Recognizing a Hero In Addict (7 cont&8)

By the time I started seizing regularly, the situation escalated to an unfathomable level of unbearable. I was trying to walk to my bathroom a room away, but every few feet I would wake up on the floor. I knew this meant the seizures had begun. You don't know when you're in the process of seizing other than that you lose time and wake up in a different position than you were previously in prior to the loss, typically stunned and with bruises. I was trying to get to the bathroom to throw up and simultaneously expel the build up of excrement packed tightly and abundantly in my filled intestines as a result of approximately 14 years at this point of almost non existent and irregular bowel movements.

I was 12 when I started having sharp, stabbing pains in my stomach. They became so severe that I had to be taken to the hospital. The doctor took an xray of my stomach, and the results came back that I was full of shit, literally. The doctor told me he had never seen someone so young have this damaging of an irregularity in their bowel movements to pack their intestines so full of shit. In retrospect, I had already had several years worth of a steady ingestion and diet's worth of narcotics, unknowingly and thanks to my doting Mother, and it makes total sense I was this physically damaged already. You see, opiates block you up and make it difficult to perform the necessary action of tensing your muscles to expel waste. When you abruptly stop using narcotics, your body makes up for your previous inability to do so by making it next to impossible to stop said waste from being expelled. Translation-it's really fucking hard not to shit your pants.

I wasn't puking, but rather performing the dreaded action of attempting to do so constantly, otherwise known as dry heaving, or it's other commomly known title of just fucking kill me now. If you have never withdrawn from methadone or benzos, I don't fucking recommend it. But, I highly don't fucking recommend withdrawing from both at once. I was starting to quickly realize that my body was under far too much stress. Distress actually. Distress that exceeded simply wanting to die, and rose to the level of entering shock and actually dying a brutal fucking death without help. I painstakingly located the phonebook, and I was rescued by a local group that helped poor souls like myself get into treatment. I was extremely lucky because I don't believe I would have made it out of that situation alive, one way or another. They came and got me almost immediately. Anybody that has been in this situation can tell you what an out and out miracle this occurence was. A man and a woman in recovery came and picked me up in a mini van. They carried me to the mini van, and the plan was to take me back to their office until I could get in with the suboxone doc they scheduled me with in an hour. If you have never seen someone this badly in withdrawal before, it is a horrifically jarring scene, even to those in recovery.

It might even be more painful and jarring to those IN recovery because there's a piece of them that can actually feel your pain. Typically pain they've repressed do to precisely how horrific it really is. A lot of addicts will tell you, this is the reason they volunteer for these types of tasks while in recovery. It's a powerful visual and reminder of why you don't want to slip back into your habit, and what will eventually happen if you do. After years in recovery, and sometimes less, your addiction starts to play tricks on you by trying to entice you back into it's world by having you only reminisce on your using in a fond and pleasurable light. This scene will snap you back to reality real fucking quick.

We didn't make it to their office. They didn't even try. They looked scared, and I knew they were. They drove maniacally to the suboxone doctor, carried me inside, and started frantically asking the receptionist to get the doctor out "NOW". I had in fact waited far too long to call for help, but I didn't care about dying. I cared about wanting to die with every fiber of my being, and my body not allowing it. I cared about not being able to breathe because I was dry heaving so incessantly that I could barely take a breath. The man and woman told me I had several seizures while on the 15 minute van ride, and I was in really, really bad shape. They carried me into an office full of normal people. Jesus, these poor fucking people. Yes, poor me, but you've gotta understand what these people were subjected to also. This was a normal every day physician that just happened to be the only one in the area that also had her license to prescribe suboxone. These were everyday people visiting this doctor for everyday things. Imagine going to your primary Care physician for a flu shot and seeing this picture. Jesus, I don't wish that sight on my worst enemy. A sight I was too. They had a hard time getting me inside, and they tried to get the receptionist to allow me to wait in the van, but based on their taking me in, she obviously wasn't allowing it. When the receptionist saw me, it was obvious she wished she would have. I was no longer a person at that point. I was being tortured by an unyielding beast that was devouring my insides and mind with a voracity of a thousand wild, starving hyenas. I could only collapse inside the door into a fetal position and rock back and forth while those hyenas screeched wildly and loudly inside what was left of my mind. The doctor peeked outside into the waiting room, and then ran to my angel posse carrying a prescription pad exclaiming, "Oh Jesus, get her this script right now!", as she scribbled the suboxone note out on it. That's exactly what they did. I don't know how long I waited in that van, but it felt like a thousand fucking years, and I lost my goddamned mind, or what was left of it, in the time it took for the pharmacy to fill it. Finally, the man came back to the van with the woman and I inside, and he had the prescription.

