

April 1, 2013: The video is finished and ready to post. The URL is . I hope that this will do some good, but I don’t know any more if we have any hope of anything helping us or others out. I’m discouraged, but still fighting.

I just received an email from another victim. It’s another response to my original video that I put on YouTube asking for help in tabulating Mirapex compulsions. Her husband has been on Mirapex for 20 years while he and her have suffered through a series of devastating compulsions; compulsion that were incorrectly diagnosed and consequently mistreated to no effect. We are in correspondence and I offered to her the same offer that I’ve made to other victims: that I would be willing to include a chapter in this book describing (in their own words) the experiences of other Mirapex victims. Unfortunately other victims have either settled their claims and now are gagged from speaking out, or cannot face the shame and trauma (their words) of writing their story. I can fully understand how they feel as this is how the defendants keep the story of how Mirapex can ruin people’s lives from getting widely known

You might be surprised that her husband could go for 20 years without his doctors discovering the reason for his compulsions was Mirapex. I’m not. This is the one thread that is the same among all the sad stories that I have heard; that Mirapex is never suspected by patient or doctor until the emotional and financial damage is irreparable. She is beginning to wean her husband off of Mirapex.

April 10th, 2013: Lee has just emailed Mary a letter that he received from the defendant’s lawyer. It has me furious. I am beside myself and it is all I can do to control my anger and try to think straight. I want to get on a plane paying with money I don’t have, go back to New York, find the law firm that sent such a nasty and insulting letter and shove it down their throats. But, while it would make me feel good, it would not advance our cause and would set us back. I have to consider the long game, but now I find I constantly lust for instant revenge. I must keep my head and think this out. Here is their letter:

This will confirm our prior telephone conversation regarding efforts to further

resolve the claim of Ms. Magalhaes. Defendants have offered $xxxxx for a full and final settlement of the claim. If this amount is not accepted then the defendants will continue to seek enforcement of the original settlement of $xxxxx. As noted if Ms. Magalhaes chooses to refuse any further reasonable negotiations and continues to oppose enforcement of the previously agreed settlement, she is required to appear for hearing in Minnesota before Magistrate Noel. While defendants would have been willing to consider some further modification of their offer, your client's continued demands in the multiple six figures is unreasonable, unacceptable and unproductive.

If the demand continues to remain at or near the levels previously communicated, it will be clear that your client has no intent to resolve this claim Unless there is a substantial reduction in the demand to an amount well below $100,000.00, the defendants will continue to seek enforcement of the original settlement of $xxxxx and will expect Ms. Magalhaes to appear in person in Minnesota as specifically and expressly required by Judge Noel. We expect that the merits will result in sustaining the previously agreed to settlement of $xxxxx. Further if Ms. Magalhaes does not appear for any hearing that will only strengthen the defendant's position in obtaining enforcement of the previous settlement.

Once I settled down and with the help of my son-in law Mark, Mary sent this reply:

Dear H. Lee Thompson,

This is in response to the letter from Mr. Liederman of 10 April 2013.  

The offer that the defendants refer to as "the original settlement of $xxxxx" is the subject of a motion brought by the defendants that is currently under appeal, and based on the recent ruling of Judge Davis I am fully confident that we will prevail in that appeal, i.e., it will be ruled that no settlement was reached. Therefore I consider the $xxxxx amount as an offer, not a settlement.  

Furthermore, I continue to live in a half completed shabby house in which we are forced to all share one bedroom. I have lost my lucrative business. I was forced to undergo bankruptcy. Our truck was repossessed. I am still suffering from the aftereffects of the Mirapex caused seizures. I completely lost three years of my daughter’s life. She underwent a year of counseling. I am heavily in debt to my aging parents who now have to continue to work to make ends meet. I am still constantly fighting depression and anxiety for how the side effects from Mirapex financially and emotionally devastated our family. Including losing the years my husband and I planned to have our second child which has deeply affected my husband.

Therefore, we accept neither the $xxxxx nor the more recent $xxxxx offer, and we will not, as the defendants demand, return a counter-offer of an "amount well below $100,000.00". I find the defendant’s offer of $xxxxx, of which a substantial portion will go to lawyer fees and other legal expenses, to be demeaning, patronizing and insulting.

Regarding the upcoming hearing in Minnesota, we believe that evidence currently in the Magistrate's hands, including my affidavit of 21 February 2013, are more than sufficient to prove that the criteria outlined by Judge Davis for a valid contract were never met.  In addition, it is an extreme hardship for me to appear in Minnesota due to my current financial and employment condition. Therefore, from our perspective, my appearance at the hearing is both unnecessary and extremely difficult, and I do not intend to make the trip.  If defendants wish to subpoena me to appear, I will of course comply.

Best regards,

Mary Magalhaes

April 16, 2013: Mary’s lawyer Lee is continuing to give reasons for settling before the hearing. He fears that the defendants would use her history of Lupus to suggest that her reaction to Mirapex was simply manifestations of Lupus. These unfounded charges would be difficult to hear, but Lee and the defendants are underestimating Mary inner strength. Lee might have Mary’s best interests at heart and his advice is clearly that Mary settles before the hearing. He wants to spare her the trauma of testifying, but he does not understand that Mary is supported by her parents and extended family in any decision she makes. If she wants to face the hearing we will do all that is possible to make that happen. We feel there is no rush to settle before the hearing on April 30th and the ruling from Judge Noel that would come later. The worst that can happen is that Mary is forced to take the $xxxxx offer. At best the lawsuit will continue its tortuous path to resolution.

April, 2013: Mary emailed this reply to Lee.

Hi Lee---

 Thanks for your concern about my medical history.  I appreciate the effort you are making in my behalf.  During the pre-Mirapex period I graduated from college with honors, was running my successful business, and planning the remodel of my house, and taking care of my daughter.  There is no mention of "compulsive behavior" in the medical records prior to me taking Mirapex.  I know that the defendants are trying to intimidate me with the threat of dragging out all my past health problems, but I don't personally find that a problem.  Their sophomoric attempts to switch the blame to me for not settling and for my behavior on Mirapex won't work.   It is clearly documented that all my "destructive" behaviors started and stopped with Mirapex.  

 Sincerely, 

 Mary D. Magalhaes

April 26, 2013: Mary has received no subpoenas from anyone to attend the hearing. It seems that she can attend by telephone. This is good news as we cannot afford to travel to Minneapolis. Lee has called Mary and he gave her a phone number to call so she can be included in the hearing set for April 30.

April 30, 2013: This morning Mary is continuing calling the number he gave her, but the person she is reaching cannot seem to connect her into the hearing. It is afternoon now and Mary has given up as it is two hours later in Minnesota and the hearing should be wrapped up by now. We don’t know what happened.

May 2, 2013: Mary has just heard from one of the other plaintiffs that actually attended the hearing through a video hookup at his local Federal Courthouse. He was called by the pharmaceuticals’ lawyers as a witness. This was a surprise. I wonder why he was called by them. Mary just learned that he and Mary are the only ones left as all the others gave into the pressure and settled and now are forever silenced. I don’t blame them as we also desperately want this nightmare to be over and we understand that each victim and their families have their own circumstances to consider. He is going to call me tomorrow as I really want to hear firsthand what happened at the hearing.

May 3, 2013: Mary has just gotten an email from Lee containing an order from Judge Noel. Mary has to attend another hearing scheduled for May 28th. The hearing is in the Federal Courthouse in Minneapolis. If the Seattle Federal Courthouse has the capability of setting up a video conference from one of their courtrooms then Mary can testify from Seattle. If not then she will have to appear in Minneapolis or automatically be forced to take the $xxxxx settlement offer. Mary will have to determine if that is possible, or what will we do?

There is good news in the email, however. The defendants evidently asked the judge to have Mary’s affidavit struck from the evidence since she was not at the last hearing on April 30th. This is the affidavit where Mary testifies that she never gave her lawyer the permission to put forward the final demand of $xxxxx. In addition, the affidavit contained the email Mary sent Lee as soon as she realized the offer was put forward to the defendants. Thankfully the judge denied that request.

May 4, 2013: Now, everything is clear and nothing is clear. I know what to think and cannot think. I just got off of the phone with the other plaintiff that actually attended the hearing held on the 30th of April by remote video connection. He told me something that came out in the hearing that has totally shocked me and I’m not sure I can even write about it. Apparently the defendants lawyers (representing the two pharmaceuticals) have been working together to settle the claims within a budget that the defendant’s lawyers had sent to Lee----and-----if that isn’t bad enough they included an additional $200,000 for Lee to use at his discretion up front. The other plaintiff told me that these facts are in the exhibits that were entered into evidence at the hearing. I can’t finish this now. I have to get a copy of the exhibits and study them. He must be mistaken.

May 7, 2013: The shock still hasn’t worn off, but I’ve seen the publically available exhibits and the other plaintiff was dead right. Lee had eighteen clients, with lawsuits filed against the pharmaceuticals, that hadn’t settled as of January 2012. The defendants budgeted $800,000 to settle those claims allocated by them among the 18 according to their assessment of the merits of the individual claims. They gave Lee a “smoothing bucket” (their term) of $200,000. The total of the settlement plus the “smoothing bucket” is slightly over $1,000,000. The defendants’ lawyers also wrote Lee that “We have no objection if you reserve a certain sum out of that figure and have us represent it is payment of certain expenses.”

Everything that has happened now makes sense in some twisted perverted way. This is what I think happened. From publically available court records I know that other lawyers filing Mirapex lawsuits also had multiple clients; more clients than they could possibly give individual attention to unless they were part of large firms that had the manpower to do so. In addition, these lawyers could not possibly have the financial resources to go to trial----and----possibly lose. These were lawyers, like Lee, that advertised for people that had suffered side effects from Mirapex.

These lawyers know their limitations. We contacted over forty law firms and they all turned us down. Some of the firms had looked extensively at Mary’s case. What I took away from their answers was that unless Mary was extremely damage (disabled or outright killed) they could not justify risking a lawsuit. We are grateful that Lee would take Mary’s case in the face of these problems. We realized that the movie myth of lawyers taking expensive cases for free just for the sake of something called “justice” is just that; a myth.

After stonewalling the plaintiffs and their lawyers, the lawyers for the pharmaceuticals then offer a way for the plaintiffs’ lawyers to get something for their time out of all their lawsuits without going to trial. They do this by putting forward a “financial schedule” for settling all the lawsuits that include a sum called a “smoothing bucket” as an extra incentive. I don’t know for sure but I suppose that the lawyers can keep the “smoothing bucket” for “expenses” if they do not use it for additional payments to their plaintiffs.

That is my hypothesis of how the pharmaceuticals have set up the system to their benefit. A system in which the defendants are satisfied at the small amounts per case they have to pay, a system in which the plaintiffs’ lawyers get some enumeration for their work on each case, a system in which the court is satisfied at not having the expense of hosting a trial, but a system in which the actual victim that suffered the damages is left out. We are grateful that Lee did take Mary’s case and he is now going the extra mile to keep her lawsuit alive, even against his advice to Mary.

I am too disgusted to write any more right now and it is very possible that no one will read this account anyway. They will try to beat us down until my daughter settles for pennies on the dollar and is forever gagged like the other plaintiffs. I’m sure now that victims of the side effects from other drugs are handled in the same fashion. I see lawyers advertising on TV for such cases all the time. I’m sick with dread. I’m beginning to also see these lawyers as “victims” of the pharmaceuticals.

Chapter 17: A “Get out of Prison Free” Card

May 13, 2013: Mary found out today that she has Celiac Disease! Normally this news would be not a reason for relief, but Mary’s special circumstances make it that way. Mary was forced to change doctors earlier in the year due to the ever changing array of health insurance providers from her husband’s company where he works. Normally this process is fraught with stress, but this time it actually was very beneficial. However, it was not her new doctor that got her thinking about Celiac Disease, but her sister Megan. Megan was talking to a friend at work and the friend mentioned that she was Gluten intolerant and also had Celiac Disease. Megan’s friend’s symptoms were very similar to what Mary has been experiencing and what doctors had diagnosed as Lupus.

Mary’s new doctor was very receptive to having Mary first tested for Gluten Intolerance. Gluten Intolerance is not universally accepted among doctors so we were glad that the new doctor was agreeable to having the blood test done. The blood test came back positive. The next step was to have a biopsy done on the small intestine to confirm or rule out Celiac Disease. Celiac Disease is where the gluten damages the villi in the small intestine due to an autoimmune reaction. This damage makes it difficult to properly digest food and can cause all the symptoms Mary has experienced most of her adult life.

