The Artful Placement of Words
An excerpt from the unfolding story of systemic betrayal, medical failure, and the mother who tried to stop it.
After two more months of institutional captivity, Mayo Clinic and Mower County finally released possession—but not custody—of Lindsey’s infant son.
The baby who had once nursed peacefully at the time of his abduction was now a fragile, broken child.
Rico lay in bed with a “weak cry,” his small body wracked with discomfort and intermittent grunting. His breathing had worsened, now requiring supplemental oxygen. His belly remained distended, and each shallow inhale carried the sound of pain. He could no longer safely feed by mouth. A new inward-turning eye and the absence of visual tracking revealed what the medical language still refused to say plainly: his brain had been injured. And despite a single fleeting smile, it seemed Rico had already begun to give up.
The cruelty wasn’t over.
Rico still bore a left-to-right cardiac shunt. He suffered from obstructive sleep apnea. The same child who once breastfed contentedly now relied on a malfunctioning G-tube leaking into bandages. This wasn't medicine. It was damage control.
Just days after his release, the gastrostomy tube fell out. Lindsey was told to tape it in place.
That was Mayo Clinic’s new standard of care—duct tape.
Four months after birth and multiple blood transfusions later, AZT was finally discontinued. A quiet admission that Lindsey had been right from the beginning. But it didn’t matter. The damage had been done. She had already been labeled. Discredited. Buried beneath the phrase “refused treatment.”
Because the system needed a villain—and truth had no place in that role.
Rico remained dangerously ill. His muscles were wasting. His platelet count had doubled, signaling deep inflammation. His CRP—normally below 3.0—remained over 200. His bone marrow couldn’t regenerate. Hematocrit, leukocytes, neutrophils—all collapsed. And yet, even as his body failed, his T-cell count remained high.
His immune system was still fighting.
So if HIV wasn’t suppressing it… what was?
The answer isn’t HIV. It’s everything that followed birth.
The drugs. The transfusions. The forced separation. The chaos.
He had left the sanctuary of the womb only to become a Petri dish—his sterile environment transformed into an incubator of harm.
Mayo Clinic, once presumed a haven, had become the crucible of his suffering.
His symptoms aren’t mysterious. They’re not elusive. They are linear. Predictable. Inevitable.
They begin the moment he left Lindsey’s womb.
What followed was a cascade: trauma, abduction, AZT, blood transfusions, infections, nutritional collapse. Domino after domino. And it doesn’t matter which fell first—because now we can see where they all led.
Every warning Lindsey gave on the day of his birth came true.
Anemia. Neutropenia. Leukopenia. Muscle loss. Transfusions.
All of it.
All of it—avoidable.