'Summer from hell’
’AS
HIS WORLD SHRANK, SO DID MINE’
Chapter 2
In 2008 Zac was having what Laura thought were
normal teenage problems. He totaled the car. He quit baseball. He broke up with
friends. He smoked weed. She called it "the summer from hell.'' But it was
a season that never ended.
The family — Laura, Zac and his older sister
Leah — moved to Maryland from a small town in Illinois in 2004. Laura had
gotten a good job as a software trainer. They rented a three-bedroom brick
townhouse just north of the Baltimore line.
Zac was popular, athletic, musical,
charismatic — "a bit of a ladies' man,'' Leah recalls.
That summer, Laura noticed one
of Zac's eyes was fluttering. His hands trembled. He lost sense of time. He
threw fits over nothing, and broke things. He said he saw no point in
celebrating his 18th birthday. He hid in the basement, and covered
his face against germs.
His doctor sent him to a therapist, who sent
him to a psychiatrist, who sent him to a specialist, who diagnosed
obsessive-compulsive disorder. Several experts told Laura the problem was
behavioral; she should set expectations and not encourage fantasies.
Zac Pogliano as a third grader.
(Photo: Courtesy of the Pogliano family)
But Zac's symptoms got worse. He'd sleep 14
hours a day and lie in the shower for an hour under cold water. He was paranoid
— hence the knife under the pillow — and when Laura got home from work, the
front door always was dead-bolted from the inside.
Once, Zac opened the door but didn't recognize
her. Another time, she had to break a window to get in. When she went back to
her car a few minutes later, he locked her out again.
After he decided that the family dog was
"contaminating" the household, Zac opened the door and let him
escape.
Sometimes he stood stock-still in the middle
of a room for several minutes. Sometimes he walked with a stiff,
neurologically-impaired gait that Laura thought of as "Frankenwalking.''
They were classic symptoms, and the doctor confirmed it: Zac was psychotic.
Laura's employers, she says, didn't accept the
constant interruptions and sudden departures. A supervisor dismissively called
Zac "Laura's little problem" in front of her team, and privately told
her, "No one gives a s---.''
She quit one job, then another and another, to
be with Zac, who stayed home from high school more often than he attended.
Her own mental health deteriorated. She had
panic attacks, couldn't sleep. She felt isolated. "I wished he still
played rugby, baseball. That he still had his old friends. What he gave up, I
gave up. As his world shrank, so did mine.''
But, she says, "I told myself I had to
get over what I wanted. My attitude was, 'I'll enjoy nothing while he enjoys
nothing.'''
She was stunned by the ignorance of mental
illness. She was asked how many different personalities Zac had (confusing
schizophrenia with multiple personality disorder); if he was a genius
(an idiot savant), and, after one
of several shooting sprees by a mental patient, "Does he have a gun?''
“My attitude was, 'I'll enjoy
nothing while he enjoys nothing.'”
LAURA POGLIANO
Bills piled up — for lawyers (Zac was busted
twice for pot and once for heroin), ambulances and co-pays. She had to hire
people to sit with Zac when she was working, to drive him to appointments and
to do medical and insurance paperwork. "We needed a staff of three to keep
a household of two afloat,'' she says.
The disease never went away. If Zac stopped
taking his meds — because of side effects or because he felt cured — Laura knew
a breakdown was coming, just not when. She asked a psychiatrist what triggers a
breakdown. Change, he said: "The stress of daily living.''
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