Within 45 minutes of taking my first tablet of suboxone, I knew there was a God. You don't get "high" from suboxone. Not if you have a serious drug habit, you don't. Suboxone simply stops the pride of wild animals that ferociously dine on your insides while you're alive. It stops a slow, brutal, relentless, and agonizingly torturous death. It is a miracle drug, and I will fight to the day I die to ensure this drug is offered in prisons as an alternative to this torture that can be prevented by simply offering this medication assisted treatment, or MAT, as it's known within the addiction community. Despite MAT programs being so overwhelmingly beneficial to addicts, they are still contested by those that are ignorant to the disease of addiction, and feel we are simply trading one addiction for another. This could not be further from the truth, and despite the countless studies done on suboxone and it's indisputable results in combatting addiction symptoms, these same individuals still contest without merit or reason, it being administered to mitigate addiction and it's symptoms. If you know anyone that wants to logically dispute the merits of suboxone being administered for MAT, send them my way. The inhumanity of not allowing MAT for incarcerated addicts is unfathomable, reprehensible, and satanic even.

I know the cruelty involved because I've experienced it first hand when I went to prison. I am one of the "lucky" ones that is alive to write about my experience. My late best friend's sister wasn't that lucky. She hung herself in a jail cell as a welcome alternative to enduring the torture of withdrawing from heroin. Her three year old daughter lost her Mother that day, and her Mother lost her second daughter in a span of five years. A loss that could have been prevented, prevented by suboxone.

Chapter 8

While other kids were graduating high school and applying to colleges to kick start their lives, I was busy applying to rehabs to kick my habit. It was a miracle I graduated high school, but I did, and now I needed another miracle. Even if you want help, like most addicts do, it's not readily available for us to take advantage of. I needed healthcare to enter treatment, so I applied for a job with the state, and started working full time in the city, as a student loan collections representative, to acquire the healthcare I needed to enter a treatment facility at 19. After the initial waiting period required, I was granted access to the help I desperately needed.

It couldn't have come soon enough. In the weeks prior to my entering rehab, I had two separate and apparently scarring on my coworkers, instances of falling out with grand mal seizures from being in withdrawal after not being able to obtain enough medication to satisfy my addicted body. I was told it was extremely scary for them to witness, and both times they called 911 to have me transported via ambulance to the hospital. No one suspected this was a result of my addiction. No one suspected I had an addiction. Pretty, young, white, professionals aren't registering as drug addicts on anyone's radar. Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.

Despite all the evidence my peers were being presented with, their worlds would have been far too unbalanced and disrupted by accepting the reality of my being a drug addict. In their minds, a drug addict is someone that lived in another set of skin, residing in a squalor filled neighborhood far away from the ones they occupied with their children and spouses. Accepting that a pretty, white, young, professional lived in the cubicle next to them, would mean accepting that this demonic force could inflict it's terror on them, their children, their families, and their lives without warning, discrimination, or humanity. If the monster didn't exist in their world, in their minds, then it couldn't hide in their closets in wait for them, for their families, their friends, their loved ones, or so they thought.

My first stint in a rehab was an eye opening experience on every front. Prior to my admittance into the facility in Pennsylvania where I lived and was from, I hid this shameful secret from everyone I knew for as long as I could remember. Doctors, friends, family outside my parents, teachers, boyfriends, coworkers, and everyone and anyone I interacted with was blissfully unaware that I was using copious amounts of narcotics morning, afternoon, and night to function enough to simply survive.

