Exo

This might be a long read and I'll try to make it as brief as possible. For those who care enough to read thank you in advance. I need serious advice on what to do with my little brother.

My brother Ryan is 19 years old. He'll be 20 in June. My brother has serious mental problems. The problem is that I honestly don't know what's wrong with him. If there was a disease called "being a f*cking scumbag assh*le" then he would have that.

I believe this all started when he severely broke his leg when he was 15 years old. He broke his tibia and fibia in two places while snowboarding. He spent five days in the hospital on probably the strongest pain killers known to man that a hospital can legally distribute because the idiotic doctors at the hospital he was taken too decided that the best way to fix an injury like that was merely to set the bones and put a cast over it. Every time he moved he was in agonizing pain. We somehow brought him home from the hospital and made him a makeshift bedroom in the basement so that he could have easier access to the bathroom and have access to our television. Two painful weeks went by and he couldn't even walk to the bathroom he was in so much pain. We brought him to a different hospital and they called the other doctors idiots and surgically implanted steel rods in his leg. His pain decreased but he still had to spend at least a month in bed recovering. He was prescribed pain killers the whole time.

I believe that was what set in motion all the events I'm going to describe.

• After he got back to school his grades plummeted. He was always a B student and now he was lucky to get a C. He must have set a record for school absences and he cut class every day. He served in school suspension for cutting every other day and was told that he'd have to stay back a year due to the absences. This is where my mother comes in.
• My mother went to the school and somehow was able to get them to give him another chance and let him more on to senior year. Senior year comes around and he does the exact same thing. He cuts class. He doesn't go to school. His grades are worse than ever. The school feels like they've been sh*t on and rightfully so and they decide again to keep him back another year. Again my mother pleads with them and somehow gets them to consider giving him one last chance by letting him serve his detentions and pass summer school. He didn't walk at graduation. He barely got through summer school. Barely.
• After high school he had a series of jobs that went nowhere. He worked at Burger King and told us he was being made a manager. A week after that announcement he told us that he quit because he wasn't being treated fairly. I thought this was suspicious and I went to Burger King. He was fired for taking somebodies paycheck and trying to cash it. I don't even know how that's possible but he did it. I confronted him about it and he denied it.
• The next job he had was working at a pizza place. My mother had a suspicion that he wasn't working there so I decided to pay a visit to them. Before I went inside I called him and asked if he had work today and he said he worked for a couple hours in the morning and that they told him to take the rest of the day off. I went inside and they told me that they fired him a week ago. I asked why and they said that they believe he has a drug problem and that he just wasn't stable enough to work there.

This isn't the first time he's had a problem with drugs. Before his broken leg my father found him in possession of an ounce of weed that was being used for sale. This is actually a common thing in my town. My best friends have sold weed and some still do. I occasionally smoke some weed so this has always been a somewhat soft spot for me. My father actually gave it back to him because he thought that he'd be in debt with some drug dealer. This shouldn't have happened. Knowing what I know now. We should have done something about that. I don't know what but we should have done something.

Over the last couple years my family (it's just the four of us) have been noticing things that we just can't explain. Money has been missing. Electronics have been missing. My brother and father are volunteer firefighters and the department uses a banquet hall and bar to generate money. My father noticed money missing from the cash drawer and put in a camera to see if he could catch the thief. My father works over 40 hours a week and he mistakenly trusted my brother enough to let him know that there was a camera in the hall. The very next day the camera was ripped out of the wall. The very next day. The files were still saved and my father witnessed a person at two in the morning with the same build and height as my brother walk in, try to open the cash drawer, fail and then leave. We couldn't see his face. He was wearing a sweatshirt of the high school he "graduated" from. My father approached him about this. He denied stealing anything. He didn't deny being there.

My brother has also been in trouble with the cops. They all have to do with speeding tickets and court dates. My brother has had quite a number of speeding tickets and license violations. All of which has been taken care of and what I mean by that is paid for by my dad. He hasn't paid for anything. The last incident with court involved my brother taking my parents car and blowing a highway red light at 80 miles and hour. The light had been red for almost a minute. If it wasn't three in the morning he would have been killed along with the girl in his passenger seat. The cop pulled him over and wrote him three tickets and told him to go home. The same cop found him at a 24 hour deli 20 minutes later eating a sandwich and wrote him another ticket. My brother had to pay $1000 ticket and had his license taken away for three months. My father paid the ticket.