For Mary this was like finding out, after being imprisoned for most of her life, she is found innocent and set free. I don’t know how Mary is able to handle this news along with all her financial problems caused by Mirapex and her continuing health problems. Of course an issue is whether Mary also could have Lupus along with Celiac Disease, if such a cruel thing could be possible. Hasn’t she suffered enough?

All of her tests for Lupus have been border-line for that chronic illness. Having been a scientist for so many years I certainly realize that some issues will never be satisfactorily resolved with the evidence in hand. Mary’s doctor thought that she should give a gluten-free diet six months before they worry about the possibility of Lupus also being a problem.

Once we heard the diagnoses some things started to make sense to us. Mary loved hamburgers as a teenager, but started preferring only having the hamburger patty without the bun. Mary also stopped eating pasta soon after being diagnosed with Lupus. We thought it was just a quirk or “something to do with Lupus. After all, Mary still enjoyed the cookies I made and the gravies made with flower. Now we know she stopped eating those items because of the gluten in them. Our bodies can tell us things without actually speaking to us in words, but I wish our bodies could really speak to us in words. That would make this type of problem easier to solve. On Thanksgiving this year I’ll bake two turkeys with two kinds of dressing. Mary has already been avoiding gluten before this definitive test for Celiac Disease and she has been feeling better.

How ironic that this whole Mirapex train wreck might have been avoided if she had been diagnosed with Celiac Disease as a teenager. However in fairness to her doctors at that time Gluten Intolerance and Celiac Disease were not well known or considered. We or Mary have never blamed her doctors for not catching the Mirapex train wreck, or the misguided attempt of her doctor to medicate her for Central Nervous System Lupus, nor for not catching Celiac. Most doctors are overworked with patients and need the help of the research from pharmaceuticals and their adequate warnings about drugs to help them. We only hold those accountable, like the pharmaceuticals that purposely hold back information for their own selfish gains.

Chapter 18: Waiting Again

May 24, 2013: It was almost immediately apparent that we needed to see the transcript from the 30th April hearing. That way Mary could better prepare for the hearing on May 28th. Unfortunately the transcript has not been available on PACER to view. Mary called the court recorder, but it turns out that the transcript will be unavailable until sometime in late summer. This is to give the lawyers for both sides time to remove any information that should not be made public, like social security numbers---or---embarrassing gaffs.

The court recorder in Minneapolis thought that it would be possible to view the transcript locally at the Seattle Courthouse., but they do not seem to be able to pull that off for us. Time is running out so today we broke down and paid $119.70 to have all the 133 pages of the transcript emailed to Mary. I’ll read it when I get home tonight from working at the flower shop. I’m emailing a copy to my son-in-law Mark so we can discuss it.

May 25, 2013: I finished reading the transcript last night. Apparently the defendant’s lawyers thought that Mary had been ordered to appear at the April 30th hearing but failed to do so. Remember this is the hearing that Mary tried to attend by phone, but could never get properly connected. Mary had never received a direct order from the court (from Judge Noel) as far as we knew. That was correct. Judge Noel had intended to give Mary such an order, but never officially issued it. That is why he then scheduled another hearing on May 28th where he did issue an order for Mary and her husband Joe to attend. Is this a break for us? I’ve learned that in this legal mess nothing is a break for us.

The only other noteworthy story in the transcript was the attempt by the defendant’s lawyers to get the other plaintiff to admit that at the first and so far only settlement conference, H. Lee Thompson was totally in charge in setting the amounts to offer. At least in Mary’s case this was completely untrue. At that settlement conference in Minneapolis Mary and Joe decided what amount to offer and Judge Noel transmitted that offer to the defendants. That must have been true for the other plaintiff as well since he strongly denied that Lee was in charge. The defendant’s lawyers were hoping that by showing Lee was totally in charge at the settlement and this de facto and hidden delegation of settlement authority to Lee was never revoked. Then according to their twisted reasoning Lee had the authority to offer any settlement he wanted in the future without consulting his clients.

Mary called the Federal Courthouse in Seattle and they assured her that all the arrangements for attending the hearing in Minneapolis by video link were made. All we had to do was come to the courthouse in the morning on May 28th.

May 28, 2013: The hearing has ended. Only Mary and Joe and Helen and I attended at the Seattle Courthouse. We are relieved and happy with how it went. Mary and Joe did an excellent job of testifying both on direct questioning and on cross-examination from both sides. Of course, there was absolutely no evidence that the defendants could use to show that Mary had given the authority to Lee to make the $xxxxx offer. This was because she had never given that authority to her lawyer.

After the questioning was over by Lee and the defendant’s lawyers the Judge surprised us by asking questions directly to Mary. In evidence were: one email from Lee to the defendants stating that he had the authority to settle Mary’s case and another that a demand of $xxxxx dollars would suffice to do so. Judge Noel first read the first email in its entirety. Then he asked Mary if she had any idea how this was possible when she had never given Lee the authority to put that offer forward. Mary replied that she did not know and that she was shocked when she found out. Judge Noel then read the second email to Mary and asked the same question. Mary again replied that she had no idea and reiterated that she was shocked when she found out about the demand of $xxxxx for a full and final settlement.

He then asked Lee how this happened. Lee argued that even though he had presented the offer of $xxxxx for a full and final demand, from his perspective and the understanding with his clients, the settlement wasn’t final until he had a chance to discuss the offer with them. Then his clients would finalize the offer by signing a release absolving the defendants of all future claims. We couldn’t see the Judge’s face clearly on the video screen so I couldn’t tell how he reacted to Lee’s explanation. It didn’t really matter as the hearing was to see if there was any evidence that Mary had authorized the demand that Lee made.

June 10, 2013: Today, Monday, I hit a low point. No decision from judge Noel yet and Mary just told me that Lee had sent her another letter asking her to offer a demand for something between $xxxxx and $xxxxxx. I suppose that he is afraid that Mary will lose (maybe he knows something I don’t know) so he might be able to get a few more dollars this way. I had my 50th high school reunion on Saturday night, but had to work at the flower shop prior to going. Sunday Helen and I hoped to get some rest, but Mary and Joe were hoping to get the wiring inspected in part of their basement this week. Helen and I worked there on Sunday from 1 to 8:30 at night. I’m wearing out. Today I was trying to find time to fix a TV connection at the flower shop, but needed to stop to clean flowers, vases and flower buckets before delivering flowers. I knew I needed to get home early from the shop as we had more work to do to get the wiring ready for the inspector. I also felt under pressure to continue writing on this book. It was all too much for me. I just had to stand still while cleaning the flowers to regain my composure.

Helen and I got home at 7:30 tonight from Mary and Joe’s. All the wiring is ready for inspection except for a minor amount that Joe can finish tomorrow. I wasn’t going to watch the singing program called “The Voice” with Helen, but just concentrate on continuing the writing of this book. However, Helen thought it would help me relax so I sat down with her. My son Adam and his wife Sara were going in and out of our bedroom, but I thought that they were using our computer for something. Before our show ended they called me up and had me look out on our small deck outside of our bedroom. They had put up several pots and hanging baskets of flowers. They had also added an outside thermometer and a rain gage; a nice touch for a weatherman. This was my Father’s Day present from them and Helen. If there was ever a day where I needed a show of support and love this was the one.

This act of kindness has made me remember how grateful I am that our whole family has stuck together throughout this Mirapex ordeal. Other victims of Mirapex have suffered divorces and estrangements from their children. None of this has happened to us. Perhaps Helen and I sent the foundation for how our family responded by how we raised our four children. We always took them our all my scientific field trips. I was the only scientist to do so. Helen and I felt if we stayed together as a family we would be making memories together that we could share in the years to come, instead of memories of being apart. We never regretted the effort made to stay together and I appreciate it more than ever today. Tonight I’m heading to bed with gladness in my heart for I realize that no matter how this whole Mirapex mess turns out, they can never take away our strong family bonds. Now all we can do is wait for the Judge’s decision.

June 18, 2013: It’s a pleasure to write about something other than Mirapex, a topic that has consumed our life piece by piece until nothing is left but Mirapex, Mirapex, and Mirapex. I’m sick to death of it. Whoops! I forgot that I’m writing about another topic. Helen and the kids gave me some money for Father’s Day so I could put a small roof over the deck off of our bedroom that Adam and Sara fixed up for me. It felt like “old times” to be planning and building again. The roof is only 12 by 4 ft., but putting it in was a nice challenge and it got my mind off of the “topic I’m not writing about”. Yesterday Mary and Joe and Helen helped me lift the roof up to our deck and screw it in.

Helen wasn’t sure how she would like having a roof over our deck, but she really likes it. Somehow it makes the deck seem really cozy, especially when it is raining. Now we can leave the door to the deck open anytime for fresh air. I moved the string of white lights Adam and Sara had put over the eves onto the new roof. It’s very festive at night with the “cozy roof” and the pretty lights. Now Helen is all for putting a roof over the larger deck off of the main floor. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time so we could have “nicer furniture” out there; maybe in the future?

My McCleary Grandmother had a really small covered front porch. When I was little I played for hours with my cousin on that porch. We made houses out of blankets rain or shine. I’d like Georgia and the next generation of grandchildren to have the same experience I had. I was surprised when I revisited my Grandmother’s house and realized how small her porch actually was. But, it was made big enough with her great love for all of her grandchildren.

Georgia doesn’t know anything about Mirapex and the trials we have been going through. I doubt that the outcome is will make much of an effect on her life. It’s the love of our family that really matters. We’ll be OK no matters what happens if we keep our strong family bonds and love for each other.

July 12, 2013: The wait is over and it is shocking and depressing. Magistrate Judge Noel has ruled that the defendant’s motion to enforce Mary’s non-authorized settlement offer of $xxxxx be granted. The whole hearing was a total farce! I feel like I’ve fallen down the “rabbit hole”. All the testimony from Mary that she never granted H. Lee Thompson either actual or apparent authority to put forward the offer of $xxxxx fell on deaf ears. District Judge Davis’s contention that in addition to a client’s attorney saying he had authority, the client had to actually have given him that authority, was for nothing.

Judge Noel fell back to his original argument that “an attorney’s statement to opposing counsel regarding his authority his authority to settle his client’s claim is evidence that he was authorized to settle the/his client’s claims.”

Judge Noel, way back in November of 2011, ordered that “Plaintiff’s counsel must meet in person or by telephone with each client whose case is to be addressed, to fully discuss the settlement value of each case in light of the nature and extent of his client’s damages, the strength of that clients on the merits, as well as the strength of Defendants’ defended specific to that client’s claim. No later than 10 days before any such meeting, Plaintiff’s counsel must make a written settlement demand with respect to each case discussed at that meeting”, To add insult to injury Judge Noel is also arguing in his ruling that that order actually gave Mary’s attorney authority to not only put forward the demand of $475,000 to the defendant’s, but to continue to put forward demands without consulting Mary at all in what those demands would be. Apparently Mary would have to have actually contacted the defendants by letter to inform them that any authority he attorney had was being revoked! This is hard to swallow in light of the fact that it is and was against court protocol for Mary to contact the defendants directly!

If any “authority” was granted Mary’s attorney by the November 2011 order it was limited in time and included the stipulation that her attorney “fully discuss” the demand before transmitting it to the defendants. Judge Noel, in his rush and apparent intention to justify his original ruling, seems to have “conveniently” forgotten that part of his order. Thanks heaven’s Mary’s attorney has an opportunity to appeal the recommendation of Judge Noel to the District Judge Davis. Being trained as a scientist I’m used to arguing positions based on facts. Any scientist that would have made a decision like Judge Noel made based, as it was on non-supported facts, would have a very short career. All of our family was incensed. My son-in-law Mark always likes to argue the opposite side to mine in all our discussions. However, even Mark could not find any way to argue Judge Noel’s side. Helen, Mary and I are preparing affidavits to send in to support her attorney H. Lee Thompson’s arguments against Judge Noel’s ruling.

What I’m going to write in my affidavit is a gamble because it should not be construed to be attacking Judge Noel’s integrity along with his poor judgment, but might be, never the less, exploited that way by the defendants. I know that members of the same profession a loath to attack their fellow members so this tactic is a risk.

