Season of Sharing helps North Port mom through health battle onto road toward stability

Brooklyn Dean dragged herself through the door. She worried what to tell her daughter this time.

“Mommy, how did it go?” Alayna asked, a hopeful look on her face.

Brooklyn was tired. Tired of their living situation. Tired of making promises she couldn’t keep. Tired of being so tired.

But it was the doctors that made her despair. Another one had just dismissed her. No matter what Brooklyn did – dressing in a suit and heels or crawling there listless in sweats – doctors never seemed to take her seriously.

Through the years, Brooklyn had learned ways to mask her exhaustion and pain. But not from her kids. Alayna and her little brother still didn't have a steady home. Each visit to the doctor raised all their hopes: maybe this instance would lead to a breakthrough and a shot at a normal life.

Now Brooklyn shook her head. For the millionth time she apologized to her daughter, and made another promise she needed to believe as much as anyone else. 

She would find a doctor to listen, she told Alayna, and someday they would have a beautiful house with three bedrooms, a big tree in the backyard, and kids to play with in the neighborhood.

“One day I will heal, one day this is all going to make sense,” she assured her daughter on her way to lie down. “But not today.”

“Save myself”

She was a teen when the pain started.

Brooklyn grew up in Hendersonville, North Carolina, a spirited and active child – the second of four siblings. Her father was an entrepreneur in the restaurant and construction trades while her mom worked bartending or full time in the house.

But by the time she was a young adolescent, Brooklyn began to need long naps after school. Her legs ached, too, feeling so heavy she could barely stand.

“I knew something was off then,” she recalled

Doctors diagnosed her with depression, ADHD and bipolar disorder. But the medications they prescribed left her spaced out – not fixing the pain and fatigue, and worsening her brain fog.

After Brooklyn begged her parents to bring her back to the doctors, she was told by medical personnel she wasn’t taking the pills right. When she stopped taking them to escape the severe side effects, she saw a word written in her chart: “noncompliant.”

Sleeping more and more – the pain moving into her joints and other limbs – Brooklyn soon acquired other labels from family and friends: lazy and sad.

Afraid of being second-guessed, Brooklyn learned to wear a mask. Between waves of symptoms, she would light up a room with a huge laugh and smile. She manically threw herself into activities, trying to squeeze all she could from life before the next crushing spell of exhaustion.

But privately she was lonely, longing to be rescued from the hellscape she felt raging inside. Initially college-bound, she gravitated to troubled men, and by her mid-twenties, she was a single mother with two small children.

The exhaustion at that point was near constant and the pain was worse than ever. She went back to doctors again and again. Weren’t there more tests they could do? She had done some reading. What about lupus? she asked gingerly, not wanting to offend them or question their expertise.

She had hopes and dreams for her life – an entrepreneurial spirit like her dad, a work ethic like both of her parents, waiting to be unleashed.

“I feel like there’s a war in my body and I’m dying,” she shared tentatively with the next doctor. “I’m afraid to tell you that. I don’t know if I can trust anyone.”

At 24, she finally had bloodwork done as doctors looked for lupus at her request. She was borderline, they concluded, and the condition was rare, they told her. They ruled it out. They also crossed multiple sclerosis off the list.

By then she had been diagnosed with psychosomatic disorder – a psychological condition whose physical symptoms were often attributed to stress.

Did she want to be sick? one doctor asked, attempting to link Brooklyn’s exhaustion to her life as a single mom. Brooklyn felt mocked, misunderstood. And crazy. What she really wanted was an answer.

At home, she had no energy for bedtime stories. Young Alayna, only in elementary school, had to do the cooking many nights and get herself ready for school. Truancy officers called when Alayna missed too many days. So did child protective services. Added to Brooklyn’s labels now was “bad mother.”

She was not going to lose Alayna and her son, Ezra.

Scared off from the medical profession, Brooklyn pushed forward in sheer survival mode, fight or flight. And she decided to fight.

“At the end of the day, it was my duty to save myself.”

Rock bottom

Feeling like she was wrestling with lions, Brooklyn pulled herself out of bed and to the gym to work her muscles.

She asked God for guidance and studied the laws of attraction and the power of positive thinking.

“God, please bring a doctor who will see this,” she asked. Afraid of being gaslit again, she gave up finding one on her own.

She pushed down pain at her jobs in hospitality, sales and retail.

For years she’d hold employment only so long before her strength gave out and she needed to rest for a week or more. Then she’d look for a new job to start the cycle again. The instability forced Brooklyn and the kids to bounce between the homes of family and friends, before her condition wore out their welcome.

Then, several years ago, the owner of the diner where Brooklyn worked offered to help. The woman was moved by Brooklyn’s work ethic. Despite all Brooklyn was shouldering, she had a fire inside her. The woman volunteered to accompany Brooklyn to her next appointment with a new doctor to advocate on her behalf.

This doctor seemed to listen more. While not searching for a new diagnosis, he did want to try different medications: stimulants and a mood stabilizer. Brooklyn felt a slight shift, enough to give her the motivation and energy to lose 60 pounds and think ahead.  

Meeting a new boyfriend, they hatched business plans together and decided to set out for a fresh start in Florida. Brooklyn welcomed the change, estranged from family and friends and tired of being such a burden to them all. Now, as she and the kids packed up for the move to Bradenton in early 2021, she could finally start anew with no labels, she thought.

