a bit of sad news...

we had some very bad news this month too.. One of my closest friends online, had a terrible thing happen to her... Her mum decided to take her own life. It has been so heartbreaking.. Poor Bec who has lost her mum & the grandmother to her 2 beautiful girls and 2 (twins) children yet to be born... Im going to post a bit of info. that Bec's sister Mel posted over at EB and she has included a petion that they would like everyone to sign.. it is to try & stop the nasty drug that Bec's mum Nikki had been taking & was trying to come to terms with withdrawing from it... I know Bec wont mind me sharing this here as she's hoping as many people as possible will sign the petition for her & her family.....


I am writing this for a couple of different reasons. My sister ~Bec~ is known by many of you also. Some of you might know my family's situation by now. If not, my mother committed suicide on Tuesday by hanging herself in my Dad's shed. I found her body. She was 45 years old.Mum had been sick for coming up 7 years. For a long time it was unknown what was wrong. Many possibilities were tossed around including MS. After having some teeth removed about 18mths into her illness, she started getting better. She went from barely being able to move to walking again. It was found that she had mercury poisoning from her amalgum (sp) fillings. This reprieve was short lived and she soon became really sick again.Earlier this year, her test results came back saying that she no longer had mercury in her system, so they started to cut out her medications. One that she had been on for 4 years was called Rivotrill. It is intended for use by people with severe epilepsy to help control seizures. Mum was on it for pain management, restless leg syndrome and tremors. This drug was only ever trialed for 9 weeks before it was placed on the market. This drug killed my Mum.There is an online petition to make known the effects of coming off this drug. Mum is not the first person to kill themselves coming off this and unless everything is disclosed prior to prescribing this drug, she wont be the last. This petition is also in place to ask drug companies to thoroughly testdrugs before placing them on the market to help prevent this sort of situation.Please, please , please read the information on this site and sign the petition for my Mum and my family. We need to prevent this from happening to other people. If you know anyone who is on Rivotrill (also known as Klonopin in other countries) please get them to read this to inform them of the effects and so that they can start to plan to get weaned off this drug.Here is the petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/K12345/petition.html This is also to put out there the plea that if you do feel suicidal, please don't do it. I know it sounds so easy to write that down but many people in my circle of family and friends, myself included) have suffered depression. I have been to those dark places before and have contemplated suicide myself on more than one occasion. Seeing how this has effected so many people has made me realise that no matter how hard things get, I could never do that to the people I love.This has destroyed our family and everyone we know. I have a 10 week old daughter who will never know her Nanna. My sister has a 5 and 3.5 year old and is pregnant with twins. The twins will never know her and her girls' hearts are breaking. It only just clicked with Ebony today that Nanna won't be coming back. I thought that my brother may have been spared some of the pain because he had not yet had children, but as he said, Mum will never attend his wedding, she will never see his children.My Dad is beside himself. He wants to stay in that house. He is petrified that if he does that I won't visit or bring Emily around. And I can't tell him that I will. I can't go back there and see . . . well anything. Not yet anyway.You have no idea how much somebody effects everybodies lives. The bag checker lady at our local Big W always asks how our mum is going. We told her that she had passed away and she started crying. The chemist, the butcher, everybody loved her but in this case even that wasn't enough.For everybody else, please look for signs in loved ones. The signs were there with Mum but she had always been so outspoken about suicide and how selfish it was- she had even talked a few people away from that edge - that we never thought that this would happen. It was not my Mum that made this choice . . . she wouldn't have but this drug induced illness had such a hold over her that she could not get out.Please hold your loved ones close tonight and never let them go....