July 14, 2013: Another nice break away from Mirapex. Today we had a family work party at Mary and Joe’s house to start putting plasterboard on the walls. The electrical inspector passed the wiring so it is “full steam ahead”. Helen and I were tossed into severe financial distress by our heed to help Mary and Joe get a foundation under their cabin (that was precariously perched on wood cribbing). Neither Mary and Joe, or Helen and I had any additional funds left over from the building of the foundation to do further work on their house. Remember that the partial fixing of their leaking roof was made possible from the work of Mother Nature (the ice storm), insurance payout and our hard, hard work.

Now, through the kindness of another family that believes in “tithing” and the good money management of their forbearers, Mary and Joe are getting the funds to at least complete some of their basement. The work party consisted of my oldest daughter Amy, her husband Mark, their two children Luke and Annelies, Mary, Joe and Julia, our youngest daughter Megan, and Adam and Sara. Georgia did her part by being cute. We got a lot accomplished today. I was able to get old wiring rerouted away from where we needed to put up plasterboard. The only small hitch was when I cut a wire that was still live that produced a nice display of fireworks and thankfully no dead body. At least from all my electrical work I knew to use insulated electrician’s pliers to cut the wire. I should known better than to trust the old mains (electrical shutoffs for the whole house) to actually turn off all the current to every wire. We also got about half of the plasterboard up on the ceiling. Now Helen, Joe, Mary and I will continue the work in the coming weeks.

July 16, 2013: I sent off my affidavit today. It was four full pages that concluded in part: “That Judge Noel completely ignored Minnesota case law, his original intentions of the order given in Document 34, the directive form District Judge Davis and prior testimony and affidavits from Mary D. Magalahes and Joe R. Magalhaes when he concluded that ‘an attorney’s statements to opposing counsel regarding his authority to settle his clients’ claims is evidence of that attorney’s actual or apparent authority”. I added further “that as a consequence of the rulings and orders by the Court, the Plaintiffs, my daughter Mary D. Magalhaes and her husband Joe R. Magalhaes, have suffered irreparable harm to their claim against the Defendants.” Now all we had to do was wait and see what would happen when District Judge Davis reviews H. Lee Thompson’s objections to the report and our affidavits.

Chapter 19: A Nice Wedding Interlude

July 24, 2013: Helen’s cataracts in her eyes had been getting progressively worse every month. I didn’t think that she would be driving much longer. Again, through the kindness of others she is having surgery on her right eye today and will get surgery on her left eye on the 31st (my birthday).

August 1, 2013: One month and counting. The last of my four children, Megan, is getting married at our house on Pipe Lake on August 31st. Now the push is on to get the house and yard cleaned up in time for the wedding. Adam and Sara are busy boxing up what they had stored in our basement and getting ready to move all of it into a storage facility. With some creative shoving and stacking we should be able to get their pieces of furniture into what little space is left in our two storage rooms in the basement. Cleaning up is a tall order with trying to keep on top of the Mirapex lawsuit, run the flower shop, babysit Georgia and everything else that makes up life. Our family has always been able to come through in all that we have needed to do, but there is always a first time for everything, especially where failure is involved.

Megan is planning the wedding and taking care of all the ordering and food preparation. She will be married in our kind neighbor Bob’s yard. She will use the same arbor that I made for our son’s and his wife Sara’s wedding. All the tables will be set up in our yard. She is planning for about 240 people to attend. It will be impossible to accommodate that many people under tents. We will need the weather Gods to shine on us.

Unfortunately I would like to keep this chapter only about the wedding as it would be a relief to talk about something else for a change. But, it seems that Mirapex will never be finished ruining our lives. Today I went on PACER and looked at the reply of the defendants to Mary’s lawyer’s objections. When a motion is made the side making the motion argues its case (the defendants). Then the other side (Mary’s side) has a chance to argue their case. The last word is always given to the side that first put in the motion (why is that?). The defendants just put in their last word and it is something beyond the unbelievable. I don’t whether to laugh or cry or curse. Actually I did all three in the course of a few minutes.

I won’t bore you with all their legal bull---, but you might be interested in this part of their argument:

“Moreover, Ms. Magalhaes’ and the Locatellis’ affidavits are rife with conjecture, irrelevance, argument, conclusion, hearsay, and baseless diatribes and ad hominem attacks at Magistrate Judge Noel and the integrity of the judicial process, No matter how disappointed Plaintiffs and the Locatellis may be with the Magistrate Judge’s rulings, nothing warrants their unfounded charges that, inter alia, Magistrate Judge Noel “totally ignored” or “completely ignored” Plaintiffs’ evidence; that it “has and had to be perfectly clear to Judge Noel” that Mr. Thompson lacked settlement authority (not how we said it) ; that they were “appalled and shocked” by the Magistrate Judge’s ruling; and, that Plaintiffs are now victims of a unfair and unjust judicial process run amok (nice touch, but not our words) . These utterly baseless claims disparage the character and abilities of an able and respected jurist and the integrity of the judicial process and have absolutely no place in the Record.”

What I had to say about this couldn’t be printed in any decent book, but here is what my son-in-law emailed to me after he read it. This captures perfectly my feelings and can be reproduced here.

”What brown-nosers!!!   They’re [defendants] totally sucking up to Noel, acting like they are totally appalled on his behalf.

"These utterly baseless claims disparage the character and abilities of an able and

respected jurist and the integrity of the judicial process and have absolutely no place in

the Record. The Court may, and should, properly strike them of its own accord."

I love it!    All ye Corporate lawyers of honor and integrity, Unite in defense of poor judge Noel, against the attacks from the Evil Magalhaes Monster!!!!

I have to hand it to them....they are extremely clever in twisting the facts, playing on emotions, and conjuring "rock solid logic" from nothing, or even from contradictory facts.  It definitely takes a "special" person to be a good corporate lawyer.

I hope you are right about Judge Davis.  Noel is probably a lost cause.  

This is pretty intriguing.  I guess it's all in Judge Davis' hands now.

Mark”

Remember that Mark was also trained as a scientist. He has many years under his belt and he is highly respected in his field by other scientists. He can easily recognize bull--- when he sees it. How Judge Davis will react is anybody’s guess. Will the judge jump to the defense of “poor Judge Noel”, or actually base his decision on the facts as presented, not as made up by the defendants. I’m not too hopeful. People in the same profession normally close ranks against outsiders when one member is attacked. That is why doctors that are “butchering” patients often are able to keep practicing. I may be asking too much to believe that Judge Davis will put aside personal feelings and decide this motion purely on the legal merits of the arguments.

August 22, 2013: Helen had her last checkup after her eye surgery today. Her vision is vastly improved and will be perfect after minor corrections from glasses. Evidently her astigmatism made it almost impossible to pick the right artificial lens for each eye. Helen is thrilled and I’m relieved to have her eyesight restored. She will be able to see her daughter married. How great is that? I will never understand humans. It seems we are capable of such extreme cruelty to each other, but also great acts of kindness.

August 29, 2013, Morning: All of us have been working steadily this last week to get the house cleaned up and ready for the wedding. I’m pretty worn out. Today is the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner. The weather is not in our favor today as thunderstorms are predicted which is fairly unusual for Western Washington.

August 29, 2013, Evening: And thunderstorms it was! We managed to sneak in the rehearsal between downpours. The rest of the day was spent cleaning, cleaning and cleaning. Adam and Sara didn’t sing at the rehearsal, but all the young people (Helen included in the “young people at heart” group) stayed up and Sara and Adam sang the song they planned to sing at the wedding and then Adam played the guitar and everyone sang. I would have liked to have joined in, but I was too tired from all the preparation. I need rest, rest and more rest!

August 31: People are still dancing. I can hear the music and laughter from my bedroom. It’s midnight and I’m putting my granddaughter Georgia to bed so Sara can enjoy dancing with Adam. It was a dream wedding, much like Adam and Sara’s wedding in terms of happiness, joy and gaiety.

In addition to our yard we used the neighbor’s yards on each side of us. In one yard we set up all the chairs (we had 225 guests come) facing the lake. We used the same arch I made for Adam and Sara’s wedding, but this time it was down by the lake shore. Tiki torches lined the center aisle. Our neighbor Bob’s house was perfect for setting up the wedding party. A double door opened onto a patio facing the lake so we were able to line up before walking down the aisle without being seen. Nieces and nephews from both sides of the family lit the torches before the bridal procession. Adam stood in front on Megan’s side and Anna, a good friend of Kyle’s, stood on his side in addition to the normal array of groomsmen and bridesmaids.

When Megan and I came down the aisle everyone waved and smiled. It really was fun and satisfying to be able to walk with my daughter on my arm. Part way through the ceremony I read from “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran. This is one of my all-time favorite books so when Megan asked me to read from it I was really excited. I especially liked the lines:

“And stand together yet not too near together:

For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

And the oak tree and the cypress grow

not in each other’s shadow.”

Adam played the guitar while he and Sara harmonized on the “Offering” by the Avett Brothers. The lines I especially like in that song are:

“And I've known others 

And I've loved others too 

But I loved them cause they were stepping stones 

On a staircase to you”

Those lines fit Kyle and Megan, but also spoke to the strong relationship between Adam and Sara. Helen has been my first and last relationship, but everyone has a different path to finding the one they want to make a family with. The important part in all relationships is the commitment to stay together, and the shared acts of kindness that create the lasting family bonds; bonds that in our family, are being tested every day, but are still holding strong.

The wedding ended with a very happy Kyle and Megan doing “high fives” with the bridal party, then striding down the aisle to the cheers of everyone present. What a great feeling all around. The guests carried the chairs into our yard for the “sit-down” dinner. Kyle is a chef at a Hawaiian Restaurant in Seattle which provided the food. Megan’s friend Katrina baked the pineapple upside-down cakes and an additional Gluten free one for Mary. Anna’s mother provided Mai Tais for everyone. It truly was a family and friends successful production.

All of our children learned to ballroom dance in the Hobart house dancehall. Megan was no exception so she chose a waltz for the Father-Daughter Dance. As we started off swirling around the dance floor I heard someone say “They can dance”! This is a tired cliché, but I going to use it anyway as it truly was “a night to remember”. All too soon I know the disaster and multiple problems of Mirapex would press back into our lives. At least for one evening we can be free from those horrible concerns.

Many of Megan and Kyle’s friends pitched tents in our other neighbor’s yard. Some are sitting around a campfire, and I now I can hear a lot of splashing and laughter coming from the lake. Georgia is fast asleep in our bed, all cozy and safe. Maybe she’s dreaming about her future wedding? At least she has not yet been touched by the deadly hand of the pharmaceuticals and I’ll do everything in my power to keep all those problems away from her.

September 4, 2013: The wedding was like the eye of a hurricane. We were all caught up in the preparations and the wedding activities. All the Mirapex problems were put aside. Almost put aside. I knew that District Judge Davis was going to rule on the challenge by Mary’s lawyer Lee Thompson to the defendants’ motion to have Mary accept the forced offer of $xxxxx. I purposely did not look on PACER to see if any decision had been made as I did not want to ruin the wedding for Mary. Unfortunately, even in the calm eye of the Mirapex hurricane occasionally that pending ruling would surge into my consciousness. It was like being hit with a nausea sledge hammer. I managed to fight those feelings down and still enjoy myself, but it is very, very hard to bear.

Mark has just emailed me. Here’s his first line of his email. “Mary, John-----I don't know if you already know this via Pacer or Lee....   I went on Pacer this morning and found Judge Davis' ruling on the motion to enforce settlement, dated August 26.” I had to momentarily stop reading. The “eye” has passed. We are violently tossed into the other side of the Mirapex hurricane and the winds and rain are brutal.

Chapter 20: The Final Ruling?

September 4, 2013: The email from Mark continued:

“Unfortunately, he ruled in favor of the defendants, upholding Judge Noel's recommendation from July.  Pretty much just restated everything Noel stated. The ruling is attached.

Mark has, as always got it pretty much right. There is a higher court that we could appeal this ruling to, but Thompson has already told us that he is not a member of that court and as such could not bring an appeal. We would only have weeks to find a new lawyer to take our appeal forward. This chance is no chance. Some lawyer might undertake this if we could pay him. But, since all our finances have been gutted by Mirapex that route is over.