“You couldn’t tell me I was going to hit a worse rock bottom.”

Climbing Everest

Within a few months, the new boyfriend split. Brooklyn was on her own with the kids in an apartment she could barely afford.

Rent for her apartment soon shot from $1,779 a month to $2,100. But caught in the middle of a surging housing crisis, Brooklyn didn’t have the money to move. Rents for comparable apartments were higher and with steep move-in costs. Child care cost her more than a thousand dollars a month.

“I was immediately drowning as soon as I got to Florida,” she said. “I was stuck.”

Working a bartending job at a tiki bar, Brooklyn fell further and further behind on her service industry wages. Facing eviction, she was forced to move out of her apartment in the fall of 2022.

Atop the already enormous challenges of being a single mom in search of affordable housing in the area, her body was still plagued by constant aching and near-debilitating fatigue – her brief reprieve over.

She and the kids bounced from one hotel to another, staying with friends in the Carolinas for a few months before returning this spring to her Bradenton bartending job and a cramped Airbnb studio.

Brooklyn kept at her prayers, promising the kids she would find them stability. Alayna had been to a half dozen schools in one year alone. Brooklyn asked God for deeper insight – to send her a sign.

And then one appeared, right under her nose: from the Airbnb owner. He had a rental house coming available. It could provide her and the kids the stability she long sought. She should come and see it.

The second Brooklyn stepped on the grounds, she felt a chill. Located in North Port, the house sat in a neighborhood full of families and kids. It had three bedrooms. And then there was the backyard – with a towering oak tree soaring to the sky. Everything that Brooklyn had visualized for herself and the kids.

“The tree, that’s what really did it for me,” she said. “When I saw this house, it’s like God is really blessing me.”

At $1,500 a month, it was something Brooklyn could afford. But she had no money saved up for move-in costs and yet another move.

In all of her searches for help, JFCS of the Suncoast gave her a light. Case manager January Beles was struck by the resiliency of the young mother and her positive attitude. She turned to Season of Sharing, which covered the first month’s rent in September – enough to help Brooklyn and the kids get in the door.

But the assistance did more than that. It would cushion Brooklyn for what came next – something she had been waiting for almost half of her life.

How to Help: Support Season of Sharing

"Finally, I get a chance at life"

It happened one evening in October, at her job at a North Port bar and grille.

At the end of her shift, a gentleman approached, possibly another bar flirt, she thought at first. But then she saw that wasn’t the case. He was older and kind, his questions sincere. What did she want to do with her life? He had watched her hustle, admiring her work ethic – not realizing the brain fog she powered through, struggling to recall drinks she’d served a hundred times before.

She told him about her stalled college applications, her health leaving her unable to see them through. He asked if she considered the medical field. She laughed – sharing her disillusionment and more than decade-long battle to find reasons behind her fatigue and pain. It was then that he told her that he was a doctor.

She couldn’t believe it. The floodgates opened and she told him her entire ordeal, the medicines she was taking, her various diagnoses. He listened and asked more questions. He ran down a list of symptoms. She said yes and yes again – every one of them describing her to a T.

“You have lupus,” he concluded. Brooklyn was stunned.

“Wait! I thought that all along,” she yelped.

Brooklyn was ecstatic – a strange reaction, she knew, to such serious news. It was what she had been praying for – a doctor who would listen, see her as a person and not a crazy patient, who could offer an answer to what was plaguing her for years. And he had found her, exactly as she’d asked.

“God, you answered my prayers,” she thought.

As Brooklyn’s Uber pulled up, the man gave her his card. She called and was seen right away – with an official diagnosis to follow. She had lupus cerebritis, she learned – a version of the autoimmune disorder that attacks the brain and central nervous system.

Brooklyn immediately began new medications for autoimmune suppression therapy and steroids to combat the inflammation in her brain. Within days the fog lifted from her head. She found a new energy she hadn’t experienced since her youth.

Thanks to the one-time assist from Season of Sharing, she could take the time she needed for the doctor’s visits, transitioning to a new job in North Port without falling behind on bills.

“This is the best I’ve felt in years,” Brooklyn said on a recent morning in her serene home – with candles lit and calm music playing in the background, her potted plants and seedlings lining the lanai out back and around the big oak tree. 

“It’s beautiful. Oh my God, I just like to get up and walk without feeling like my legs weigh 500 pounds.”

Her relationship with her parents is on the mend. And she is making up for lost time with 10-year-old Alayna, and Ezra, now 5. They read together and play in the yard. She hopes to plan a family vacation soon. For now she has commandeered the chores – to let Alayna be a kid.

Brooklyn, now 29, is also ready to dive into her next chapter. She has dusted off those college applications and is applying to go back to school. She is confident now she has the strength to follow through on her goals.

“Finally,” she said, “I get a chance at life."

How to helpYou can donate to Season of Sharing by going to cfsarasota.org or calling 941-556-2399. You can also mail a check to Season of Sharing, Community Foundation of Sarasota County, 2635 Fruitville Road, Sarasota, FL 34237.This story comes from a partnership between the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and the Community Foundation of Sarasota County. Saundra Amrhein covers the Season of Sharing campaign, along with issues surrounding housing, utilities, child care and transportation in the area. She can be reached at samrhein@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Season of Sharing helps North Port mom through health battle