Parkinson's Fake

Simon Says: Hello, one part of my story from this last year is definitely interesting. At least to me it is. I had this roommate, his name was Ralph Livingston. I met Ralph while living in a shared house in Burnsville, MN. There were four guys living in this house and we were each paying close to $400 a month for a room. The house had two shared bathrooms and a shared kitchen. Two of the residents were just kids in their early 20's and then there was Ralph and I in our early 50's. The younger guys pretty much trashed the place, never cleaning up after themselves and always bringing all their friends over to party. Ralph and I would party along with them but at least we tried to keep the place clean. Neither Ralph nor I had much of a taste for weed but the house was always foggy with marijuana smoke. My thing was alcohol and Ralph was addicted to prescription pain killers (vicodin, percocet, and phentynal patches). The highest guy in the house was usually Ralph but he could be high and no one would really know it. I didn't know it at the time but Ralph was a natural con man. Ralph claimed to have Parkinson’s disease so he could get a large portion of his drugs prescribed to him legally. I became suspicious when the only time he exhibited any symptoms is when he had to go see his doctor. He was prescribed some 20 different medications a day but only took the pain meds, the rest he would just throw in a drawer and they would pile up fast. Every now and then he would empty the drawer into the garbage. My being an alcoholic and with everything else going on in the house I didn't really care what he was doing. Needless to say Ralph’s Parkinson’s disease symptoms would mysteriously disappear after his doctors appointments. I did some research into Parkinson's and found that the disease can only be diagnosed by the symptoms. There are no blood tests or any other kind of tests that will indicate Parkinson's. The only definitive way to diagnose this disease is after the death of the patient when an autopsy can be performed to confirm the presence of Parkinson's. I was told this information directly from a PhD Neuroscientist. So if you want to get pain killers you can research the symptoms of Parkinson's disease and just fake it when you go to the doctors office. Anyway, I didn't care what he did as long as it didn't affect me. The only reason I checked into it was because Ralph eventually conned me out of everything I owned. Along with Ralphs diagnosis of Parkinson's came Social Security Disability. He also got County funded housing and food stamps because his Social Security wasn't considered adequate. So Ralph gets a free apartment in Eagan and a pretty nice one at that. Since Ralph and I had become friends and we were both fed up with the younger guys living in the house, Ralph offered me a room in his new apartment where I paid about the same amount of money. I lived in the apartment for a little more than a year off and on. Ralph would get so fucked up on the pain killers, especially when he put the phentynal patches on, that he couldn't walk or talk or do much of anything but stumble around. At one point I couldn't take it anymore and moved into another friends house for about six months and then back into Ralphs when I had to move out of my other friends place. Ralph continued to get wasted and I just tried to stay out of the apartment as much as possible, more or less just a place to sleep. One morning I woke up and Ralph was bleeding from his mouth and ass. I called a friend of mine and asked if it was anything I should worry about. The answer was yes. The Tylenol in the pain killers and his heavy drinking had burned a hole in his stomach and caused some serious liver damage. I got him into my car and told him he had to get to the hospital quick. He didn't want to go because then his social workers would become aware of his addiction. The whole way to the hospital he kept complaining that he was all right and didn't need to go to the ER. I brought him there anyway and when I arrived at the ER the medics didn't waste any time getting him out of the car and onto a gurney. I'm no hero but the doctor there told me that if I hadn't brought him in when I did he would have died. He was in the ICU there for about a week and then they released him back home where he continued to abuse the drugs and began acting different. He was getting so loaded that he was stumbling around the place knocking over furniture and basically wrecking the place. I had to start gluing things down so he wouldn't knock shit over and break everything. One day he fell down in the shower and banged his head on the water fixture and had blood all over the bathroom from trying to get back on his feet. I ended up having to clean the bathroom, he claimed he was having trouble because of the Parkinson’s and I would just say oh because I didn't want to confront him on his bullshit. His pain killer addiction was out of the bag since his visit to the hospital and he knew it. He didn't say anything to me about it because he had to thank me for saving his life but he also blamed me for alerting social services that his real problem was an insatiable need to be totally fucked up on pain killers. I have to admit that I had tried them a few times myself but could never see what the big deal was. One really crazy thing about this story is Ralph had a young girlfriend for awhile and one day they found her dead in her apartment, overdosed on pain killers. Pain killers that Ralph had given her. I guess the phentynal patches were the thing that had pushed her over the edge. The coroner questioned the phentynal patches but no one seemed to know where she got them. Her death was ruled a suicide but I've got a feeling it would've been called something else had they known where she got the drugs from. Ralph told me this story one day when he was a little out of it. Ralph is about 6'5” and about 240 lbs. His girlfriend was just a little dainty thing and I don't think she could handle the same doses as Ralph. So like I said, Ralph was acting a little weirder than usual after I brought him to the hospital and one day I had brought my girlfriend over and we were cooking some dinner. My girlfriend and I got into a heated argument about something, I can't even remember what it was about. All of a sudden Ralph physically attacked me, I'm a smaller guy but I was able to hold my own against this big dude and I ended up throwing him into a chair which completely gernaded because of his size. I remember trying to tell Ralph to just cool off and settle down. I think he could see things weren't going to go his way so he jumped up, grabbed his cell phone and ran out the patio door. He called 911 and told the police that I had attacked him and chased him outside. When the cops arrived they talked to him first because he was outside waiting for them and he was the one who had called for help. I had been drinking that day but I was still in control of my faculties which didn't matter one bit. They gave me a breathalyzer and that was it, I was on my way to jail for assault. Ralph files a restraining order against me so I can't even go back to the place I've been living for over a year. Everything I own is in that apartment including my dog and I couldn't go back there. I went there anyway and he acted like nothing ever happened. Then he calls the cops again to have me removed from the apartment. I had a few drinks again so this time the cops bring me to Ramsey County Detox. While I was in detox I met another woman and that's another story that needs to be told. When I get out of there I end up having to get a hotel room and I can't get my stuff, most of the furniture in the place belonged to me. I guess I could have got a police escort to get my things but I had no where to put it. It wasn't like I was expecting this crap so I didn't have enough money to get a storage place so my only option was to leave it there until we could settle it in court. I had a classic Jaguar parked in the garage with expired tabs because I never drove the car. Ralph pushes the car out of the garage and parks it in the outside lot then he calls the cops and tells them there's a car parked in the lot with expired tabs. By the time I find out about this, three weeks had passed and I didn't have enough money to get the car out of the impound lot. This is where he really starts screwing me over. I was financially screwed and he knew it. I ended up having to sell the car to a friend of mine for the cost of getting it out of the impound lot. I lost a ton of money on that deal. Meanwhile, unknown to me, Ralph has to go into treatment for his addiction and while he's there he decides not to pay the rent on the apartment so he lost his apartment and I lost all my belongings. At least that’s what he's telling me now. A friend of mine saw Ralph at Target in West St.Paul and she said he was perfectly normal, not showing any signs of Parkinson's disease. The guys got to be starting to stress out because you just can't fake a progressive disease forever. The County is now paying for this guy to live in a nursing home where I heard he uses a walker to get around and shakes like a leaf. His only relief has got to be when his girlfriend picks him up so he can stop putting on the Parkinson's deception. To give it up now would make him guilty of fraud. I know this story sounds a little too bizarre to be true but it's for real, but this is the short version of the story. I'll be filling it in more and more with other stories that relate to this one. I wish I could turn him in but it would take a lot, he would have to be caught faking it and how do you catch someone who's pretending to have a disease that can only be diagnosed by the symptoms?