I know some people offer the consolation that even if “doors” seem to be closed or closing everywhere, there will be a “door” that will open for you. Right now and the way I feel I’m afraid that the only door that will open will have nothing but a void behind it. An endless void of nothing and I’ll just fall forever. But I can’t let myself go that direction and have self-pity get in the way of clear thinking. I have to find some good side to present to Mary before she sees the email. Thankfully Mary is too tired and stressed to always read her email. This gives me some time. I don’t believe that both Federal Judges, Davis and Noel, are actually being paid by the pharmaceuticals, but it really seems like it from their rulings. Both judges bought into the totally crazy and unsupportable argument that Mary and Joe gave Thompson carte blanche authority (for all time and for ever and ever) to put forward and accept offers in their behalf without consulting them by simply having him, at one time, transmit an offer to the defendants. I’m so furious I can’t even speak. Mary and Joe would have had to contact the defendants themselves and tell them directly that Thompson no longer had authority, authority that they were never told he had---but----contacting the defendants directly was forbidden (as also argued by the two faced defendants).

It is very clear that there is no possible justice for Mary in the Minnesota Federal Court from judges that argue from both sides of their mouths and any appeal, even if we could mount one, would be futile. Right now the only satisfaction I get is picturing them all burning in Hell.!!!

Enough of that! The ruling from Judge Davis concludes, after much legal doubletalk and spurious self-serving arguments:

1. The Court ADOPTS the Report and Recommendation of United States

Magistrate Judge Franklin L. Noel dated July 11, 2013 [Docket No. 96].

2. Defendants’ Motion to Enforce Settlement Agreements [Docket No. 47]

is GRANTED.

I don’t have much time to find some golden lining in this ruling before Mary reads Mark’s email, but I might find it in the “Report and Recommendation” [Docket No. 96] from Judge Noel. The key provisions are where he clearly states the terms of the settlement offer that Mary and Joe are now forced to accept. These provisions are summarized below.

 “1) Each plaintiff will release Defendants from any obligation arising out of the claims that gave rise to this lawsuit in exchange for the sums listed in Thompson’s March 2 demand.  

2.) The settlement amounts are confidential.

3.) The parties must comply with the Medicare Secondary Payer Act.” 

Neither and Joe or Mary are old enough to be concerned with the Medicare complications. I cannot find anything in the ruling that would keep Mary from telling the story of what happened to her, or from me publishing this book. It is clear that the pharmaceuticals will, in no possible way, even come close to cleaning up the mess they made in our lives, but now there is a slim possibility we can perhaps recover something from this book. We also want to help other people from the heartbreaks we suffered.

September 5, 2013: We are at the flower shop. Mary knows about the ruling and she is taking it better than I thought she would. I suppose part of it is the realization that the legal heartbreak, frustrations, and legal con game of the lawyers and court with a predetermined outcome will be over sooner than later. We have a plan worked out that we all agree on. We will be in no hurry to contact either Thompson or sign any settlement agreement sent to Mary and Joe from the defendants. First, we will see what the terms of the agreement are, then go from there. In the meantime we will work to keep the flower shop open. This is proving difficult as in August we had our worst month going over $2500 in the red. One way or another we will be also free of the pharmaceuticals. We will also try to find some “free” legal advice as to how to handle the final signing of the settlement release forms. We all need time to settle down and get a break from the relentless pressure.

September 12, 2013: So much for any substantial break from the pressure. Mary has just received a copy of the 19 page settlement release forms from the defendants by email from Thompson. She will be getting paper copies by registered mail also. They are as bad as we feared. They contain clauses we feel are additional to those required by Judge Noel in his ruling (big fat surprise). The defendants also want Mary to sign away her rights (basically all our rights) to tell the circumstances that led up to the lawsuit, and to under any circumstances “disparage” the two pharmaceuticals Boehringer Ingelheim and Pfizer; in other words, a total, legally unnecessary gag order. I could not even show my granddaughter Julia this book I wrote for her, nor could any of us ever tell this story to anyone. Furthermore the Pharmaceuticals would retain the right to sue Mary if they “feel” she breached the release---and---Mary would have to pay their legal fees.

Our plan is now to sign the release forms, but “redact” those parts that are not specifically ordered by the judge.

September 19, 2013: After more careful thought it is apparent that the release form sent by the pharmaceuticals is “overly broad”. In other words it contains the two unnecessary and not ordered clauses insisted upon by the defendants. The “non-disparagement clause” is a definite nonstarter. “Disparagement” is a word that, by its very nature, could cover almost anything Mary (or Joe) would say about the Pharmaceuticals. It would open them up to the very real threat of complete financial ruin---again. The defendants are badgering Mary’s lawyer about why Mary has not sent them the signed release forms. We see no hurry to sign, though we do not want Mary or Joe to be held in contempt of court by Judge Davis or Noel. Let them stew for once.

October 1, 2013: More bad news for our family. We were hoping that we could increase the sales of our flower shop to the point where Mary could take it over with someone else, perhaps one of our other daughters/in-law. It’s been five long years of struggle and the economy is still bad in Enumclaw. We bought the shop to help Mary in 2008. This was just when the banking system collapsed and the economy took a big hit. The sales in Enumclaw dropped about 50% for shops like ours and it hasn’t yet recovered. Mary now feels she can get out and find a better paying job on her own and it’s time. Helen and I are wearing out from the six day a week grind, the stress over paying bills, and the rigors of delivering flowers in all kinds of terrible weather.

Today Helen told our landlord we would have to close by January 1, 2013. We have talked to a business broker and the flower shop will be advertised nationally. If we can’t sell it we will dismantle it and sell off what parts we can. Helen and I might be forced to continue the business in some form in our basement, even if it is only selling leftover product on line. We had thought that with the ladies running the antique store in the front of the shop and sharing the rent, we could hang on. But, they are not doing very well either and they are no able to tend the front of the shop as much as they wanted to. Consequently we have to watch and sell their antiques most of the time which places an extra stress on us. Big changes are coming our way and what that means for all of us I don’t know. I just don’t know.

October 12, 2013: Mary just mailed off the signed, but redacted release forms to Thompson. Thompson has to sign them and send them to the defendants. We don’t know how or if the defendants will react. The defendants, it seems, will spend any amount of money to squash our family, but not anything to redress their products harm to us. Now we just simply have wait to see what happens.

Here is the letter Mary and Joe sent along with the altered release forms.

“Dear Mr. H. Lee Thompson

We have carefully read the terms of the agreement, as set forth by Magistrate Judge Noel in Document 65 Case 0:11-cv-01210-MJD-FLN, page 3, bottom of first paragraph and we fully intend to comply with the order from Magistrate Judge Noel as clearly written.

The terms of the agreement are written as follows: “Each plaintiff will release Defendants from any obligation arising out of the claims that gave rise to this lawsuit in exchange for the sums listed in Thompson’s March 2 demand. The settlement amounts are confidential, and the parties must comply with the Medicare Secondary Payer Act.”

We have also carefully read the “Confidential Settlement Agreement and Release” documents (one for each defendant) emailed to us for our signing consideration.

Judge Noel does not specifically refer in his ruling to the “Confidential Settlement Agreement and Release” referenced above. The “Confidential Settlement Agreement and Release”, as sent is overly-broad and we will not sign nor are compelled to sign that release as written.

We are crossing out and initialing the following full sentences or parts of sentences from section “V. Confidentiality”, page 11. We are also initialing each page and keeping a copy of the altered release forms that we signed.

1. Paragraph A. : The last of the first sentence starting with “the facts and circumstances giving rise-----“

2. Paragraph A. : The whole last sentence “If inquiry is made by any third person concerning the status------“

3. Paragraph B: All of this paragraph [the disparagement clause]

Sincerely,

Mary D. Magalhaes

Joseph R. Magalhaes“

The paragraphs and sentences crossed out only refer to the non-disparagement clause and the not telling of the circumstances that led up to the lawsuit; portions that were not ordered by either Judge to be part of the release form of the forced settlement agreement. Still included are the sentences that give the pharmaceuticals the right to sue if they think the release form was breached. In other words to bring harassing and nuisance lawsuits that Mary and Joe would not have the financial means to counter.

October 22, 2013: We still have not heard from either Thompson or the defendants about the changes Mary made in the release forms. I think that we are on the higher legal ground in redacting the non-required clauses, but the whole system appears rigged in favor of the pharmaceuticals and against the true victims. From our experience so far my son-in-law Mark is pretty sure that the pharmaceuticals will get whatever they want from the court.

The stress of waiting is really wearing me down. So much is now at stake. Maybe the pharmaceuticals will accept Mary’s changes and not insist on completely crushing our family. I wake up in the morning and the first thing that I think of is what will be the response of Thompson, the defendants and the court. I’m trying to not have this ruin my life, but it’s coming close. In the meantime we are trying to keep the flower shop going so we can pay the mounting bills there and have some value to show a buyer.

October 29, 2013: My wait is over and it is not good news. Lee signed the releases as Mary sent them, but the defendants’ lawyers are being arrogant ass---- who obviously think that they own the two judges; Noel and Davis and the Federal Court in Minneapolis. They had the nerve to write out a complete court order that would supersede the original one from Judge Noel; one that is all ready for Judge Davis’ signature. All he has to do is sign it. Does the phrase “he’s a rubber stamp” come to mind here? I don’t normally reproduce any of the court orders in their entirety as the exact legal language is not as important as what it means in “English”. However, I need to exactly reproduce it so you can see the extreme arrogance displayed by such a document.

----------------------------------------------

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

DISTRICT OF MINNESOTA

|In re: MIRAPEX PRODUCTS LIABILITY LITIGATION |) | |

| |) |Case No. 07-md-1836 (MJD/FLN) |

|This document relates to: |) | |

| |) | |

|Mary Magalhaes and Joseph Magalhaes, |) | |

| |) |Case No. 11-cv-412 (MJD/FLN) |

|Plaintiffs, |) | |

| |) | |

|v. |) |[PROPOSED] ORDER ENFORCING |

| |) |SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT |

|Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Pfizer, Inc., et al., |) |AND DISMISSING ACTION WITH PREJUDICE |

| |) | |

|Defendants. |) | |

| |) | |

| |) | |

| |) | |

In its Memorandum of Law and Order dated August 26, 2013 (Docket No. 112), the Court granted Defendants’ Motion to Enforce Settlement Agreements (Docket No. 47). Based upon that ruling, the Magistrate Judge’s earlier Report and Recommendation of August 2, 2012 (Docket No. 64) and this Court’s adoption of Sections I and II(A) thereof on January 11, 2013 (Docket No. 69), and in order to enforce and implement the material terms of the parties’ settlement agreement and cause this action to be dismissed with prejudice, the Court hereby ORDERS, ADJUDGES AND DECREES as follows:

1. Plaintiffs Mary Magalhaes and Joseph Magalhaes, and each of them, have fully, finally and forever released and discharged Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc, Boehringer Ingelheim International GmbH, Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, Pfizer, Inc., Pharmacia Corporation, the Upjohn Company, Pharmacia & Upjohn LLC and Pharmacia & Upjohn Company LLC, and their respective predecessors and successors in interest, former, present and future subsidiaries, divisions, parents, predecessors, successors and affiliated companies, and each of their respective present and former officers, directors, employees, shareholders, successors, partners, agents, representatives, suppliers, distributors, customers, insurers, assigns, servants, attorneys, assignees, heirs, and executors, and each of them, from any and all claims, actions, causes of action, demands, damages or liabilities of any nature whatsoever (whether contingent, accrued, mature, direct, derivative, subrogated, personal, assigned, discovered, undiscovered, inchoate, or otherwise) which Plaintiffs ever had, now have or hereafter can, shall or may have in the future arising out of, relating to, resulting from, or in any way connected with Mirapex and/or the allegations contained in Plaintiffs’ complaint, regardless of whether such claims, actions, causes of action, demands or liabilities are currently known or unknown to Plaintiffs.

