When Charlotte’s mother dies, her sister Barbara wastes no time trying to cut her out of the inheritance. Armed with an old document, Barbara smugly tries to throw a spanner in the works. But when the truth comes out, it’s Barbara who faces the ultimate betrayal, and by the time she realizes her mistake, it’s far too late.
I always thought family was unbreakable.
That no matter what, blood was blood, and at the end of the day, we would always have each other’s backs. That’s how family works, right?
A woman sitting on a bed | Source: Midjourney
But after my mother passed away, my sister Barbara came waltzing in and made me question everything I thought I knew.
And by the time the truth finally came out?
Barbara was the one begging for forgiveness.
My mother raised two daughters: myself, Charlotte, and my older sister, Barbara.
Two smiling women | Source: Midjourney
Naturally, Barbara was always the golden child. She was the one who got all the attention.
Barbara craved a roast chicken? My mother had one cooking away the moment her words left her lips. Barbara needed dry cleaning fetched? My mother would jump into her car and fetch it.
Barbara was also beautiful. Stunningly beautiful and never failed to make heads turn. She was blonde with piercing blue eyes, just like my mother.
Roast chicken and veggies on a tray | Source: Midjourney
Meanwhile, I was the odd one out. I had dark hair, dark eyes, and to be honest, I never really looked like either of them.
But I never questioned it. Why would I? I loved my mother.
No, I adored my mother with everything I had. She was my entire world.
A smiling woman | Source: Midjourney
So when she got sick, I was the one who put my life on hold to take care of her. I didn’t complain once. Not when bruises bloomed on my arms as she held onto me tightly when I took her to the bathroom. Not when she got frustrated and threw her food across the room. Not even when she would break down and cry for hours.
Barbara, on the other hand?
She was too busy chasing her dreams of becoming an actress.
“I can’t take care of Mom, Charlotte. I have auditions. I have producers to meet. I have to stay relevant and seen at events. You understand, right? Right, Lottie?”
An ill woman laying in bed | Source: Midjourney
And I did.
Because that’s what I always did. I was always understanding, while Barbara lived her life however she pleased. I tried not to focus on her and how I could have done with the help.
Instead, I let Barbara come in and out of the house, wearing her new clothes and showing off photos of her with actors and actresses that she had met.
A woman standing by a mirror | Source: Midjourney
“This is a glamorous life, Mom,” she said one day when Mom was too weak to get out of bed to eat her soup. “And you should really clean up your look, Lottie. You need to get noticed. Your posture is horrible because you sit hunched in front of that computer.”
“It’s my job, Barbara,” I said simply.
Life continued in that way for months. And finally, Mom passed away. But that was when Barbara came back.
A bowl of soup | Source: Midjourney
And she wasn’t grieving. Not at all. She was hungry, starving even.
For our mother’s money.
After the funeral, we met with Alistair, my mother’s lawyer. Barbara walked in like she owned the place, dressed in black but wearing diamond earrings I had never seen before.
I should have known something was off when she sat down with a smug smile.
A woman standing in a doorway | Source: Midjourney
The lawyer pulled out the official will, but before he could even read it, my sister pulled her first stunt. Barbara reached into her designer bag and pulled out a yellowed, folded piece of paper.
“Before you read that,” she said sweetly, “I have something interesting to share.”
She slid the paper across the table to me.
“Look what I found in Mom’s drawer when I was searching for her jewelry.”
A piece of paper on a table | Source: Midjourney
I unfolded it, and as soon as I read the words at the top, my stomach dropped.
ADOPTION DECREE.
Barbara leaned back with a smirk.
“Well, well, well,” she drawled. “Looks like I finally know why you always looked so different from us.”
My hands shook as I re-read the document.
A woman reading a piece of paper | Source: Midjourney
Once. Twice. Three times.
“You… you’re lying,” I gasped. “You made this up! You got one of your strange friends to make this!”
She let out a fake gasp, her long nails tapping against the desk.
“Oh, Charlotte,” she said. “Don’t be so dramatic. My friends have things to do with their lives. And anyway, it’s all right there. You’re adopted. Girl, you’re not even Mom’s real daughter. I always knew that your brown eyes and brown hair had no place in our family.”
A woman’s hand on a desk | Source: Midjourney
I felt sick. I felt the bile rise in my throat.
Had my mother hidden this from me my entire life? But why would she do that? Why not tell me the truth?
Would it have changed anything?
Not for me. I would have been more grateful for her.
Barbara crossed her arms.
An upset woman | Source: Midjourney
“So, despite Mom’s will saying that we split everything, you know, she kept saying that, I’ll be making sure that you get nothing. You don’t belong in this family, so why should you get anything?”
“Ladies, calm down. Let’s take a moment to think about this,” the lawyer said.
