The Gatekeeper

Part III Love Child Chapter 26

26

DURING HER INITIAL JOB interview, Lauren was told that the position she’d applied for hadn't quite opened up yet, that she needed to stay somewhere until she could start working. Lauren met an older man at the plant who offered to put her up temporarily. 

He was a divorced alcoholic with a suicidal teenage daughter. Lauren tried to help the girl, but she had been abused by her father for too many long and hard years. She stole money from Lauren and tempted her to take drugs. Her father was attracted to Lauren and not surprisingly began coming on to her.

More than Lauren could process or deal with she regressed and succumbed to an extended debilitating migraine with complicating flashbacks which left her unconscious for days and enduring excruciating pain. 

The position never did materialize. She was trapped and stranded with this messed-up family. Lauren phoned her parents begging her mother to wire enough money so she could return to Wisconsin. They did, but tragically while leaving the Western Union office she was assaulted and robbed.

After a few days of recovery, the people Lauren was staying with gave her gas money to return to Wisconsin. She roomed with a girlfriend when she got back to Milwaukee and became weaker and weaker. Soon, her medical condition was critical. 

MUSCLES ALL THROUGH HER BACK went into chronic, searing spasm. Emergency rescue workers rushed her to the hospital where tests revealed that she was suffering from a terminal case of bone cancer that had already spread throughout her body, but was most concentrated along her vertebral column.

When Lauren finally reached out to me, I listened in disbelief. 

"Hello Erik, I know you said I shouldn't call anymore but I really need to see you."

"Lauren, we've been through this so many times. I feel it's best that you try and get on with your life without me."

"Erik, you don't understand, I'm not calling to ask you for anything," her tone stiffened with anguish. "I just thought you would want to know that I'm dying."

Stunned, silent moments passed before I could respond.

"Lauren, please repeat that, did I understand you correctly, you’re dying?"

Under these dire circumstances I was willing to do what I could to help make her few remaining days as carefree and comfortable as possible. 

LAUREN WAS TRANSFERRED to Concordia Hospital through the generous intervention of her psychiatrist. As a patient in the psychiatric ward, Lauren began receiving comprehensive care and therapy.

Her original psychiatrist, a man, had fallen deeply under Lauren's spell during their initial work together, and he scheduled her for frequent appointments even though she wasn't a paying patient. 

He used a form of massage therapy used to release toxic body memories. He confided in Lauren that it was his personal and professional mission to work with child abuse victims and claimed to have taken a vow of celibacy. The problem with all of this, he had already been involved intimately with one of his other patients at the hospital. That patient, Dawn, shared this information with Lauren, not knowing her background with him.

When Lauren entered the hospital she was back in supermodel form due to her extended illness which made eating impossible, but because of frequent alter-shifting Lauren began consuming abnormal amounts of food. 

With cancer coursing throughout her body, she shouldn't have had such an appetite. Although medical tests only a few weeks earlier revealed the presence of extensive and terminal bone cancer, time and therapy resulted in purging the alter that was programmed to destroy her body with that disease.