2. Plaintiffs, their agents and their counsel shall keep confidential the amount of the settlement, the facts and circumstances giving rise to the action and/or the amounts discussed during settlement negotiations. The parties and/or their counsel may, however, make disclosure of the settlement amount received by Plaintiffs to any applicable care or medical lien holder, the Internal Revenue Service or as otherwise required by law, or to Plaintiffs’ accountants, trustees and/or other retained advisors who shall, however, upon such disclosure, agree in writing to maintain and honor the confidentiality of such information; provided, that Plaintiffs and their counsel shall first provide immediate notice of such request or action to Defendants’ counsel such that Defendants may seek a protective order that will not be opposed by Plaintiffs and their counsel. If inquiry is made by any third person concerning the status of Plaintiffs’ action, the parties and/or their respective counsel shall respond only that the action has been resolved. Plaintiffs further agree not to communicate, publish or cause to be published, in any public, electronic, web-based or business forum or context, any statement, whether written or oral, that would disparage any party being released herein.

3. Within seven (7) calendar days from the date of this Order, Defendants shall deliver to the Court for deposit with the Court settlement checks payable to “Treasurer of the United States” in the aggregate amount of the settlement demand made by Plaintiffs on March 2, 2012 and accepted by Defendants thereafter, in conformity with 28 U.S.C. § 2041. Upon the Court’s receipt of written instructions signed by both Plaintiffs and by their counsel agreeing upon the distribution of the deposited settlement funds, the Court shall issue an appropriate order under 28 U.S.C. § 2042 allowing the funds to be disbursed to Plaintiffs and their counsel in accordance with their instructions.

4. Upon Defendants’ deposit of the settlement funds referred to in the preceding paragraph, this action shall be deemed to be DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE, with all fees and costs to be borne by the parties, without the necessity of any further order from this Court. The Court shall thereafter retain jurisdiction for the limited purpose of disbursing the settlement funds.

Dated: ______________, 2013

The Honorable Michael J. Davis

Chief Judge, United States District Court

District of Minnesota

--------------------------------------------

Why did we even go to the trouble to hope that Mary and Joe could receive a fair trial in the Minneapolis Federal Court? As you can see the document would totally take away the right of Mary to own her own story of what happened to her. Mary could not even tell her own daughter Julia, when she is old enough to understand, what happened to their lives. There is no legal reason for the Judge to insist on the “total gag order” placed on Mary except to be a “Toady” for the pharmaceuticals.

However I haven’t completely sunk into complete cynicism. Perhaps Judge Davis is as sick of the legal bull---- from the defendants as we are. Perhaps he is a fair and impartial judge. Perhaps he will not sign such a miscarriage of justice and not strip Mary of everything including her story.

November 4, 2013: We found out the Lee did submit his own letter to both Judge Davis and Judge Noel on behalf of Mary’s right to retain the proprietorship of her own story. He cited the First Amendment of the Constitution several times in his letter, which gives each person the right to free speech. He had to hurriedly throw together a scattershot of arguments, but he is sticking up for Mary and we thank him for that. The defendants are arguing that if Mary is not “totally” gagged somehow she will “blab” the settlement amount (which was the only “fact” actually sealed by the court). No one in their right mind and with anything above a third grade education would think that forcing Mary to not disparage the pharmaceuticals ever, would make it any more likely that she would not disclose the settlement amount.

I helped Mary compose a letter to Thompson asking if she could also send a letter to Judges, Noel and Davis as the defendants did. We wanted to ask them personally to consider the great damage they would do to her and her family’s healing from the disaster of Mirapex if she could not tell her story. After all, most of the healing from traumatic events comes from the retelling of the story of what happened until some kind of “coming to terms” is accomplished. In their cruelty the pharmaceuticals would deny this to Mary and her family. Everyone else that did sign a “total gag order” did so of their free will in exchange for a settlement they agreed to. The willingly gave up the right to tell their story. Mary and in fact all of us would be forced to do this. Unfortunately, Thompson replied that we could not correspond directly to the Judges and that as “attorney of record” only he could do so; so much for being able to personally plead our case.

Now Mary and our fates are in the hands of the Judges again. I would like to pray for them to be guided by the spirit of justice. I open my mouth but the words will not come out. Am I descended that far into bitterness that I can’t even pray for them? We are unable to pay our landlord at the flower shop the full rent again. When will the devastating effects of Mirapex ever stop?

Chapter 21: The Roller Coaster Continues

January 20, 2014: I’m writing this chapter today, but I will use my notes and Helen’s Journal to recapture the events leading up to today. I wanted to write the events as they happened, but I’ve been too tired running and closing out the flower shop, watching our granddaughter Georgia and fighting the defendants---and----trying to have normal holiday activities.

I honestly thought by now the Mirapex litigation story would have ended and we would be trying to move on with whatever lives we have left. I don’t think I could have gone on if I would have known that today I would be still writing this story. Three large trains traveling at high speed converged at Christmas. They were the Christmas holidays, Mirapex continuing troubles and the closing and moving of the flower shop. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll start back in November.

November 27, 2013: Mary has just sent of an email to Lee Thompson wishing him a happy Thanksgiving and asking if he knew when the Judge would act on the letter from the defendants. Lee replied “Not as far as we know. Happy Thanksgiving.” We did have a Happy Thanksgiving. Our house was full, as usual for holidays, with family and friends. Georgia has been fully accepted into the extended “Locatelli tribe”. She is not too far from taking her first steps, but seeing that “little butt” disappearing around corners as she explores the house always lifts my spirits. Mirapex has been the cause of numerous family breakups for other victims. Why our family has endured I credit to the family projects we worked together on. Every spike we put together into logs, every wire we pulled together, and every field trip we shared----one by one created the bonds that now hold us together.

I did cook two turkeys this Thanksgiving; one for Mary and one for everyone else. I scoured the Net for non-gluten stuffing. I finally settled on using the recipe from Helen’s mother that we traditionally use, but adding apples and rice instead of bread cubes. Thankfully it turned out really good. I had to work harder at making the gravy out of cornstarch instead of flower, but after several false starts I manage to do it. Eventually I will be able to make gravy for Mary as well as what I’m used to. Mary has now been on a gluten-free diet for several months and is healthier than since she was a teenager. She has slimmed down and looks great and feels the same.

We are still hoping to sell the flower shop. We have no illusions of getting the $40,000 back we paid for it. The economy still hasn’t picked up in Enumclaw and now every store sells fresh flowers. The sales of fresh flowers has greatly increased, but not for florists. I have to remind myself that working at the flower shop rehabilitated Mary. It did its job. We have had some inquiries from local people thinking about taking over the shop, but, like a lot of people, they are “more in love” with the idea than the reality.

December 10, 2013: Mirapex just jumped back into our lives with a jolt. Mary just received a copy of an email her lawyer Lee Thompson sent to the defendant’s lawyer, a Mr. Smith.

“SETTLEMENT PAYMENT DUE TO MARY D MAGALHAES

Dear Mr. Smith,

I was advised today by Chief Judge Davis' court room deputy clerk, Christine Wegner, that she called you and advised that the letter you filed with the Court was not the appropriate manner for the Court to consider enforcement. As you are aware you did not communicate to me the court's instruction nor did Ms Wegner. You are advised that the release time period has expired and that defendants are in breach of the agreement. Please advise the defendants that this is an immediate demand for full and final payment to be wired to my trust account.”

This really helps to clear away the dismal December day at the flower shop. We are excited. Something must have happened between the Judge and the lawyers for the defendants. What it was, we don’t know. We are fantasizing that Judge Davis was so mad at the gall of the defendants that he threw them out of court! Can people still be boiled in oil?

A few more emails today from Thompson have cleared up what happened. Apparently, back in November Judge Davis informed the defendants that he wouldn’t accept the letter from them detailing the order forcing Mary to sign the full release form. But, in a giant breach of court etiquette neither the court nor the defendants informed Thompson. Thompson was not too happy with being kept in the dark and all this time of anxious waiting for us was unnecessary. Judge Davis also advised the defendants to file a motion if they wanted to properly pursue this “new line of attack [my words]”. As of today no motion had been filed so Thompson felt confident in calling them out for not complying with the Judge’s order and demanding they immediately pay the settlement amount. Maybe our luck is changing?

December 11, 2013: We actually have something to really be excited about---finally! Since no motion has been filed by the defendants Thompson thinks there is a chance the defendants will want to negotiate a separate deal for Mary to sign the complete release form. He sent this email to the defendants.

“Dear Mr. Liederman,

Last evening I received a telephone call from Chief Judge Davis's deputy courtroom clerk indicating that she had an ex parte telephone conversation with Attorney Smith indicating that the court would not consider the request for enforcement of the settlement in the case of Mary Magalhaes.

Mr. Smith failed to communicate the court's position as to the inappropriateness of his written communication to the court. I sent an email demand for our payment for the settlement amount. Obviously it is my opinion that the issue of confidentiality is not a part of the required payment by the defendants. This is a formal demand for wire transfer so that my clients can be paid in accordance with Chief Judge Davis's order. Also, I call your attention to page 12, VI General Provisions A through M.

However, if your client or defendants are interested in a confidentiality agreement for my clients, please advise of your authority to negotiate a separate premium payment for a separate confidentiality agreement. You have three (3) days in which to respond to this offer to negotiate the confidentiality agreement.

- H. Lee Thompson”

Thompson must spell “blood in the water”. I hope this means that the defendants committed a major blunder in demanding that the Court force Mary to sign the overly broad release form. It feels good to be on the offensive team for once.

He wants a letter from Mary authorizing him to negotiate with the defendants. With something positive to finally look forward to the day passed quickly. I jumped right into crafting a letter of authorization. Now that we know that Judge Davis will take any letter authorizing Thompson to negotiate to mean “for ever and ever until death do us part” and “for any amount. ” I have to be extremely careful of how it is written. I will include language to the effect that any amount Thompson negotiates is not an accepted offer until Mary sends the defendants a written acceptance under her signature. I’ve run my attempt by my son-in-law and fellow scientist Mark. The final draft is pretty air tight. I can final go to bed looking forward to the next day. Even Mary is excited.

December 13, 2014: ”Magalhaes v. BIPI, et al., Court File: 11-cv-412 (MJD/FLN)” That’s the formal indication of another crushed hope for us. I guess it was too good to be true. Our euphoria lasted three days. The defendants have now filed a motion to have the Court force Mary to sign the complete release form. I guess they won’t give up until they completely crush us (nice people). Lee has to formally respond. A court hearing is set for early January. Lee is pretty upset. Now he has to spend additional time he will not get adequately paid for. We are really upset.

In their motion the defendants are accusing Mary of posting anti-Mirapex videos on YouTube. Are they so stupid that they can’t see that I’m the poster? After all, I’m the one that narrates them. I’m the one who gives my email. They are posted under my YouTube account. Since the defendants are spending resources trolling the Net for what we are posting and doing they might at least take the time to get it right. But---the truth has never been important to the defendants or their lawyers. I don’t know if Mary can hold up under their relentless pressure. I’m also wondering about myself. Mary needs to write an affidavit immediately (Thompson’s wish). We can’t do it. I have to have time to draft it and Mary correct it and it has to be really, really good. The pressure of the flower shop is increasing and Christmas is coming. We can’t start closing out our accounts, Net and phones lines, etc. until we are sure our shop won’t sell. How do we get into these pickles? I’ll have to read the new motion and craft an affidavit.

December 14, 2013: I’ve re-read the defendants’ motion. It is the same as their signature ready “proposed order” I already quoted in this chapter. I’m working with Mary on the affidavit, but everything (shop, Christmas) is getting in the way. When was the last time I felt Christmas got in the way of anything? Never!

December 16, 2013: Mary and I finished the affidavit. Here it is.

“AFFIDAVIT OF MARY D. MAGALHAES Page 1 of 3

I ____________________________________ upon oath state as a resident of the state of Washington and the county of King that I have personal knowledge of the following events.

December 16, 2013

To whom it may concern:

I, Mary D. Magalhaes testify:

1. That I have given all my testimony in affidavits and in person in good faith and truth and have abided by the Courts ruling forcing me to accept a settlement that I never authorized.

2. That I have carefully read the “terms of that forced settlement” as clearly set forth by Magistrate Judge Noel.

3. That I and my husband Joseph R. Magalhaes have signed the release forms that include the specific requirement that the amount of the settlement be kept confidential.

4. That I will abide by the specific ruling of Judge Noel that the amount of the settlement will remain confidential.

5. That I have received the details of the division of the settlement funds from my lawyer H. Lee Thompson including his expenses to be charged to the settlement amount.

6. That there is no disagreement between my attorney H. Lee Thompson and myself regarding the division of the settlement as spuriously claimed by the Defendants, and therefore no disagreement which would embroil the Defendants or delay final settlement.