But I was too stunned to speak. Barbara’s words had cut me. Deep.
A smug woman | Source: Midjourney
And that’s when I saw it. There was one detail she had overlooked in her ploy. The name on the adoption paperwork had been erased. Someone had deliberately tried to remove it.
And that?
That made me suspicious.
“Please, Alistair,” she said. “You can do whatever comes next, but in terms of the estate, I want it all. I can wait until you sort out the paperwork.”
A lawyer sitting at his desk | Source: Midjourney
The lawyer sighed and nodded.
“But I think the two of you need to have a heart-to-heart before we meet again.”
Barbara scoffed.
“That’s not necessary.”
Barbara was so confident that she had won. But I wasn’t about to let her take everything without proof. I didn’t want to be horrible about it, but I had missed two promotions in the months that I had been looking after our mother.
A smug woman sitting in an office | Source: Midjourney
I needed to know that I had the safety net of her money. I just needed to have something to my name…
I decided to demand a DNA test.
“What’s the point, Charlotte?” she scoffed. “You know what it’ll say, Lottie. That you’re not family. I wonder where Mom found you. Do you think your birth mother misses you?”
I didn’t think anything other than the fact that our mother would be turning over in her grave at Barbara’s behavior.
A woman standing in a kitchen | Source: Midjourney
“Just do it,” I demanded. “Think of it this way. If I am really adopted and there’s proof, you’ll have more claim to everything.”
That did it. She moved her head slowly from side to side. Suddenly, she got off the couch, martini in hand, and looked at me.
“Fine. Let’s do it.”
But the results?
A frowning woman | Source: Midjourney
Oh my goodness. They shocked everyone. Because Barbara?
She was the one who wasn’t biologically related to our mother.
After the results came in, I went to my Aunt Helen, my mother’s younger sister. She had been tight-lipped about everything, but after I told her about the DNA results, she finally told me the truth.
“Your mother never wanted you both to know, Lottie,” Aunt Helen said, tears in her eyes. “Because she knew how much it would hurt you both.”
A sad older woman | Source: Midjourney
“Know what?” I asked, heart pounding, but I figured that it was about Barbara’s birth.
“Barbara wasn’t Mom’s biological daughter, Lottie.”
“So, you knew?”
Aunt Helen nodded.
“Your mother found Barbara at a train station when she was two years old. She was abandoned. My sister took her in, raised her as her own. And she never, ever wanted Barbara to feel anything less than loved. It helped that she had the same blonde hair and blue eyes.”
A little girl sitting on a bench | Source: Midjourney
“Okay,” I said slowly, trying to fit all the puzzle pieces together. “But how did Barbara have an adoption decree? If she was found at a train station, I mean?”
Aunt Helen sighed and glanced out the window as if she was gathering her thoughts.
“Because your mother made it official, darling. She went through the court system and legally adopted Barbara a year later. She wanted to make sure that no one could ever take her away.”
A mother and daughter duo in a court room | Source: Midjourney
My stomach twisted. I didn’t know how to feel. Or what to feel.
“So, Mom just didn’t tell her?”
Aunt Helen shook her head.
“She never told either of you, Lottie,” Aunt Helen said softly. “Because in her eyes, it didn’t matter. Barbara was her daughter, just like you were. Blood or not, she loved you both the same, and nothing was going to change that.”
An older woman sitting on a couch | Source: Midjourney
But Barbara had never seen it that way.
She had spent her entire life being treated like the golden child, like she was the one who belonged.
And yet, in the end?
Barbara was the adopted one. I was our mother’s real daughter…
A woman sitting on a couch | Source: Midjourney
The biological daughter.
When I told my sister the truth, she laughed at first. We were standing in the kitchen and I couldn’t wait to get it out. She needed to know the truth, too.
“You’re lying now, Charlotte,” she said. “You probably got someone to doctor the results, didn’t you? Or you hacked into the system! You’re the computer whiz…”
But when I showed her the DNA test and told her everything Aunt Helen had said?
Her face went pale.
An upset woman | Source: Midjourney
“No. No, this can’t be right. Mom loved me. She… she wouldn’t just take in some abandoned kid!”
But she did. She had.
“Barbara,” I said. “She loved you. And you being adopted doesn’t change that. Our mother was wonderful. She probably saw you and couldn’t wait to love you.”
Barbara looked at me. She was… I don’t know. I couldn’t read her face. I couldn’t understand what she was thinking. I had no idea.
A woman leaning against a kitchen counter | Source: Midjourney
She was blank.
As for my mom, she had given Barbara everything. She had seen a little child and wanted to take her home and love her, to make that child her own.
And instead of spreading that love and joy… what did Barbara do in return?
