Walking on Eggshells: Discovering Strength and Courage Amid Chaos (23 page)

As you may recall, I was already expecting when Bo and I married. As my due date grew near I compared this pregnancy experience to the one I had with Abbie. Really, there was no comparison. For this baby I had a nice home that included a dad. I had a drug-free life and plenty of food. For me it was the great American Dream. All I had ever wanted was a home with a mom and a dad, and lots of kids to sit around the dinner table with. All of that was coming true, but it had taken an emotional roller coaster to get here.

Late in 2008 I had gone off my birth control pills for two short weeks to regulate my system and start a new kind of pill. When I began the new pills from the first week on, I didn’t feel right. I went to my doctor and she suggested we wait another month. When I didn’t have my period in November of that year I began to get worried. The day before Christmas I bought a home pregnancy test, used it, and went into our bedroom to read it by myself.

When the test turned out to be positive I cried my eyes out. I was so devastated that I dropped to my knees. Bo and I weren’t married at this point and I had struggled as a single mom to Abbie. Even though my life was much better now, I knew how hard it was for both the baby and the mom when they were on their own. I didn’t want to put another baby through all of that hardship.

Eventually I wiped the tears off my face, put on a happy face for Bo, and went out to the living room. “Let’s go read the test,” I said with a fake smile. Fortunately, Bo was thrilled that he was going to be a dad again.

I was still taking care of my younger brothers and sister at Dad’s house, but by this time I was also serving as an assistant of sorts to Beth. My duties often kept me there until eight or nine at night. Plus when we were filming the show, the hours could run much later than that. I knew that as my pregnancy progressed it would be too much, so as Bo washed the dishes one night I called Beth. “Guess what?” I said brightly. “I have good news. I’m pregnant.” I was hoping for some celebratory words of joy, but what I got instead was, “That will be
great
for the ratings!”

I mentioned to Bo that maybe we ought to get married before I got too big with the baby. Even though I wanted a beach wedding, we initially tried to pull together a quickie wedding in Las Vegas, but everything from the flowers to the venue fell apart. Then Beth suggested that we get married on the show. It made sense. We lived in paradise. Why not have a beautiful wedding at home? So that’s what we did.

I was fourteen weeks pregnant on the day of my wedding on February 20, 2009, and while I was completely head over heels in love, it wasn’t too long before I began to see some red flags. At this point, however, the flags were nothing more than a vague warning, but it wouldn’t take long for them to turn into a full-blown hurricane.

★

My pregnancy progressed with a few hitches. Bo went with me to the first doctor’s appointment and never went to another. He also never touched my stomach after that appointment, not ever, until after the baby was born. I know he wanted our child, but his lack of touch made me feel unsupported and unloved. I also began spotting after a hike on the Big Island and was confined to bed rest for several weeks. My inability to be mobile didn’t help our film schedule, but by the time I was seven months along I was back in full force, albeit reluctantly.

Bounty hunting is a physical and dangerous job, and I didn’t feel comfortable doing it in the later stages of pregnancy. On one hunt we were going after a heroin addict. In the process I ended up in the backseat of a car with an informant during a high-speed chase. I was terrified for my baby, and after, I called Bo. I was nearly hysterical and insisted that I wanted to quit the show. Bo calmed me down, and I resumed filming other episodes.

Our beautiful daughter, Madalynn Grace Galanti, was born
on August 7, 2009. Bo and I were both instantly besotted with this amazing golden-haired child. As I mentioned before, the production crew filmed the entire birth for the show. In an ideal world, I would have preferred them not to be there for that important private moment with our little family, but everyone involved convinced me that our viewers would like to share that experience, so I acquiesced.

While I was pregnant, Bo and Beth had numerous conversations about how the birth could be filmed tastefully, then made the decision to do it. This was after Dad and Beth were offered a “bonus” for the exclusive rights, and Bo learned that we would get part of it. The birth of our child was the first time I realized that money was so important to Bo.

