Poison

It has been days nows. I have a migraine that makes the whole left side of my head feel like someone kicked it in like a mushy melon. Sure, I get migraines. I have gotten awful ones since the Vespa accident. They come from my jaw not fitting together properly and spasming. I usually take Imitrex, but last year my insurance company would not longer cover it, instead offering up Relpax, which seems to work within an hour.

But these last 2 weeks I have had one every single day. The pill will alleviate it a bit for a while but then it comes back. My stomach hurts, I get diarrhea and light/sound/smells upset me.

Last night I felt so sick. Like I should be running to the ER kind of sick. I even went to get a massage hoping it'd help.

I was restless; laying down makes it worse because even something as soft as a pillow hurts.

I reread Swango's letters. Two in two days. Hm..they seem to be coming fast and furious. I sit back and think, what am I doing this for? How do I feel about these characters. It is this helping me understand and cope with what John did? I don't have answers yet, but I keep on, compelled.

My therapist thinks this book idea is genius and the dude is pretty fucking smart, so I will choose--right now at least--to believe in him even if I can't believe in myself.

God the pounding was and is something awful.

I decided to Google Swango and stare at his picture.

And I came across this passage in an article written about him in a book that chronicled his crimes:

Headaches began. Pounding, dizzying headaches. Always troubled by migraines, KK had never experienced anything as miserable as these. For a while she attributed them to tension but deep down inside she wondered if Swango was dropping chemicals in her food. She was a nurse, a good one, and she most likely feared the worst.

Finally, she couldn't take it anymore and rushed back to her mother's house in Virginia. Away from Swango, the headaches abruptly ended.

Gone from him, she continued to love him. Perhaps she continued to believe, meekly, that Swango was innocent and all would be right in the end. But, she couldn't, just couldn't, explain why those headaches vanished the day she left.

She weighed her emotions, separated her hopes from the obvious, until the obvious became too unbearable. And then she committed suicide.

At her apartment police found a note left behind, addressed to her mom and Al Cooper:

"I love you both so much. I just didn't want to be here anymore. Just found day-to-day living a constant struggle with my thoughts. I'd say I'm sorry, but I'm not. I feel that sense of peace, 'peace of mind,' I've been looking for. It's nice."

An addendum below, to Michael, read:

"I love you more! You're the most precious man I've ever known.
"Love, KK"


My Goodness! I knew he had affianced a woman named KK. (She would have been my age if not for that dastardly suicide.) But the headaches. And finding that passage about them, when his letters came so frequently that matched with the intensity of the migraines I am getting. I allowed myself to become paranoid and think maybe he is putting something on these letters to poison me.

I talked to a friend whose husband is a police sargeant. She said that maybe I wasn't being paranoid. I also noted that I have always thought it odd that he wraps a blank sheet of paper around his letters. Paper is hard to come by for prisoners and I have always thought it strange that he wastes a whole sheet of it in each envelope. His letters range from 5-11 pages, long hand, so there is no need to cover them in a blank sheet to hide the words from view through the envelope.

Later that night my friend called me and said her husband had said he thinks it is highly likely Swango is dousing them with some sort of cleaning agent or heavy metal and that I should get bloodwork done.

There is NO way I can go to my general practitioner and request she look for poison. She is the one I went to the day after I found out about the "poison" John exposed me for two years.

And then I came upon this:


She said arsenic was found in her daughter's body at the time of her death. Before her death, Ms. Kinney showed signs of arsenic poisoning, such as vomiting, migraine headaches, nausea and disorientation, Mrs. Cooper said.

We know that he poisoned Kristin Kinney, said Al Cooper, Ms. Kinney's stepfather.

Swango fiancee Kristin Kinney killed herself. Her parents believe arsenic poisoning caused mental disorientation that triggered the suicide.



For Your Reading Pleasure