She had tried to steal my inheritance.
A child sitting on a bench | Source: Midjourney
She had tried to erase me from my own mother’s life.
And now?
She was the one who lost everything.
We went to see the lawyer again. Together, but in different cars. Barbara couldn’t even look at me.
Alistair had confirmed that my mother’s will was valid. Despite Barbara’s cruel attempt to cut me out, I still got half of everything.
A lawyer sitting at his desk | Source: Midjourney
“But… wait!” Barbara said, her fingernails digging into her thigh. “I don’t want to share…”
“Barbara,” Alistair said. “It’s clear. Your mother wanted the two of you to share everything. A straight 50-50. Now, if you want to play this biological daughter game, I don’t know what to tell you… Charlotte could take everything.”
My sister thought she could rewrite history, but legally? She couldn’t touch a thing.
The will was still clear. We were supposed to split everything.
A document on a desk | Source: Midjourney
But after her stunt? After trying to erase me from my own mother’s legacy? Barbara lost more than just her pride.
“Let’s go to court,” she said.
“I really don’t recommend that,” Alistair said.
“So, what?” Barbara blurted. “You just want us to split the money and then pretend that we’re family again? I don’t want anything to do with Charlotte. I want my money and my house. And then I want to be done with this!”
An upset woman | Source: Midjourney
“Barbara, come on…” I said.
“Just be quiet!” she bellowed, throwing one of Alistair’s pens onto the floor. “I don’t want you around. You’ll just be here to remind me that I’m not biologically our mother’s daughter. So, no. We’re doing this. And when I win, you’re going to get the hell out of my house.”
That was it. That did it. I didn’t want to be nice. I didn’t want to share. I didn’t want Barbara around any more than she wanted me around.
A pen on a carpet | Source: Midjourney
So?
I hired Alistair on the spot. For me this time, not on behalf of my mother’s deceased estate.
“Let’s do it,” I said. “Let’s go to court.”
“But I want Alistair!” Barbara said, standing up.
“Too late, sis,” I said.
Months later, Barbara fought it in court, desperate to take everything for herself. But she failed.
A woman standing with her arms folded | Source: Midjourney
In the end, the judge ruled against her.
And I got it all.
She tried to destroy me, and in doing so, she destroyed herself and her future.
And do you know what?
I think she deserved every single bit of it.
A woman sitting on a couch | Source: Midjourney
What would you have done?
These bugs come out at nighttime, and attacking victims, they silently kill or leave them with a lifelong infection
When Emiliana Rodriguez was a little girl, she recalls watching friends play a nighttime soccer match when one of the players abruptly died on the pitch.
Unaware of what had transpired, Rodriguez, a native of Bolivia, developed a phobia of the dark and the “monster”—the silent killer known as Chagas—that she had been told only appears at night.
Chagas disease is a unique sort of illness that is spread by nocturnal insects. It is also known as the “silent and silenced disease” that infects up to 8 million people annually, killing 12,000 people on average.
Emiliana Rodriguez, 42, discovered she had to live with Chagas, a “monster,” after relocating to Barcelona from Bolivia 27 years ago.
“Night is when the fear generally struck. I didn’t always sleep well,” she admitted. “I was worried that I wouldn’t wake up from my sleep.”
Rodriguez had specific tests when she was eight years old and expecting her first child, and the results indicated that she carried the Chagas gene. She recalled the passing of her buddy and remarked, “I was paralyzed with shock and remembered all those stories my relatives told me about people suddenly dying.” “I wondered, ‘What will happen to my baby?’”
Rodriguez was prescribed medicine, though, to prevent the parasite from vertically transmitting to her unborn child. After her daughter was born, she tested negative. Elvira Idalia Hernández Cuevas, 18, was unaware of the Mexican silent killer until her 18-year-old son was diagnosed with Chagas.
Idalia, an eighteen-year-old blood donor from her birthplace near Veracruz, Mexico, had a positive diagnosis for Chagas, a disease caused by triatomine bugs, often known as vampire or kissing bugs and bloodsucking parasites, when her sample was tested.
In an interview with the Guardian, Hernandez stated, “I started to research Chagas on the internet because I had never heard of it.” When I read that it was a silent murderer, I became really afraid. I had no idea where to go or what to do.
She is not alone in this; a lot of people are ignorant of the diseases that these unpleasant bugs can spread. The term Chagas originates from Carlos Ribeiro Justiniano Chagas, a Brazilian physician and researcher who made the discovery of the human case in 1909.
Over the past few decades, reports of the incidence of Chagas disease have been made in Europe, Japan, Australia, Latin America, and North America.
