ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 29, 1996 TAG: 9612300016
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: DALEVILLE
SERIES: Whatever Happened To... A look back at 1996
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
THE MOTHER of Brian Mitchell, who died after ingesting antifreeze, is still trying to inform the public of the dangers of "huffing.''
The visions come at the most inopportune times.
Katie Weddington will be sitting in a business meeting at Total Action Against Poverty, and one will come.
It's always his eyes.
Weddington's 16-year-old middle son, Brian Mitchell, is lying in a hospital bed. He is helpless to speak. She is helpless to help him.
His kidneys are drowning inside him, choking on the 12 tablespoons of antifreeze he ingested. After more than a year of abusing inhalants - air fresheners, cooking spray, cleaning products, gasoline - for a cheap, quick high, Brian has gone too far.
Brian looks at his mom. His eyes are searching, frightened, apologetic.
In her visions, he is dying, and he seems to know it.
But in the two months since Brian's death, the visions have slowly become less frequent.
And they certainly are not all Weddington is left with. She has a protective and supportive husband. She has two sons she loves deeply, unabashedly.
And she has an unsubsiding determination to tell Brian's story over and over again to anyone who will listen, so that other children and other parents will be spared her grief.
She began by giving interviews to newspapers and television the day Brian was buried, before the numbness that comes with such tragedies had abated.
And while she is not on a whirlwind lecture tour about the dangers of inhalants, she is following through with the promise she made then to herself and Brian to tell the world about the dangers of "huffing" household projects.
She spoke to the parents' support group of a treatment program - the one Brian had been scheduled to enter the day after he drank the antifreeze. She spoke to a group of Brian's fellow students at Lord Botetourt High School. She's been asked to do a half-hour television interview show and a public service announcement on WDBJ (Channel 7). And in January she'll address the students at Addison Aerospace Magnet Middle School.
Ginny Hardin, of Blue Ridge Community Services' Prevention Plus program, said Weddington is already having an effect. People are talking about the lessons of Brian's death wherever Hardin goes. It's a reminder that drug problems crop up in even the most serene of family settings, and with the most involved parents.
But Weddington isn't getting to talk to as many people as she would like. She fears she may lose her momentum.
"I really thought I would be approached," she said. "I didn't think I would have to be the aggressor."
She's still honing her presentation. Telling Brian's story is cathartic, but it is not easy. She has lamented from the start that she did not recognize the signs of Brian's problem sooner.
Brian started huffing when he was away at military school in Pennsylvania, Weddington now knows. Kicked out of school there for smoking, he brought the huffing habit home with him. Weddington would find aerosol cans with the nozzles missing, and lighters drained of butane. Brian slept a lot and became irritable.
Brian finally confessed his addiction and asked for help. But the night before he was to begin treatment at the Mt. Regis Changes program, apparently desperate for a quick buzz, he drank the antifreeze.
The first group Weddington spoke to was the Mt. Regis parents' group. That's been the hardest yet.
"Their children were in the next room, and mine wasn't," she said. "Their children were on their way to recovery, hopefully, and mine wasn't."
She tried to remind the parents to separate their child's behavior, which is the effect of the drug, from the child. Don't lose love for him, she said. Take the drugs away, and the child will be more like the one you remember and love.
She doesn't blame Brian or anyone for his death.
"It was too big for him to handle. He was a kid," she said. "There is no blame."
The rest of the family feels the same way, she said. They are all dealing with their grief in their own ways.
Brian's older brother, Ross, immersed in his Celtic ancestry, had a friend play bagpipes at Brian's grave; younger brother Colin looks at the stars and speaks to Brian.
The holidays have not been easy, though. Brian's stocking hangs from the mantel, but not shopping for Brian is a chore.
"You see things you know he'd like," his mother said.
But amid the grief and the distraction from it she finds in her work at TAP, Weddington finds sweet morsels of memory to savor. There are stories she remembers, like this one, from another, more innocent time she took her middle child to the hospital.
Tumbling over in her mind for 13 years, the story has become circular perfection, like the smooth stones found on river bottoms.
It was Christmastime, Weddington recalls, and Brian was about 3. The two had been shelling and eating pecans for about half an hour when Brian began to sneeze repeatedly.
Guessing what had happened, Weddington took Brian to the emergency room. First a nurse and then a doctor looked up Brian's nose.
"What did you put up your nose?" the doctor asked.
And Weddington's freckled little Irish boy looked up and said, "A leprechaun."
Anyone interested in engaging Katie Weddington to speak about the dangers of inhalants can call her at 992-4072.
LENGTH: Long : 108 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Katie Weddington works to educate kids about inhalants,by CNBand to come to terms with her own loss, since her son died. color. KEYWORDS: YEAR 1996