She died from a prescription drug addiction
The beach was where Brynn Gati could find peace.
Family vacations to Ocean City, N.J., were her sanctuary, those weeks providing the happiest moments in a life that otherwise was filled with dread – a life that, for many years, was filled with pain.
Solace. That was what she found at the beach. It was only a week, sometimes two. Then it was back to the endless cycle. The pain, the medication, the addiction, the anxiety and other problems.
But for those few days, she felt happy.
***
Brynn was born in Atlanta, Ga., while her father was studying mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech. When he graduated, her mother, Karen Gohn, insisted the young family move back to Pennsylvania, to York, their hometown, so they could be close to family.
Byrnn was a tomboy. She never did girly things, her mother said. She was always outside. She loved playing baseball with the boys. When she was old enough, she wanted to sign up to play Little League, but back then girls weren't allowed to. She played soccer instead, one of the first girls to play on the boys' team. She was always athletic, later running track in high school.
She loved music, and in elementary school she took up the baritone horn – at that time not a traditional girl's instrument.
She grew to love the outdoors. She fished. She took a hunting course, hoping to go hunting, but she never went. She loved animals too much to kill any of them, and the thought of killing a deer made her ill. She loved spending time at her grandparent's cabin in the mountains. She made her mother – by then, her parents had split up – go camping with her.
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She got a job in the kitchen at York Hospital while completing Emergency Medical Technician training. She volunteered with the Red Lion ambulance club. She liked helping people, her mother said. She liked the idea of comforting people in need. She had wanted to work with animals, but she moved away from that; she couldn't handle the part of the job that entailed ending an animal's life, the euthanasia thing.
She stayed at the hospital, working her way out of the kitchen to being the person who collected money for TV service and then to being, like her mother, a unit secretary. She was used to working; she had worked since she was 11, delivering papers, dragging her little red wagon around the neighborhood, saving her money so she could buy a car when she turned 16.
Her health issues began when she was young. She had ruptured a disc in her back when she was in high school and had surgery to repair it. That surgery went fine and she recovered.
A few years later, her son Michael was born, and during labor she ruptured several discs in her back, her mother said. She went to the doctor, who said she needed surgery, and he recommended surgeons in Hershey and Baltimore. She wound up going with the doctor in Maryland.
That surgery was the beginning of it.
Her pain remained, and the doctor prescribed medication, Percocet to start and then Vicodin and Demerol. Oxycontin wasn't on the market then.
Her pain never went away. More surgery followed. And more pain medications.
She sought other opinions, essentially shopping for a doctor who could find the magic combination of meds that would make the pain stop. It was a vicious cycle. She would develop a tolerance for a medication – the receptors in her brain no longer reacting to it – and would move on to something else, something stronger.
Her life revolved around pain medications. She developed other health problems. She suffered from anxiety and panic attacks. She developed diabetes. Her body was ravaged by the drugs and was responding by breaking down.
Her mother had a hard time understanding. She would plead, "Why can't you stop this? I don't know why you just can't stop this."
She had a medication pump installed in her body, administering a regulated amount of pain medication. And it worked. She was able to manage her pain. Life was pretty good, her mother said. Brynn was coaching her son's soccer team and going to his baseball games. Life seemed to return to normal.
But then the pump, a hockey-puck-sized device implanted in her abdomen that delivered medication to her spine, failed. The doctors couldn't replace it; there was too much scar tissue around her spine. They feared the surgery would paralyze her.
By then, she couldn't work. That was the worst part, her mother said. She had always worked, and it really bothered her that she could no longer support herself.
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She went back to pain medication, Oxycontin this time. The abuse to her body began to take its toll. Her kidneys failed. At one point, she told a doctor that if she didn't get something for the pain she was going to kill herself, a comment that earned a psych ward admission.
She had contemplated suicide. She told a friend her plan was to go to Mount Wolf, put her earbuds in and sit on the railroad tracks until a train came along and ended it all.
She went into rehab several times. She wasn't there for treatment for her addiction, though. She went to rehab to detox and always left before treatment began, thinking that if she started over with a clean slate, the pain meds would work better. It was like hitting a reset button, her mother said. On one trip to the hospital, the doctor, learning how much medication she was taking, told her it was a wonder she was still alive.
Her addiction and chronic pain took its toll on her family. Once, her mother sat in her car in a supermarket parking lot, tears streaming down her cheeks, wishing Brynn would just die and end her pain and allow her son to have a childhood.
The medication affected her thought process. She would get confused. One weekend, her mother said, she spent two days believing that she was on the Starship Enterprise.
She wanted to get onto methadone, which, in addition to its use treating heroin addicts, is used as a pain reliever, mostly for terminal cancer patients. The methadone clinic rejected her, though. She was on other medications, and, as her mother said, her case was just too complex.
She returned to rehab and detoxed. The rehab wanted her to stay, but she refused. She returned home and went to a new doctor, who prescribed methadone. She was also taking Klonopin for anxiety and medication for nerve pain and another to help her sleep.
She thought this new regimen would work and her life would become normal enough that she could establish a support group for people going through what she was experiencing.
The night before her last day, she called her grandmother in Florida. She was close to her grandmother, calling her weekly, at the very least. She told her, "I hope I die before you do because I couldn't stand living without you."
The next day, July 7, 2016, a Thursday, she fell asleep in her chair. When her son went to wake her, she was on the floor. He playfully and gently kicked her behind, telling her to get up off the floor. She didn't move. He turned her over and realized she wasn't breathing. He called 911 and administered CPR, calling Brynn's mother, screaming.
She was gone. She was 49.
The cause of death was chalked up to multi-drug toxicity. The manner of death: accidental. The test results didn't indicate that she had overdosed.
Her mother and son wanted her story told so that others realize that opioid addiction is not limited to heroin, that prescription drug addiction is even more prevalent and can be just as deadly. They hope other families going through what their family went through know that they are not alone.
***
Before she died, Brynn told her family that she wanted her granddaughters Addason and Sophia to be baptized. They were never able to arrange it while Brynn was alive. On Jan. 8, the girls were baptized at St. John's Episcopal Church. "It was a beautiful day," her mother said. "We haven't had too many of those since she passed away."
Her ashes are in her East York home, where her son still lives. He plans to take some of them and scatter them on the beach at Ocean City, N.J.
Reach Mike Argento at 717-771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.