Later, as I watched the show as it aired, I felt exploited. I know the viewers enjoyed the episode, as we got tons of positive e-mail and Twitter and Facebook posts about it, and I was happy about that part of it. But I’m still not sure why I didn’t insist that the birth not be filmed. It would have been my right to do so. I could have asked my doctor to clear the room, and today I would have done so without a second thought. All I can say is that I wasn’t there yet. I had made great strides in my recovery and in developing some self-esteem, but I was not where I needed to be. Not yet, anyway.

★

After the birth I was prescribed and took codeine for the pain. I had not been high since I was eighteen years old, but the codeine took me there right away. After the birth I also had issues with my body image, as I had gained more than 100 pounds during my pregnancy. I don’t know exactly how much I gained because when I reached 190 pounds, I stopped weighing myself. I do know that I gained a lot of weight after that. When I took the codeine, however, all the bad feelings about my body went away. In fact, I felt wonderful! Sadly, I didn’t have any idea that I was in a dangerous situation with my addiction. After all, I reasoned, the doctor had prescribed these pills to me. I was
supposed
to be taking them.

Relatively quickly, I dropped to 150 pounds, which was still about 50 pounds too much for me. Then I plateaued. No matter what I did, I could not drop another pound. I didn’t have too much time to think about that, though, because I had a baby to take care of.

After we got Mady home I was pleased to realize that I was a far better mom to Mady as an infant than I had been to Abbie. I had come a long way! But when Mady was just a month old, she began running a high temperature. Concerned, I took her to Queens Hospital in Honolulu on September 11, 2009. This was against the advice of my family and husband. They all thought I was overreacting. The people on staff at the hospital agreed with me, however. In fact, they suspected meningitis and wanted to do a spinal tap.

When I heard that news I began to feel that my life was starting to spin me out of control. It was a feeling I often had when Abbie
was small, and I was overwhelmed. A spinal tap? On my one-month-old baby? Some of my feelings may have been from the codeine I was taking and some of it might have been true fear. Some of my roller coaster emotions might have been hormones from the birth—and from breast-feeding. Or they might have caused by stress from having a husband who had two jobs and no money, or being on camera almost one hundred pounds heavier than I had been a few months before.

Needing support, I called Beth, and when she came we asked if we could see another doctor. The original doctor was at the tail end of her shift and was worn out. I did not feel comfortable having her do the spinal tap when she was obviously exhausted. We asked to wait until the next doctor arrived but were told we couldn’t do that. This doctor, apparently, had to do the spinal. Instead, I decided to take Mady home and find a different doctor the next day.

Leaving wasn’t as simple as walking out the door, though. When Beth and I tried to leave the hospital a few minutes later, security would not agree to bring our cars around unless we left Mady with them. They were that serious about her health, and their attitude just scared me all the more. We were able to leave only after Beth took out her iPhone and began filming members of the security staff who were harassing us. Then I took Mady to her pediatrician, who suggested I give the fever one more day before making any decisions about what to do.

That evening I lay in bed with Mady and prayed with everything I had that she would be okay. The next morning, when
Mady was no better, I left Bo asleep in bed and took Mady back to our pediatrician, who encouraged me to take Mady to Kapiolani Women’s and Children’s Hospital. They ended up doing a spinal tap. Mady’s veins were so small that it took them seven tries to get the needle in. They’d pat her feet, her ankles, her hands, and her arms very hard to try to get her veins to come up. She was screaming and screaming and I was so upset a staff member gave me some Ativan to decrease my growing anxiety.

Mady was hospitalized for a week—a week during which Bo was very absent—and during which I took both codeine and Ativan the entire time. Tests on Mady’s cloudy spinal fluid had come back positive for meningitis, an infection of the membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord. They didn’t yet know if it was bacterial or viral in nature, but started Mady on antibiotics out of caution. While I was getting high and spending every second of the day with Mady in the hospital, Serene and Abbie were with Big Travis (Travis’s father), and Bo got himself a tattoo of a scorpion.

