Tracy Flanigan:  

Hello, My story isn't the most interesting story, but here it goes. After I graduated in 1982, I truly wanted to continue my education, but due to my family's situation I was needed to contribute as much money as I could to the family. I did sign up for a couple of classes at Normandale Community College and I started to work fulltime as a Nursing Assistant, which was what I had been working at when I was in high school. Pretty quickly into my working fulltime, I ended up seriously injuring my back doing a patient (sp?) lift. I was doing everything "by the rules" but I still ended up getting that injury; that was the end of my "career" as far as nursing went. I also had to stop going to school because I was in so much pain that I had trouble walking, let alone carrying a backpack full of textbooks around. I was in dispair and lost as to what my next move would be. I did go through a law suit against the workman compensation company which took about 15 months. I got a very little bit of compensation during that time period. I was VERY bored so I did become involved in community theater for around 3 years. I enjoyed working back stage the most. I loved assisting the stage manager as much as I could and I found many friends by being involved in this activity. Eventually my "lawsuit" came to a settlement and I was awarded somewhere around $5,000, well the settement was bigger than that, but after paying the lawyer and the dr's I ended up with the 5 K. WOW woopie, lol. As many of you should remember, I was/am a singer. I found an ad in the paper for Eastern Onion Singing Telegram Service and I went ahead and auditioned for them. It ended up that one of the "powers that be" was a good friend of mine from community theater; I was cast as "May East" (spoofing Mae West) I did a pretty good job at that if I do say myself. I worked for them for about a year. It turned out to not pay very well at all and it was hard on my car(s) bottom line it just didn't work out the way I wanted it to. When I left EO, I just started to apply for any kind of job I thought I could handle. I was always very fortunate in that when ever I interviewed for a job, I got it. I don't know why things happened that way for as long as it did, but it was great for me for many years. I started working at a company that sold/distributed "fasteners", nails, nuts, bolts, those sort of things. I know SO INTERESTING, lol.The first day I worked, I saw a guy in the wharehouse that who I thought was EXTREMELY attractive, I immediately thought that he must have been dating someone else and I would never have a chance getting him for myself. Within 3 months of working there, after flirting back and forth in a big way, we ended up getting together. No, we did not "hook up" as the kids say today, lol, I wasn't THAT kind of girl. However, things got pretty serious very fast and we were "exclusive" within a couple of weeks. Long story short, after three years of dating and 1 year of living together, we got married. We will be celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary this coming March 18th. We ended up having two children, a boy born in 1990 and a girl born in 1997. We did not mean for them to be so far apart in age, but our daughter decided to come in her own time, which if you knew her fits with her personality perfectly, lol. When our son Matthew hit around the age of 13, we were having MANY issues with him. Not the typical adolescent stuff, but into addition to those behaviors. We sent him to counselors, psychiatrists, he got involved with social workers and psychologists at his shcool. He was diagnosed with a lot of stuff such as ADD, ODD (oppositional defiant disorder, it basically manifested itself in that he was VERY disrespectful to any authority personal, dr's and us) again this was not considered to be a "behavioral problem" but a DIAGNOSIS as in something was wrong with the chemicals in his brain. Yet the same dr's who diagnosed these problems, would FIRE him as a client when he showed the symptoms of these disorders. I basically am trying to say that we were sent every which way, told totally contridicting information and no matter how hard we tried to work with these supposed professionals, our son was NEVER served in the way he deserved to be. He ended up going into residential treatment which was MY idea, not the dr's and in hindsight I am not sure if it ever helped him at all. It did however give us a respite from him literally running our household and demanding our attention to the point that we were not giving enough attention to his little sister, Shannon, and we knew it but had no idea how to fix it. On July 5th, 2007 Matthew took an overdose of my prescription me...Expand for more