Michela is a 38 year old single woman of Hispanic descent. She identifies as heterosexual and a member of the Catholic religious faith. Michela’s parents are immigrants from El Salvador who came to America in the mid 1970’s to seek a better life for themselves. They settled at first in central Pennsylvania, where Michela was later born. Her father worked in a coal mine for her early years and eventually died in a mining accident when Michela was 10 years old.
This event lead to a great deal of turmoil in the family. Michela’s mother, who had been unskilled and primarily raising Michela and her younger brother, eventually sued the mining company for wrongful death and won a high six-figure verdict, which allowed her to relocate the family to the area they presently live in, as well as purchase a home and live modestly for the last 15 or so years.
Because Michela had a good support network of friends and surrogate-like family from the local Catholic church surrounding her, she was able to maintain B grades and graduate high school in the middle of her class (the first in her family to do so). She had dreams of attending college and becoming a nurse.
Michela, also an accomplished soccer player in high school, at 18 earned a partial scholarship to play soccer at a small private liberal arts school several hours from her mother and brother. It was here that Michela’s life began to unravel.
She began spending time with some new friends that had much more a party lifestyle than her friends from high school, who had been overachieving students focused on earning good grades. She began to experiment with alcohol and marijuana. In the beginning, it was harmless fun, as her new friends made her feel good about “kicking back” and getting tipsy once in awhile. Michela was able to balance her school life, soccer practice responsibilities, and personal life for the first year, but did see her grades slip from B’s to C’s. She assured her mother the following summer that while college was significantly more difficult than high school, she felt she could handle the work and just thought she needed the first year to “adjust.” Her mother believed her and wished her well as she departed back to school for her sophomore year.
It was during this year that things completely fell apart for Michela. Her alcohol use increased significantly, to the point that she drinking most days of the week. She also graduated from marijuana and began trying other drugs her friends had around; mainly ecstasy, cocaine and pain pills.
No longer could she balance her partying with her life responsibilities, Michela began to get F’s on assignments, started skipping classes, and stopped attending soccer practice.
One night towards the end of the Fall semester, Michela was extremely intoxicated and woke up the next morning, naked in an off-campus apartment and unable to remember what happened the night prior.
Michela went to the police the next day, who were able to confirm she had been raped the night prior and went about collecting evidence and as well as initiating the prosecution process. The legal ordeal proved more than she could handle, as Michela had to testify before her assailant in court, as well as suffer many judgements and insults from her classmates who called her a “whore” for blaming her assailant, who happened to be a popular athlete at the college she attended.
The perpetrator was eventually found guilty of rape and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Michela, however, has been unable to fully heal from this awful ordeal., She dropped out of college and returned home to her mother’s house, but her mother didn’t recognize the person Michela had become. Her alcohol use increased drastically during the legal proceedings, and she found herself making friends at the local bars in her hometown instead of seeking out her old friends from church and high school.
Presently, Michela has about 45 college credits toward a nursing degree. It’s been 7 years since the trial, and at this point she is a full blown alcoholic, supported mainly by her mother and her on-again, off-again boyfriend Max. She has no job or benefits, including medical insurance which only covered her as long as she was in school. Although she’s had some minor brushes with the law for petty crimes and a few short-term hospitalizations for erratic behavior, she has not been in counseling or treatment in the years following her trauma for any extended period of time.
Michela was referred to the case management agency by a social worker the last time she was hospitalized, about 3 months ago. Her mother had the phone number from Michela’s discharge paperwork, and called them two weeks ago, as they had checked in periodically since the discharge despite Michela never following through with services or treatment. Her mother is in financial trouble, as the money from her lawsuit is set to run out in the next few months she can no longer afford to provide for her daughter. She asked if the agency could help Michela find an apartment of her own.