I was devastated by my family’s lack of support. Mady was hospitalized from September 12 through September 20. During that time Bo and Cecily each brought me food and visited once. No one else came.

Beth had scheduled a photo shoot for season six in California on September 28. Because I was breast-feeding I had no choice but to fly with Mady to the shoot. In addition, I was still huge, and wardrobe had my old measurements. Nothing they brought in even came close to fitting. It was beyond embarrassing. I was still
about 150 pounds, but I am normally a tiny person and am just five feet tall. Beth at that time was thinner than I was, so I wore Beth’s clothes for the shoot.

While I can’t be positive, I think Mady began having breathing difficulties at the shoot. Dad is a chain-smoker and smoked throughout the session. I think the smoke from the cigarettes was the start of Mady’s second round of hospitalization.

Two days after we got home Mady came down with pneumonia. Back in the hospital she had a second spinal tap, but this time we had good news: the fluid was clear. There was a second round of IVs and antibiotics, but during the ten days we were there this time, absolutely no one came to see us.

To me, this was just another sign that my irrevocable act, my allowing the adults around me to assume it was Dad who molested me, will never be forgotten. Everyone throughout my life had always said what a screwed-up mess I was, but by now I had realized that was not true. I was a good mom, a good person. I had come a long way. Maybe, I thought, if my family could not support me at a time like this, they were the ones who were screwed up.

I slept both hospital stays on a pullout chair and was up each time the doctors came in for their every-two-hour check on Mady. By the seventh or eighth day I was so exhausted I snapped at a new doctor who came in early one morning after a shift change and chased her out of the room. I had been up with Mady all night and hadn’t slept in several days.

A month later we were all in Colorado for Thanksgiving to
film a Christmas special. Between the birth, Mady’s illnesses, my horrendous weight gain, keeping up a public image, taping episodes of the show, and my family’s total lack of support, it was a lot to handle. And I managed it all in completely the wrong way, by taking more pills.

★

On New Year’s Eve that Year Bo and I went out with Duane Lee and his girlfriend. I was still really upset about my body image and my inability to lose weight and had decided to get a breast enhancement after the holidays. Bo had been “hands off” for months now, and I thought the surgery would make me more attractive to him.

I was in the shower in the Waikiki hotel room Bo and I had taken for the night when we somehow got into a huge fight. One reason I don’t remember the start of the fight is that we had been drinking, and I hadn’t drunk anything for years. Bo ended up throwing his wedding ring at me and smacking me in the head. Terrified, I locked the bathroom door, but Bo is a big guy and he broke the door down and pulled me out of the shower by my neck, then held me captive against the wall.

When I was able to break free I called security. I wanted Bo out of the room. Our family had had Cecily’s birthday party there the previous June, and when I told security I wanted the police involved they said no. They reasoned that because I was Dog’s
daughter, bringing the police into it could take the situation completely out of hand. Instead, they helped me out of the room and I went home without Bo.

That was the first time my husband ever laid hands on me, but it was not the last. It all fell into place for me then, way too late. In the months we had been married, Bo had had some very angry outbursts, and I realized that I had become an abused spouse, with all of the ugly things that term implies.

After the New Year’s incident I was prescribed more painkillers because my neck was messed up. Then, after my breast surgery, I was prescribed Percocet and Valium. I was taking all of these pills every day along with the other pills I had been prescribed. When I ran out, I’d just get refills. It was that easy. I’d also had some dental work done and was prescribed Tylenol 3, then Tylenol 4. Before I knew it, I was hooked on this very dangerous mix of prescription drugs. It got so bad that if I didn’t take the pills I would begin to shake.

I was also taking these pills on bounty hunts and while we were filming for the show. During the summer we usually filmed in Colorado, and it was after a Justin Bieber concert there that our entire family went to that things really fell apart. Instead of watching the show, I ended up partying near the buses with Justin’s production crew. I should have sat with my family and enjoyed the show. I realized that even then, but by this time my addiction was so out of control it was all I could think about. Pills and booze had completely taken over my life.