This past year has been pretty eye opening. It started in the summer. This is the three months he didn't have a license. In the beginning of July my brother was like a different person. He was engaging. He was enthusiastic. He was outgoing. The problem was that it was very very strange. Out of nowhere he decided that he was going to compete in a bike race to raise money for cancer. Remember that. Cancer is going to play a big role at the end of this story. The paper ended up doing a story on him and they interviewed my dad. My father had to say all these great things about my brother to this reporter. Little did the paper know that my father was making all this stuff up. My brother didn't deserve recognition.

Ryan never did the race.

My brother during that summer also told us and was completely convinced that he was going to run for council of our town. It took us a week to get him to realize that nobody would vote for a 19 year old kid who barely graduated high school, was jobless, had no drivers license, and didn't go to college.

All that changed in October when my brother stopped going out. He stopped smoking weed. He stopped hanging out with all of his friends. He worked for a short time with a friend of the family doing yard work but he soon left that job. My brother fell into a depression. He's been in it until right now. He hasn't worked in months. He's literally been on the couch the entire time watching tv and sleeping.

Here's the thing though. During that time I've never had a better relationship with him. He was like my best friend. We hung out and watched movies and joked and just acted like brothers were supposed to act. I finally thought that all that sh*t was behind him and now we had to just work on getting him out of a depression and back to being an actual person. We were completely supportive and didn't get on his case about spending all his time at home and doing nothing. He's sick. We set up doctors appointments. We set up time with a psychiatrist. He's on Xanax for his anxiety, prozac, and a mood stabilizer. He was getting better.

All this changed two weeks ago.

I came home one day and found him in the kitchen eating ice cream out of the box at the counter. I looked into his eyes and they were red as hell. He was high as hell. I asked him if he was high and he told me that he went to a friends house who just had his first kid (at 19) and they celebrated a bit (yes I know. Retarded. This is my town). They smoked and he came home. I actually wasn't mad. I told him not to make it a habit and left it at that.

He has smoked every single day since. The person who he was buying it from called me and told me he bought enough to sell and he wanted to let me know. My brother admitted to selling a bit to "make some money" and I told him that he was forbidden to be a drug dealer and that after he sold the rest he was done. This was my mistake. He still says he hasn't sold anything since but the other day my father counted 20 Xanax missing from the bottle. My brother told him they fell down the sink. He sold them.

My parents aren't idiots. They are just very very forgiving people. My parents and I know that if we kick him out of the house he's most likely never going to come back and he's going to die in a ditch somewhere on drugs. We can't let this happen.

This is the last thing and the main reason of why I'm writing this thread.

For the past two weeks he;s been smoking weed. I mentioned that. What I didn't mention is that he makes no attempt to hide it. I've come home ever day and smelled weed in my house and so have my parents. My mother has breast cancer. She has pleaded with him to stop smoking in the house. Pleaded. Two night ago my mom witnessed him buying a bag of weed from some ****ing c*nt in front of my house. When he came inside she broke down and started crying and screaming at him saying how can he do this; that he is stabbing her in the back; that he's stabbing his mother with cancer in the back. She screamed and cried all in front of my eyes.

My brother went into his room and rolled a blunt.

Ten minutes later he was outside smoking it. My mother was still crying.

I ripped it out of his hands and threw it in his face and he called me an ******* and didn't understand why I was screaming at him. He was unaware of what he did. Either that or he just didn't care.

Yesterday I came home from work and told him how disgusting he was I called him a scumbag c*cksucker. I almost spit on him. I told him if he didn't stop that he was going to lose a brother and gain another parent. I would no longer keep certain things from my parents and I would flush every ounce of weed I found. I made him promise me and for the time being it actually looked like he was listening to me.

I came home today and was home an hour before I smelled weed. 24 hours after ALL THAT. He's smoking a blunt on my deck while I'm ten feet away.

I dragged him inside. I nearly beat the **** out of him. I threw the blunt in the toilet. I called him the nastiest things I could think of and I meant every word. He looked at me like I was an ******* and he shrugged his shoulders and left.

I'm distraught. I don't know what to do. He doesn't care about his family. If the three of us died tomorrow he wouldn't care. My brother doesn't care if his family dies. I believe that in my heart.

I've known heroin addicts who have robbed people at gun point and what he's doing is more f*cked up than that.

He just came home. He's whistling.

I'm completely serious. He's ****ing whistling.

This sounds like I just made this all up. I didn't. This is actually my life. Maybe one day I can turn this into a book but for right now my family and I have to live with it every day and he doesn't care whatsoever. I'm almost certain I'm going to lose my brother. Either he'll be dead or dead to me and I'm scared.

I don't know what to do.

Thanks for reading.

EDIT: I need to get out of here for a while. If I don't respond until late at night that's why. I'll respond to any questions or anything you guys might have to say. Thanks again.