7. That I have not discussed the contents of my father John D. Locatelli’s book with him, nor read any part of it, nor contributed to his book in any way.

8. That I have not contacted anyone about publication of my father’s book, nor have I promoted his book in any way.

9. That I have not posted a video on You Tube regarding Mirapex as spuriously claimed by the defendants. That if my father John D. Locatelli has posted such a video on You Tube it was not at my directive, and that he did not discuss any You Tube videos with me.

I, Mary D. Magalhaes further testify:

1. That, while every Mirapex settlement agreement reached in MDL 1836 so far has contained the additional language I redacted from the release, everyone else was free to negotiate settlement amounts and to voluntarily give up their freedom to tell their story. On the other hand the Defendants are asking the Court to force me, under threat, to give up the freedom to tell my story for an amount that I would have never accepted in exchange for my silence if I had been free to choose.

I, Mary D. Magalhaes further testify:

1. That the side effects of the drug Mirapex manufactured by the Defendants and the settlement forced by the Court on me have ended forever my hopes and dreams of a career as a paralegal, completion of our home, financial well-being, and justice from the Defendants.

2. That the only possession I have left is the ability and the right to tell my life story to whom I choose. That now, because Mirapex totally changed my life’s story for the worse, Mirapex will now be a major part of my story until I die.

3. That to take away what happened to my life because of Mirapex would be to effectively and completely take away from me my life story.

4. That the defendants, not being satisfied with simply ruining my emotional and financial life and that of my family, want to even take away my right to the story of my life.

5. That my ability to heal emotionally from the devastation of Mirapex absolutely depends on my ability to tell my story to family and friends, and to tell my daughter in the future why she had to live through such trauma in her young life.

6. That I firmly believe that, given the actions of the Defendants so far, the Defendants would not hesitate to sue me for whatever slim financial resources I have left if I attempt to even tell my daughter or anyone else what happened.

7. That I would live in fear the rest of my life of such a crippling lawsuit.

8. That Defendants claim “[my] objections to the confidentiality language contained in the release clearly signal [my] intent to continue arousing public sentiment against Defendants and Mirapex---something the settlement of this lawsuit was intended to foreclose.”

9. That the Defendants can in no way can clearly know what my intent is in this matter.

10. That such a punishment from the Court would be unjustified, unnecessary, and exceedingly cruel.”

December 18, 2013: Thompson has filed a response to the defendants’ motion and they will file their own response to his response---and so it goes. I’m too tired of all of this back and forth ad infinitum to discuss all the arguments and counterarguments. I’ll give all this detail when I describe the court hearing.

We have set the day after Christmas as the “drop dead” date to start cleaning up the shop, and so far, there are no real commitments from anyone to buy the shop. If it doesn’t sell we will see if the other flower shop in town would want to buy our phone number and flower account list. We have a number of accounts that we fill every week and then send out invoices at the end of the month. We sure could use any money we can get

December 26: Now the fun begins. No one has bought the shop and we have until Jan 1 to clean up and get out. I came in today at 6 AM to start dismantling the shelves, overhead storage, cupboards, countertops and other storage.

The fight is on! Thompson just fired a shot across their bow. He has also filed his own motion today with the court along with Mary’s affidavit and his response to their motion. Thompson is asking the Court to dismiss their motion on legal technical grounds. Now they have to respond to him and so on. He is disputing their use of a “Summary Judgment Motion”. Either side in a civil lawsuit can file a summary judgment motion prior to a trial. This is a motion to end the lawsuit by either having it dismissed in favor of the defendants or a judgment rendered in favor of the plaintiffs. For this motion to be granted by the presiding judge it has to backed up by indisputable facts that any jury would agree with. In addition, the judge has to interpret the law in favor of the side receiving such a motion to end the lawsuit if at all possible. Unfortunately the Court has not given Mary the benefit of such a ruling in the past. Thompson is then arguing that their motion does not meet the standards of a summary judgment and therefore should be dismissed.

I agree with Thompson. Arguing, as the defendants have, that everyone always signs the complete agreement, that Mary will definitely blab the amount of the settlement if not totally gagged, and that peace will never come to either side without total gagging, seems open to dispute, not beyond dispute. In addition, Judge Davis has now delayed the hearing until February 10, 2014 and gives Judge Noel the task of holding the hearing and writing recommendations to him for final judgment. This is good on one hand as we can finish up with the shop and have a normal Christmas for our family. On the other hand it gives us more time to stew about the outcome.

I was smart enough to use screws and a power screwdriver to put everything together. Taking apart is easier and I can save the wood, cupboards and countertops for future use. Before I get too far into the last days of the flower shop I should mention that we managed again to pull off a wonderful Christmas. We even had Helen’s extended family over for Christmas Eve dinner, twenty three in all. Helen and I are holding up pretty well. But, getting older catches up with people eventually, and Helen and I are just like everyone else in that respect. How ironic it would be to die just when Mirapex might finally be over and Helen and I might get more peace in our lives. We have been fighting the pharmaceuticals now for almost five years. Unfortunately, five years at my age might be a significant part of the rest of my life.

January 4, 2014: This morning I’m about as tired as I’ve ever been. The contents of the flowers shop is now in our basement and underneath the lakeside deck. If another box was put in the basement, the basement would explode in a shower of flower buckets, silk flowers, holiday gifts, candelabras, corsage boxes; all the bits and pieces collected over fifty years. I had worked several 16 hour days dismantling the shop and I Helen and I were doing OK until the flower cooler. We had much needed help from my cousin Kathy, my sister-in-law Mary, Mary’s husband Joe, my son-in-law Mark and daughter Megan. The straw that almost broke the camel’s back was taking apart the flower cooler. We were going to leave it, but our landlord decided at the last moment to want it taken down, and all our helpers were back at their work. It was ten by ten feet square and eight feet tall. Everything was nailed together and it was filled with insulation. Helen and I tried to pry it apart, but even with long pry bars we couldn’t do it. I finally cut it into manageable strips with a Sawzall. It took us seven trips to the dump and two to recycling to dispose of it. I guess that I must be healthier than I thought because I’m still standing, though just barely.

No one bought the flower shop, but we did manage to sell the phone number and house accounts to the other flower shop in town. It wasn’t for much money, but every little bit counts. We are going to keep our business license so we can sell off all the items in the basement, hopefully over the next year. Two people wanted us to continue making arrangements for them so we (Helen) will do that also.

I haven’t had a cold or any other illness for five years. Maybe somehow my body knew that I couldn’t afford to get sick with all the responsibility I had. Lots of people around me did get sick but never caught whatever they had. This was also true the times I built our houses. I never got sick when I was building, even when I was putting in long hard hours. However, it never failed that when I was finished with the long hours of building and could finally take a breather that I would catch some of the worst colds I ever had. Maybe it was the letdown that caused it, or maybe because I pushed extra hard at the end to finish. I’m dreading this happening again, now that the pressure of the shop is over.

January 25: I’m caught up now to the present with my story. Mirapex is always on my mind and it will be a relief when it finally is “old news”. I started wondering if the lawyers for the pharmaceuticals hadn’t gotten themselves into a legal bind with just assuming that Mary would simply sign the total release form including the confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses. I wondered if they had even carefully read the judge’s order that only stipulated the amount of the settlement remain confidential. Then it occurred to me that, since they were asking the court to rule on whether it was necessary to add the other two clauses to ensure the amount of the settlement be kept secret, that this issue had previously never come before the court and wasn’t settle law.

Maybe, just maybe the pharmaceuticals have gotten themselves into a legal bind and trapped themselves into a ruling they don’t want? Maybe, just maybe this future ruling from the court will have major ramifications for all the future settlements to come? The court has only an interest in keeping the amounts confidential so that all other lawsuits and potential trials will be free from prejudice derived from knowing what other plaintiffs were awarded. The pharmaceuticals, for their own selfish reasons, do not want any bad publicity to get out about their drugs, or to have anyone talking badly about them. If the judge rules in Mary’s favor, then future plaintiffs will have leverage to negotiate over the last two clauses for additional settlement money. As it now stands plaintiffs sign the complete release including the last two clauses as they think that it is required by the court.

Maybe, just maybe this obscure hearing and future ruling might be a news story of national interest? Of course, new agencies only report news that will somehow touch a significant portion of the public as they have to act in their interest in these matters. Also, it is possible that if the court (the judges) thought that the hearing and subsequent ruling was being scrutinized by the press, then they might be more cautious on how they conducted themselves so as not to seem to favor the pharmaceuticals. After all, the rulings of the Supreme Court give ample proof that judges are human like the rest of us.

Starting on January 20th I started to email local news agencies about the coming hearing. I also emailed news agencies (papers and TV stations) in Minneapolis as they would be more likely to attend the hearing. In life, events that affect us are like the tip of an iceberg. Is the iceberg only a small piece of ice floating on the surface, or is it going deep into the ocean. After all, one first date can lead to marriage and children while all the other first dates then become only small footnotes in our lives. I received a response from only one newsperson. He was a national award winning investigative producer that had taken an early retirement from national news to work at a local TV station in Minneapolis that has an affiliate station in Seattle. He didn’t know anything about Mirapex and the trouble it can cause in patients’ lives, but he thinks that there might be a story in it. He’s interested in the ruling that will come out of Mary’s hearing and in Mary’s story. This may or may not be the “tip” of a giant iceberg that will change all of our lives. We can only hope.

January 28: Helen and I just back from a flower delivery to Rainier School in Buckley, Washington. I still haven’t gotten a cold. Maybe all the trouble with the pharmaceuticals has made me too mean for cold germs. Mary, since the second week in January, has been a personal assistant to a friend. This is working out really well for Mary. She is working almost every day, but not on the weekends. As her friend’s health improves she will work fewer days and will have to find another source of income. Mary is also doing flowers for an occasional wedding. The recreation room in Mary’s basement is finished and Mary and Joe have moved all their boxes of stored items into it. This frees up the rest of the basement for Joe and I to start on the plumbing. If all goes well they will have a new laundry room and bathroom in the basement. It is a slow job as we have to accommodate all the idiosyncrasies of a small cabin sitting on top of the new basement. Damn you Mirapex!

January 30: We are still getting bills in the mail from the flower wire services that we thought we were free of once we closed out in December. It seems we can’t get away from them. I had hoped that having several flower wire services would make our shop more attractive to a buyer. That didn’t happen. Before computers and the internet flower shops had no easy way to look up the phone number or address of a flower shop in another city. Customers didn’t either, but could come into a flower shop and with the help of a wire service’s list of other flower shops, “wire out” flowers to the other city. The internet made it possible to locate other flower shops without the wire services, but it also made it possible for wire services to advertise and intercept orders that used to be called directly in the flower shop. The 30% of the order value that the wire services charged to send their orders to the flower shops effectively cancelled any net money from those orders. The wire services had as much to do with flower shops closing around the country as did the great recession.

February 8: It is all set up for Mary to attend the hearing on February 10 by telephone. The hearing is in a courtroom in Minneapolis at 9:00 Central Time. That’s 7:00 in the morning our time in Maple Valley, WA. We will use the speaker phone in our bedroom so that Mary, Helen and I can hear everything and Mary can answer questions if she has to. The pharmaceuticals will do everything to crush us. I’m trying not to have anxiety about the coming hearing affect my daily life, but it creeps into everything I do. We’ll just have to see how it goes. Only two days to find out.

Chapter 22: Are We in Hell?

February 20, 2014: The hearing was this morning and was over in about an hour. The defendants (the lawyers for the pharmaceuticals) first presented their arguments to Magistrate Judge Noel. They had three arguments. The first was that I (Mr. Locatelli) was writing a book and had inquired on the Net about finding a publisher, in addition to posting videos on You Tube. Somehow, in their thinking, this fact made it more likely that Mary would disclose the amount of the settlement without the total gag order being enforced on her by the court. I couldn’t see the logic behind this argument and Judge Noel also seemed skeptical. Judge Noel ask if I was a party to the lawsuit and when the defendants replied that I was not, he ask why then was I not free to publish what I wanted to. They didn’t have a good answer, but they stressed that Mary had to be prevented from helping in anyway with my book so as to keep the amount of the settlement confidential.