Kissing bugs are mostly found in rural or suburban low-income housing walls, where they are most active at night when humans are asleep. The insect bites an animal or person, then excretes on the skin of the victim. The victim may inadvertently scratch the area and sever the skin, or they may spread the excrement into their mouth or eyes. This is how the T. cruzi infection is disseminated.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that between 6 and 7 million people worldwide—roughly 8 million people in Mexico, Central America, and South America—have Chagas disease; the majority of these individuals remain oblivious to their illness. These estimates are provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The persistent infection might be fatal if untreated. According to the Guardian, Chagas disease kills over 12,000 people year, “more people in Latin America than any other parasite disease, including malaria.”
Despite the fact that these bugs have been found in the United States—nearly 300,000 people are infected—they are not thought to be endemic.
While some people never experience any symptoms, the CDC notes that 20 to 30 percent experience gastrointestinal or heart problems that can cause excruciating pain decades later.
Furthermore, only 10% of cases are detected globally, which makes prevention and treatment exceedingly challenging.
Hernández and her daughter Idalia went to see a number of doctors in search of assistance, but all were also uninformed about Chagas disease and its management. “I was taken aback, terrified, and depressed because I believed my kid was going to pass away. Above all, Hernandez stated, “I was more anxious because I was unable to locate any trustworthy information.”
Idalia finally got the care she required after receiving assistance from a family member who was employed in the medical field.
“The Mexican government claims that the Chagas disease is under control and that not many people are affected, but that is untrue,” Hernández asserts. Medical practitioners misdiagnose Chagas disease for other heart conditions because they lack knowledge in this area. Most people are unaware that there is Chagas in Mexico.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has classified chagas as a neglected tropical disease, which means that the global health policy agenda does not include it.
Chagas is overlooked in part because, according to Colin Forsyth, a research manager at the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi), “it’s a silent disease that stays hidden for so long in your body… because of the asymptomatic nature of the initial part of the infection.”
Forsyth went on to say, “The people affected just don’t have the power to influence healthcare policy,” making reference to the impoverished communities. It’s kept hidden by a convergence of social and biological factors.
Chagas, however, is becoming more well recognized as it spreads to other continents and can also be transferred from mother to child during pregnancy or childbirth, as well as through organ and blood transfusions.
The main objective of the Chagas Hub, a UK-based facility founded by Professor David Moore, a doctor at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London, is to get “more people tested and treated, and to manage the risk of transmission, which in the UK is from mother to child,” according to Professor Moore.
Regarding the WHO’s 2030 aim for the eradication of the disease, Moore stated that progress toward it is “glacial” and added, “I can’t imagine that we’ll be remotely close by 2030.” That seems improbable.
Two medications that have been available for more than 50 years to treat chagas are benznidazole and nifurtimox, which according to Moore are “toxic, unpleasant, not particularly effective.”
Although the medications are effective in curing babies, there is no guarantee that they will prevent or halt the advancement of the condition in adults.
Regarding severe adverse effects, Rodriguez remembers getting dizziness and nausea as well as breaking out in hives. She completed her therapy, and she gets checked out annually.
Moore goes on to say that while creating stronger anti-Chaga drugs is crucial to stopping the disease’s spread, pharmaceutical companies are currently not financially motivated to do so.
As president of the International Federation of Associations of People Affected by Chagas condition (FINDECHAGAS), Hernández is on a mission to raise awareness of the condition until there is a greater need on the market for innovative treatments.
In Spain, Rodriguez is battling the “monster” as part of a campaign to increase public awareness of Chagas disease being conducted by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health.
“I’m tired of hearing nothing at all,” Rodriguez declares. “I want Chagas to be discussed and made public. I’m in favor of testing and therapy for individuals.
They are being heard, too.
World Chagas Disease Day was instituted by the WHO on April 14, 1909, the day Carlos discovered the disease’s first human case.The WHO states that “a diversified set of 20 diseases and disease categories are set out to be prevented, controlled, eliminated, and eradicated through global targets for 2030 and milestones.” And among them is Chagas.
To prevent a possible infestation, the CDC suggests taking the following steps:
Close up any gaps and fissures around doors, windows, walls, and roofs.
Clear out the rock, wood, and brush piles close to your home.
Put screens on windows and doors, and fix any tears or holes in them.
Close up gaps and crevices that lead to the exterior, crawl areas beneath the home, and the attic.
Keep pets inside, especially during the evening.
Maintain the cleanliness of your home and any outdoor pet resting places, and check for bugs on a regular basis.
If you believe you have discovered a kissing insect, the CDC recommends avoiding crushing it. Alternatively, carefully put the bug in a jar, fill it with rubbing alcohol, and then freeze it. It is then recommended that you bring the bug’s container to an academic lab or your local health authority so that it can be identified.
Please tell this tale to help spread the word about an illness that goes unnoticed!
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