Free Perfect Poison by M. William Phelps Page B

who looked up to his father. So, years later, the scrawny, blond-haired boy with thin lips and an imposing smile enlisted.
    Hudon’s outgoing personality, strong moral fiber and easygoing attitude, however, landed him in a vegetative state not too long after he arrived at the Royal Air Force Station, in Lakenheath, England.
    As Hudon, an assistant physical therapist, and two friends walked into a local London pizza joint one night, the base commander, with his wife, children and another couple, stopped Henry at the door. There were two men fighting in the back of the restaurant, the commander said. He asked Henry if he could break it up.
    â€œI’ll do my best, sir.”
    Henry was known throughout his company as a peacemaker, a guy who didn’t like to see people argue and fight. So he walked over to where the men were yelling and pushing each other and tried getting in the middle, demanding that they stop fighting.
    But someone watching the fight didn’t appreciate Hudon’s can’t-we-all-just-get-along attitude. While he was trying his best to separate the two men, Hudon was struck in the back of the head with a beer bottle, and his paralyzed body fell to the ground. The impact his head had made with the cement floor was so powerful it detached a retina from his right eyeball and shattered his front teeth.
    Henry Hudon would never be the same.
    For the next three weeks, he lay in a coma, incoherent and nonresponsive. But Hudon was a fighter. After several surgeries, and plenty of prayers on the part of his family, surprising even his doctors, Hudon fought his way out of the coma.
    Unfortunately, he was a different person.
    Before the accident, Henry Hudon was a guy who never argued with anyone and took orders from his commanders as the letter of the law. Now, Hudon would become enraged at the drop of a dime and had a hard time listening to anyone.
    â€œHe looked the same,” Julia Hudon, his mother, recalled, “but he was not the same.”
    He became emotional. He “heard voices” and saw things that weren’t there. He accused people of stalking him. While on certain medications, Henry’s hands shook as if he suffered from Parkinson’s disease. Within a year, he was honorably discharged and sent back to the United States under the official diagnosis of suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.
    Not knowing what to do, Julia Hudon had her son committed to North State Hospital a year after he returned, but realized soon after that the VAMC in Leeds had similar services available.
    Once a healthy, twenty-year-old member of the United States Air Force with a promising career ahead of him, Henry Hudon would now live out the rest of his life dependent upon a cocktail of psychiatric medications and frequent visits to the VA hospital whenever he felt his mental health spiraling out of control.
    Between 1986 and 1995, his mental status fluctuated from being “out of control” to “in control,” which landed him in and out of the VAMC at Leeds more than three dozen times. He’d take his medication as prescribed, and it would work wonders. But the effects wouldn’t last. Three or four times a year, he’d show up for a new prescription or an adjustment of the meds he was already on, and end up spending anywhere from ten days to three weeks, and, one time, nearly a year.
    Throughout the fall of 1995, Henry’s condition worsened. None of the medications he was prescribed worked. Doctors couldn’t find the right mix. Not only that, but he developed “tardive dysdiadochokinesis,” a syndrome, caused by the medication, that made his body shake uncontrollably. He developed TMJ, which made his face sag and his speech slur. Spending so much time at the VAMC, Hudon began hanging around with other VA patients and started smoking pot once in a while with them outside. When he didn’t take his medication regularly, he would get