Pam's Story: Finding a new purpose (Part 5)

Part 5 of a 6-day series

By trying to overdose on their own psychiatric medications, Pam Kazmaier and her son Zack may have done themselves a favor. Indeed, their suicide attempt may have saved their lives.

A 6-part series

Sunday: Together in death

Monday: By the book

Tuesday: Troubled pasts

Wednesday: “I am not their servant”

Today: New hair, new underwear

Friday: “You don’t throw people away”

Their inpatient treatment at St. Luke’s Behavioral Health Center set them both on a path to remarkable recovery. Doctors weaned 12-year-old Zack off the antidepressants that had made him suicidal for most of his life and started him on a new anti-psychotic medication that worked wonders.

When he returned to school in early October 2003, his teachers at Field Elementary were amazed at his transformation. Just a couple of weeks earlier he was out of control, manic and defiant. Now he was well-mannered and sociable.

He still struggled with bipolar disorder and learning disabilities, but he was as stable as he’d been in years. He was learning to rely more on his father and didn’t need Pam’s constant, obsessive attention.

Pam tried to get back to normal, despite megadoses of psychiatric medications, shaky hands, a shaky marriage and a criminal indictment.

She cooked, cleaned and attended Mormon church services with her husband, Kevin, and their two boys. She went through the motions, while inside she felt ashamed and defeated.

She’d been accused of trying to harm her own child, though she believed at the time that she was helping all of them by putting an end to their suffering. Facing the possibility of more than 30 years in prison, the former nurse decided to accept a plea agreement that would put her on probation for 10 years for child abuse.

Still, Pam managed to navigate the bureaucratic maze that is the county’s public mental health system and found ValueOptions case manager Jackie Byrd.

“She was not well,” Jackie recalls. “She just had that beaten-down look to her. Very frumpy. Always clean, but baggy clothes. Very much the workhorse.”

Pam’s nursing career was over. She was sedated most of the time, unsteady the rest, and couldn’t work like that. Besides, a felony conviction meant she would have to surrender the license she’d earned nearly 30 years earlier.

After more than 20 years, her marriage might be over, too. Her husband had been advised to divorce her and get custody of their two boys. Kevin was still angry, but he hadn’t yet quit on the woman he met in high school Spanish class.

While Pam was disentangling herself from Zack and leaving more of the child care responsibilities to Kevin, she still couldn’t figure out a reason for living.

“Constantly, every day she wanted to die,” Jackie recalls. “She’d say, ‘I went to bed last night and I prayed to God to die. And I woke up in the morning and I’m really pissed. Why am I still here?’ “

Pam had to work at getting better. So she pushed herself out the door and walked into the local office of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

There she found compassion, understanding and acceptance, something that she felt was lacking at her church and at home. She took classes and trained to become a support group facilitator and was certified in August 2004, a month after she signed the plea agreement.

When Pam told the NAMI director about her felony, he told her not to worry. “Eventually, everyone with mental illness ends up getting charged with something.”

But it was hard for Pam to stop dwelling on her identity as a felon. Jackie helped move her case to the county’s mental health court, specifically designed to encourage recovery and staffed by judges, lawyers and probation officers with mental health training. With Jackie’s encouragement, she began thinking more about herself.

She quit the Mormon church and bought regular underwear for the first time in 20 years. She bought a box of tea. She began consuming books by women writers: “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan; “The Price of Motherhood” by Ann Crittenden; “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” by Gloria Steinem.

“With each encouraging word from these new female friends of mine, I began to piece together a happy life,” she wrote in an online essay. “I became selfish for the first time in my life.”

She got her gray hair cut and colored brown, with caramel highlights. She began exercising every day and lost 30 pounds. She collected bits of turquoise-colored sea glass because it made her feel good.

And she did everything her plea agreement required: took her medication religiously, met with her case manager, her probation officer, her psychiatrist. She attended group therapy and paid her fines and fees.

Pam landed a job at Triple R’s East Valley Clubhouse in Mesa, a place for people with serious mental illness to find work, housing and companionship.

The clubhouse gave her a reason to wake up every morning, and she dedicated herself to its members, helping them learn skills and get jobs, filling in for them at Whataburger if they couldn’t make their shift, sharing her experiences and listening to theirs. The job was key to her recovery, and she was getting paid, albeit at a fraction of her nursing salary.

Pam’s boundless energy, sense of humor and enthusiasm were contagious. The staff and the members loved her, and she loved them back.

“Everybody has a passion,” Pam would say of the clubhouse members. “Everybody has a gift to give to the planet.”

The future was looking brighter. But it occurred to Pam that her life at home was still much the same. The tidy house off Gilbert Road was nice enough, but it was full of men and motorcycle parts and grease and dishes and a TV in every room.

As her relationships with her husband and sons improved, her mental health demanded that she stop taking care of everyone and find some peace and quiet.

“It’s such a guy house. It’s like living in an auto shop,” Pam says now. “The last straw was when I came home and found a muffler on the kitchen table.”

Pam asked Kevin for her own place, and they bought a first-floor condominium about a mile from their home. He helped her paint the walls in vibrant shades of turquoise and install modern Ikea furnishings. She bought a beta fish and named it Gloria and went back and forth between what she now called “Kevin’s house” and her new place.

In October 2006, three years after she lay down with her son to commit suicide, Pam earned her certification as a psychiatric rehabilitation practitioner. She had passed a rigorous test and found a new career.

Under the plea agreement, her felony conviction was not supposed to keep her from getting a job, but the crime was still on her state record. So when a new requirement came down earlier this year that all Triple R employees pass a background check, she failed.

The job she so loved was in jeopardy.