Recently we had an accident. My older 18-year-old son was playing with friends outside and fell off the roof of the garage. Doctors diagnosed him with a traumatic brain injury. The child was unconscious for almost five days.
All this time I was hoping that everything would turn out fine, but my hopes did not come true. When my son woke up completely, he was not responding to the outside world: he eats, sleeps, walks, but he does not care about other people, and he also doesn’t want to talk or can’t.
Doctors do not give any guarantee for his improvement. For his sake, I quit my job and devoted myself entirely to the household and his treatment. At home my son had no improvement: a complete lack of response to anything at all, plus there was another problem – my youngest Nicky became terrified of his brother. In the beginning he didn’t even leave his nursery, he was afraid to run into him in the corridor. My persuasion only intensified his tantrums, and Nicky said it was not his brother, it's was some other guy and that he wanted to eat him – my youngest is only four years old, so my husband and I decided that it was just stress from everything that had happened.
After some time, when the situation in the house subsided a little, I began to notice strange behavior of my eldest: sometimes it seems as though he is intently watching us, he developed this creepy grin, just like an animal scowl. Plus, he only starts to smile when Nicky is nearby. My youngest seems calmer, but he is still nervous and antsy, and jumps at every sound in the house. And yesterday my neighbor came over, at which Nicky often plays with her son and told me this:
Yesterday your Nicky behaved strangely and refused to eat at our place. Then he came to me and said that he would not be able to visit us anymore. When I asked him “why?” he said: “because that man will take me away soon.” Now, this is exactly what she said:
- What man?
- The one that came with my brother.
- That man comes to visit you?
- No. He is always home.
- Nicky, you must have got something confused. You don’t have any strangers in your house.
- No, there is that man with red eyes. He always looks at me when my elder brother is asleep.
When I heard it I was horrified and now I just don’t know what to do. I myself started to be afraid of my older son, because now I'm starting to doubt that he is my son. With each passing day more and more it seems to me that there is someone else in his body, someone else who is a grown up and smart enough not to reveal himself. It is as if he is waiting for something and is always watching the whole family.