Thompson countered this argument by noting that Mr. Locatelli and his wife had been all along helping their daughter financially, emotionally and also with the lawsuit. He stated that Mr. Locatelli had attended all the hearings and was privy to firsthand knowledge of all events related to the lawsuit and his daughter’s reactions to Mirapex. In other words, I could write my book without any help from Mary and that totally gagging her would not change that fact. I have been very careful in not having Mary help in anyway with my book. Mary has not read or even seen it in any form and she has had nothing to do with the videos that I have posted to the Net.

Their second argument was that Mary would not be prevented from telling her story “around the kitchen table” to her daughter even if a total gag order was imposed by the courts as the pharmaceuticals wanted. Thompson countered however that Mary would not be protected from a lawsuit if she did tell her daughter and would also be open to a lawsuit if her daughter retold that story later in life. Mary needed the freedom to own the rights to her own story without fear of recrimination. He also questioned the term “disparage” in the disparagement clause as being too vague a term to be imposed on Mary in any legal order from the court.

Their third argument almost made me gag in its blatant disingenuous. They argued that Mary and the pharmaceuticals would be better off if a total gag order was imposed on Mary so as to bring peace to both of them once and for all. I understand that from the pharmaceutical’s point of view they would more likely have more peace if Mary couldn’t tell her story and warn others about the dangers of Mirapex. Arguing that Mary would be better off not being able to tell her story was unbelievable. I couldn’t see their lawyer say this, but how could anyone tell such a lie and keep a straight face. That shows the type of lawyers that work for the pharmaceuticals.

Judge Noel also seemed skeptical of this argument. He asked their lawyers why not the release that Mary had already signed been sufficient to bring legal peace to the pharmaceuticals. He made the point that it had freed them from this and all future lawsuits brought by Mary due to her side effects from Mirapex. The function of the court in these matters was to settle lawsuits according to the law and not protect the pharmaceuticals from unwanted publicity.

Thompson also restated his prior arguments about the merits of their motion as a Summary Judgment and asked that their motion be dismissed, and that Mary be paid the settlement amount as previously determined by the court. We had a phone connection directly into the courtroom and could plainly hear all the conversations happening there. Apparently the lawyers for the pharmaceuticals didn’t know the connection was still in place after Judge Noel left. We heard one of their female lawyers plaintively remark to one of the other lawyers “but they always sign the whole release”.

Now we have to wait for Judge Noel’s recommendation and then District Judge Davis has to rule on that recommendation. His ruling can only be appealed to the District court where Lee cannot practice. I suppose that Judge Noel could sidestep the bigger issue of how much “gagging’ is necessary to keep the amount of the settlement secret and narrowly rule that the defendant’s motion does not meet the requirement of a summary judgment. Where that would leave Mary legally I’m not sure. I’m just going to try to get on with my life as best I can.

March 15: Lee is starting to get anxious as he hasn’t heard anything from the court, so he asked Mary to check with Judge Noel’s clerk. Mary was told today that a recommendation should be forthcoming before the end of the month. Today I worked with Joe on the vent part of the plumbing in their basement. I’ll sure be glad when the weather warms up and so does their basement.

April 1: April Fool’s Day and we are still waiting for a verdict from Magistrate Judge Noel. Anyone that has had to wait for a life-changing decision knows how the wait is sometimes almost unbearable and the worries keep creeping into consciousness. The thoughts are like a toothache that can recede into the background only to strike with full force when least expected.

Mary and Joe and Julia are making the most of their little cabin perched on the bigger basement in progress. They have a cozy, but tiny front room that would have a nice view of the lake except for the old not-insulated sliding glass door and the required warmth- trapping drapes covering it. The cabin’s flat roof has a two foot overhang on the side facing the lake. The flower cooler in our now debunk flower shop had two very nice insulated sliding glass doors that Joe and I are installing in a wall we built out under those eaves. When we are done this will add about two feet to their front room. This doesn’t seem like much, but it will increase their front room size by about 20% and give them a lake view---and---insulated windows.

April 4, 2014: I should be checking PACER to see if the decision is posted in the court records, but I’m too nervous. I must be getting old.

April 7: Mary has received an email from Lee telling her that a decision has been posted and that he feels that it is unlikely to be overturned by the District Judge Davis. The ruling now posted is from the Magistrate Judge Noel, but to be finalized as an order that Mary and the defendants have to follow it needs to be signed by District Judge Davis. Each party (Mary and the pharmaceuticals) have until April 17 to file objections to the report. If there are any objections then Judge Davis will be the final decider. Here is Judge Noel’s reasoning behind his ruling in his own words.

“In August 2013, this Court granted Defendants’ motion to enforce the parties 2012 settlement agreement. However, no final judgment was entered. In order to effectuate the parties agreement, Defendants sought Plaintiffs’ signatures on a written release that incorporated all material terms of the settlement agreement. Plaintiffs signed the release, but crossed out certain provisions relating to confidentiality and non-disparagement.

Plaintiffs argue that the provisions they object to violate their First Amendment right to free speech. Defendants contend that all material terms of the settlement should be enforced by this Court based on its inherent authority and the parties course of dealing. Plaintiffs maintain that the record does not reflect an agreement on the provisions at issue.

This Court has acknowledged that confidentiality is a material term of the settlement

agreements arising out of the multi-district Mirapex litigation. For example, this Court’s August 2012 report and recommendation stated that “[t]he settlement amounts are confidential” and “[t]he terms of every settlement agreement in this Mirapex Multi-District Litigation have been made confidential” and “ the terms of the settlement agreement shall remain confidential.” This Court has not, however, had reason to opine on all material terms of the settlement agreements. Specifically, this Court has not had reason to consider whether any communication, publication or other statement made by the Plaintiffs in this case might disparage the Defendants—or whether such a non-disparagement provision is appropriately included in an order enforcing the settlement. As reflected in the attached proposed order, this Court recommends omitting the non-disparagement language.”

The Judge then includes the following language in the order to be signed by District Judge Davis:

1. Plaintiffs Mary Magalhaes and Joseph Magalhaes, and each of them, have fully, finally and forever released and discharged Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc, Boehringer Ingelheim International GmbH, Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, Pfizer, Inc., Pharmacia Corporation, the Upjohn Company, Pharmacia & Upjohn LLC and Pharmacia & Upjohn Company LLC, and their respective predecessors and successors in interest, former, present and future subsidiaries, divisions, parents, predecessors, successors and affiliated companies, and each of their respective present and former officers, directors, employees, shareholders, successors, partners, agents, representatives, suppliers, distributors, customers, insurers, assigns, servants, attorneys, assignees, heirs, and executors, and each of them, from any and all claims, actions, causes of action, demands, damages or liabilities of any nature whatsoever (whether contingent, accrued, mature, direct, derivative, subrogated, personal, assigned, discovered, undiscovered, inchoate, or otherwise) which Plaintiffs ever had, now have or hereafter can, shall or may have in the future arising out of, relating to, resulting from, or in any way connected with Mirapex and/or the allegations contained in Plaintiffs’ complaint, regardless of whether such claims, actions, causes of action, demands or liabilities are currently known or unknown to Plaintiffs.

2. Plaintiffs, their agents and their counsel shall keep confidential the amount of the settlement, the facts and circumstances giving rise to the action and/or the amounts discussed during settlement negotiations. The parties and/or their counsel may, however, make disclosure of the settlement amount received by Plaintiffs to any applicable care or medical lien holder, the Internal Revenue Service or as otherwise required by law, or to Plaintiffs’ accountants, trustees and/or other retained advisors who shall, however, upon such disclosure, agree in writing to maintain and honor the confidentiality of such information; provided, that Plaintiffs and their counsel shall first provide immediate notice of such request or action to Defendants’ counsel such that Defendants may seek a

protective order that will not be opposed by Plaintiffs and their counsel. If inquiry is made by any third person concerning the status of Plaintiffs’ action, the parties and/or their respective counsel shall respond only that the action has been resolved.

3. Within seven (7) calendar days from the date of this Order, Defendants shall deliver to counsel for Plaintiffs settlement checks payable to “Mary Magalhaes and Joseph Magalhaes, individually and as husband and wife, and H. Lee Thompson, their attorney” in the aggregate amount of the settlement demand made by Plaintiffs on March 2, 2012 and accepted by Defendants thereafter. At the same time, Defendants shall also notify the Court and all counsel via e-mail that their share of the aggregate settlement proceeds have been delivered to Plaintiffs’ counsel.

Once Judge Davis signs the order and dates it then the defendants a.k.a. the pharmaceuticals will have to pay Mary and Joe---and----this marathon legal disaster will be over---finally.

April 8: Now that I’ve calmed down enough to read the report again and start thinking in a clear way, I’ve realized the following. The defendants probably think that they have won, or at least won enough to not file any objections. They now have had the court do their dirty work by gagging Mary for them. I do not in any way agree with the Judge’s ruling that forbids Mary to talk about the “facts and circumstances giving rise to the action” (the lawsuit). This is a giveaway to the pharmaceuticals as it stops Mary telling about her experiences with Mirapex in addition to the settlement amount. I can’t see how stopping Mary from telling about Mirapex is any concern of the courts. In addition the pharmaceuticals will get a protective order that is legally enforceable by a Federal Court and violation of it can subject Mary to contempt of court, fines and possible confinement.

However, and this is an enormous “however”. The judge did insist on leaving in “the facts and circumstances giving rise to the action”, but word “action” here is singular and must refer to the onetime filing of the lawsuit by Mary. Then the phrase “the facts and circumstances giving rise to the action” would bar Mary from telling her story from the time she took Mirapex to the filing of the lawsuit. But the struck out “disparagement clause” would allow her to tell how life has been post Mirapex, including the trauma of the lawsuit and how her life has changed for the worse from what it had been pre-Mirapex. She could also tell about the post Mirapex effect on people around her and even push for better warnings on Mirapex. She could tell about the trauma of others she met. She can “disparage” the drug Mirapex; tell about its side effects and the behavior of the pharms all she wants as long as she doesn’t tell the specifics of her personal Mirapex experience.

Perhaps the joke is on the defendants and the court, but they do not know it yet. Their lawyers could not have worked harder to make themselves and the pharms look unfair, cruel and uncaring---and---the court, by insisting on a non-necessary gag order, looks to be in the pocket of the pharms. Not a pretty picture.

In addition, Mary would not be very good at telling what happened to her on Mirapex as she can’t remember most of it. It came out in the hearing that as long as I wrote from my own first hand experiences about what happened and was not a party to the lawsuit, then I can say and publish what I want. I was very careful to not get help from Mary in any way, but I didn’t need her help as I was privy to everything that occurred in the lawsuit, to Mary on Mirapex, and the settlement conference with Mary and her husband. I’m free to tell the story better than Mary could have told it and—I have.

Also, and this is very important, because the court did not make Mary sign the standard 19 page settlement she is insulated from punitive action from the pharms unless she slanders or libels them. The punitive action has to come from the Federal Court and they would only act if Mary violated the court order and not simply to scare and harass Mary as the pharms would have. Mary’s story can and will be told---and----Mary can talk about Mirapex and the change it caused in her life and the damage it caused in other people’s lives.

We have to decide if we want to file objections to Judge Noel’s ruling. We don’t think that this is wise. If we get the “facts and circumstances” language removed (though Lee does not think that Davis would be amenable to that) then the defendants would probably appeal to the District Court where Lee cannot practice. This is too big a risk. If the defendants don’t object to the recommendation of Judge Noel we will let it slide.

April 14: All of us were just beginning to calm down and realize that it’s over when the pharmaceuticals dropped another bombshell on us. Lee just forwarded an email from the defendants that AGAIN contained the complete 19 page release for Mary and Joe to sign. This release omitted the “disparage clause” but contained all the language that would make Mary and Joe easy targets for harassment lawsuits from the pharmaceuticals. It would also make them responsible for paying all the lawyer costs including the costs of the defendant’s lawyers. Do they think we are that stupid or have I died and descended into Hell along with them?

April 15: Lee has just sent a letter to Judge Davis and Noel. Here is the part about the 19 page release:

“Plaintiffs also request a telephone conference regarding the presentment of releases for their signature before payment of the settlement. Defendant’s attorney Maria Nida sent to plaintiffs’ attorney a nineteen page release for BIPI and Pfizer requesting my signature and plaintiffs’ signatures. Plaintiffs assert that the defendants by and through Attorney Maria Nida are not abiding by the Report and Recommendations and the attached Order.

Plaintiffs’ council has attempted to communicate by telephone by calling Attorney Arthur Liderman and Attorney Maria Nida, on April 14, 2014, and have requested by email whether the Defendants are requiring the release to be signed by the Plaintiffs and Plaintiffs’ council. Plaintiffs believe that this requirement is in conflict and not in compliance with the proposed order attached to the Report and Recommendation of Magistrate Noel.”

April 17: Great news for once!!! I just sent off the following email to Mary. “The defendants have given up on the notion of having the complete 19 page release signed---and----will fork over the money as soon as Davis signs the order----You are probably the first person in the history of litigation against the pharms that settled without signing the complete 19 page release!!! See the attached filing from them---I guess they knew that they had no legal standing to press forward once they knew you didn't fall for signing---.”

The pharmaceuticals have finally given in on requiring the signing of the full 19 page release. I won’t bore you with their recent filing, but it was a “lame” try at covering their butts and avoiding sanctions from the Judge.

April 20: Mary could have requested Lee to see if the defendants would pay an additional amount for her and Joe to sign the original full release, but Mary is more determined now than ever to get her story out. Finally--- it might-----just might be over!

I have just one last note to write for this chapter. There may be some legal precedent set by the Judge’s ruling concerning what is reasonable for the pharmaceuticals to require in their releases. If there is one I’ll let the legal scholars argue about that.

Chapter 23: My Turn

Genesis 18:

22 The men turned away and went toward Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the Lord.[d] 23 Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? 24 What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare[e] the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? 25 Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

26 The Lord said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

27 Then Abraham spoke up again: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, 28 what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five people?”

“If I find forty-five there,” he said, “I will not destroy it.”

29 Once again he spoke to him, “What if only forty are found there?”

He said, “For the sake of forty, I will not do it.”

30 Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak. What if only thirty can be found there?”

He answered, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.”

31 Abraham said, “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, what if only twenty can be found there?”

He said, “For the sake of twenty, I will not destroy it.”

32 Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?”

He answered, “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”

May 8, 2014: As I’m struggling to find answers in all that has happened to our family I thought of these verses from Genesis. I was a cradle Catholic, but I never actually read the complete Bible until I met and married Helen. Today I can feel comfortable in any church and I consider myself a very spiritual, but not a particularly religious person. Nevertheless I find comfort in these particular verses.

I picture having a similar conversation with God, but now God is not concerned with Sodom and Gomorrah, but with my struggle to find meaning in our Mirapex emotional and financial train wreck. Lee certainly earned his share of the settlement as he went the extra mile supporting Mary through seemingly endless hearings, and legal maneuvering by the pharmaceuticals. But, the amount, which the Court deems so important that it must remain hidden forever, is so small that after all Lee’s allowable expenses are subtracted and also his 35% standard fee Mary and Joe only ended up with about 52% of what the Court forced her to accept. The smaller the forced settlement amount the more the allowable expenses cut into the final cash out amount. If Mary’s forced settlement amount would have been about $8,000 she would have gotten nothing---nothing! To add insult to injury we spent a couple of thousand dollars in travel expenses going to the phony settlement conference in Minneapolis and on all the mailing and copying; all in all--- pretty damn frustrating.

The pharmaceuticals never intended to deal fairly with any of the Mirapex victims. They never had to as the deck was stacked in their favor from the start with the prohibitive costs of litigation, the costly travel to useless settlement conferences and the Court ready to accommodate their wishes. We were lucky to get whatever crumbs we could.

May 16, 2014: I had to stop writing as I was overcome with hatred and frustration. Magistrate Judge Noel had no reason, no reason except to give the pharmaceuticals a giant gift in stopping Mary from telling her story---to anyone!!! That was totally unnecessary and not needed just to keep the actual amount of the settlement secret. Enough---enough! I have to stop this right now and concentrate on the positive. But first I have some things that I have wanted to say for several years.

First: This had to have been the job description that the pharmaceuticals posted when they were looking for lawyers and law firms to handle lawsuits brought by victims of Mirapex’s side effects.

“WANTED: LAWYERS WILLING TO FORGO ANY FEELINGS OF JUSTICE, FAIRNESS, AND KINDNESS, IN DEALING WITH VICTIMS OF THE DRUG MIRAPEX’S SIDE EFFECTS. YOU MUST BE WILLING TO CRUSH, INTIMIDATE, DISPARAGE, DISCOURAGE, AND MAKE AN EXAMPLE OF THESE VICTIMS. YOU MUST BE WILLING NOT ONLY TO SIMPLY BEND THE TRUTH, BUT TO USE OUTRIGHT LIES TO GET THE RESULTS WE WANT. MOST VICTIMS ARE ALREADY EMOTIONALLY AND FINANCIALLY WEAKENED SO THEY ARE NOT HARD TO FURTHER BEAT DOWN AND SILENCE.”

You might wonder who would answer such an ad, but throughout history plenty of hands have gone up when terrible things were asked to be done. When victims were to be driven by train to the gas chambers, there were people that said “I’ll do it!” In Rwanda hands shot up when people were asked to chop apart long time neighbors. There is an endless supply of these types of people. They are not the type that would break into someone’s home or mug somebody on the street on their own----but---given the cover of some type of “official” sanction are more than willing to do terrible things to other people. It is even more galling that these people pretend to be decent members of society. They attend church, kiss their kids goodnight, are nice to their friends and neighbors, on the surface appear to be good people. But would anyone call Idi Amin a decent person because he was sometimes kind? I doubt it. I thought that civilization had given up on the practice of making the family of a hanged person stand under the gibbet: apparently the pharmaceuticals have not.

Second: If another time I hear “it’s not personal, it’s only business”, I’ll choke.

Third: The Supreme Court of the United States of America has ruled that corporations can be considered as individuals in some cases. I’m sure then that these esteemed judges would not fault me for giving the legal arm of the Corporate Pharmaceuticals a personality assessment and deciding what kind of individuals they would be. Let me think-----? Someone that refuses to clean up their messes and blames other people instead of themselves is acting like a five year old. Someone that is totally devoid of moral responsibility or social conscience, has no empathy for others, and lacks remorse and shame is a sociopath. The unavoidable conclusion is the Pharmaceuticals, when acting through their legal arms are SOCIOPATHIC FIVE YEARS OLDS.

Fourth: We have been through three years of Mirapex financial and emotional horror and now five years of additional financial and emotional horror courtesy of the pharmaceuticals with only a pittance in remuneration. Helen and I only survived because of the strong rings of support that surrounded us. Mary, while emotionally distraught, nevertheless remained steadfast in her convictions that she needed to have her story told and the pharmaceuticals held accountable for the hidden side effects of their drug Mirapex. Her husband Joe soldiered on and kept his good nature despite grinding problems almost every day. Surrounding Mary’s family and Helen and I is another ring of love and support. It is made up of our other children Amy, Megan and Adam and their spouses Mark, Kyle and Sara, and our grandchildren Georgia, Annelies and Luke. Surrounding that ring is another made up of our friends, extended family and the other victims of Mirapex I’ve corresponded with. It is these concentric rings of love and support that made it possible to somewhat prevail as we have against the pharmaceuticals and all their arrogance, power and money.

17 May 2014:

The Lord said to me, “If fifty people were spared the revenges of Mirapex because of your ordeal would you consider it worthwhile.”

“I would.”

“If I find forty-five that were spared?”

“I would.”

“For the sake of forty?”

“I would.”

“For the sake of ten?”

“I would.”

Then the Lord said, “But let me speak just once more. What if only one can be found that was spared the revenges of Mirapex because of your ordeal would you consider it worthwhile?”

I answered “To keep only a single person from the living hell we went through, I would consider it worthwhile.”

March 19, 2014: I just read where some conservationists are arguing that since corporations appear to value the bottom line above everything else, then giving a dollar value to the money a corporation could save by sound ecological practices (mitigating flooding, reducing smog, etc.) is more effective than moral persuasion or censor. Perhaps assigning a dollar value to human suffering or human life instead of the zero amounts now used by the pharmaceutical’s legal teams might stop the “scorched earth” policy they now use in dealing with victims of drug side effects. But first I have to see if Hell is freezing over.

Postscript: The Fish that Got Away

March 22, 2014: “Now I’m in the driver’s seat” Mary told me last night. Mary is determined to make the most of her “limited” freedom to speak out and speak out she will. Our first task is to email all the “gagged” and not gagged Mirapex victims and other supporters and let them know the final outcome of the lawsuit. Most “gagged” victims will be surprised and gratified to find out that Mary did not have to sign the crushing 19 page release form.

Soon we will contact the reporter in Minneapolis and this time Mary can email him herself. We are hopeful, but don’t know if anything will come of this. Next comes the push to find an agent or publisher for this book. If this book gets published then all our pushing back against the pharmaceuticals will have been worth it.

I’ve been helping Joe in their basement when he gets home after work and on the weekends. We are making good progress on the water supply plumbing. Mary is still doing some flowers and helping her friend. Helen and I are enjoying our family and friends and watching Georgia.

Perhaps Mary will be the “fish” that got away!

December 26, 2016:

It’s the day after Christmas. Our family is still intact and thriving. In addition to Georgia (just turned four) we have another new granddaughter Penny, not quite a year old. Mary and Joe are now in the heated basement on their house and Mary has her own project room decorated to her liking. It is truly a miracle that we could put together and make work the in-floor heating system from the hodgepodge of instructions and web pages we had to work with. The building inspector spent an hour looking over our work, but could not find any violations. We still have a bathroom to finish and a bedroom to move, but all in all we are pretty pleased with our progress.

Mary has almost made a complete recovery from the side effects of Mirapex. However, we are all afraid that she will be left with some permanent damage as her ability to retain new information and connect it to what she already knows has been impaired. She is very concerned that her ability to hold down a regular job will be impacted.

Our quest to have this book published is not going so well. I’ve been contacted numerous times by other Mirapex victims and they have been helped by reading Mary’s story. Many of them feel alone in their suffering as family and friends have deserted them. However, agents and publishers are afraid to incur the wrath of the pharmaceuticals, as the pharmaceuticals threaten to pull advertising from anyone that would dare to challenge them.

We were very hopeful the reporter in Minneapolis would be able to help us, but unfortunately we’ve found that people in a position to help us have to first be concerned with their bottom line, while those that are willing to help us do not have the resources to do so.

Sometimes there is a key event in any recovery where a “corner is turned”, but this is only realized through the perspective of time. Mary and I have talked a lot about her recovery and now Mary can pinpoint when her recovery “turned the corner.”

In 2012 her daughter Julia became enthralled with the TV series Supernatural and the actor Misha Collins who plays Castiel in the show. My other granddaughter Annelies also watched the show and through her Julia learned that there was to be a world-wide scavenger hunt created by Misha Collins. One of the items on the list was to break the world’s record for the longest safety pin chain----and----it was to be put together in Burnaby British Columbia, Canada. Fortunately this was within driving distance of Maple Valley, but unfortunately Mary, still suffering the effects of Mirapex could hardly drive out of her neighborhood. My wife didn’t have the time to drive Mary and Julia to Canada and others didn’t either.

Faced with disappointing Julia, Mary had to make a hard decision. Could she push through her fears and take Julia or suffer another crushing defeat. I was worried about May going, but I thought it was worth the risk as this was a chance for Mary to overcome her fear of engaging with the outside world, and for both of them to move out of the shadow of Mirapex into a new beginning.

With trepidation we watched Mary and Julia leave for Canada on Thursday August 15, 2013. Mary wept as she crossed the border realizing she had really made a change for the better and had conquered a major fear. Several times Mary and Julia were able to meet and talk with Misha Collins. Mary later told me that even in her darkness moments she must have retained the core of her personality that believed that there is kindness in everyone and that we can do amazing things together to create beautiful changes in the world.

This was a profound moment, as meeting Misha was the catalyst in her recovery since Misha shared the same vision as Mary. When she returned home Mary had truly “turned the corner” and was on the road to recovery. Since then our whole family has become involved in the scavenger hunts and some of our family were included in the last two years Gishwhes’ coffee table book.

Or biggest regret today is our inability to publish Mary’s story, as we feel we could help the thousands of other Mirapex victims reconcile with family and friends, and help others from suffering unnecessarily from its side effects.

However we are still hopeful we can find an agent and publisher courageous enough to help us get this story out.

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