I was around 13 years old before I learned that the pills my Mother was feeding me since at least 9 years old, the vitamins I had been consuming repeatedly on a daily basis, were not in fact vitamins, but rather intensely strong narcotics that my body was heavily dependent upon. It was not my choice to begin ingesting narcotics, just as it was not the choice of my best friend's sister who hung herself withdrawing in a jail cell, and it was not the choice of the little girl turned woman being raped by her sick, incestuous father. But we still pay the price ignorance and addiction charges, for the abuse we suffered and endured at their hands. We pay the price of your ignorance every time you tell us to take responsibility for our actions, and imply and suggest we aren't. How much more do we have to pay, lose, endure, be subjected to for society to stop persecuting, labeling, and vilifying us? For what period of time are we required to be the villains, and who decides how much and for how long to punish us, if not us? We have to live with and in the shadow of this monster, this disease that consumes us, for an entire lifetime. Regardless of how many years of recovery I accomplish, I still live in fear of this merciless beast devouring me again one day, and will forever have to take preventative measures to ensure it remains dormant while it lives inside of me for a lifetime. Addiction thrives in and feeds off of shame. Shame is addiction's main source of fuel, and every time you demean, belittle, and persecute us, you feed the beast his favorite meal. YOU feed the beast with your ignorance, and then you have the audacity to insult us with information you feel is new to us or a concept you offensively assert and believe escapes us by saying we need to take responsibility for our addiction. Does having an addiction negate our want and need to be treated as human beings worthy of the air you so selfishly hoard and divvy up to those you deem as deserving of it? We do fucking take responsibility, but our taking responsibility for our feeding it's body the daily requirements it needs to survive, doesn't include and coincide with accepting whatever abuse and punishment you feel is appropriate to add to our disease. We take responsibility for our actions in order to rehabilitate ourselves and our lives, because that is in fact what is required of us to recover, regardless of the circumstances surrounding the catalysts that catapult us into our disease. What our disease doesn't require of us in order to recover however, is having to be a worthless statistic in your misinformed minds and judgemental eyes for an entire lifetime. Yes, unfortunately we are forced to deal with it while we live in recovery, but we should never have to do so. I even take responsibility for the choices that weren't mine to make, and so do others, including my two aforementioned friends. Addiction doesn't cherry pick and distinguish which circumstances surrounding your admittance were just and which one's weren't, and therefore neither can you. Stop telling me, stop telling my counterparts that they aren't taking responsibility when in fact we're already required to and do take responsibility for our addiction even under the most heinous of circumstances, including abuse, incest, and rape.

But Andrea, not everyone's situation is like yours and theirs, and your situation is different. Surely I don't mean YOU, I don't mean those girls that didn't have a choice, I mean all the others that made the choice to be a drug addict and continue to make the CHOICE.

My situation is no different than every addict's situation in theory. We don't want to be drug addicts, alcoholics, and universally viewed as degenerates you get to step on to boost your own perception of your superior morality above ours. We shouldn't have to divulge to you our personal and often traumatic backstories in order for you to understand and accept that the circumstances that lead us into addiction and hold us there, are against our wishes and control. I shouldn't have to tell you that I have nightmares every night about my childhood, or that I prayed since I was a child to be anything but an addict. That I didn't make a choice to take drugs the first time, and that every time thereafter wasn't my choice either, but rather my satisfying my body's instinctual urge to survive by feeding it the drugs it was dependent upon in order for me to function as a human being.

What exactly is it that you fear mongers think is going to happen if you embrace the science and facts behind a team of physician's findings, over a half century ago, that addiction is a disease rather than a conscious choice? There's not an addict on this planet that is using these findings as an excuse for not quitting. We want you to embrace it as a means of acceptance which makes us feel our disease of addiction is more universally understood and regard the act of attempting to recover from it, as the monumentally difficult feat that it is. Do you really think we don't already know that it all comes down to us? Do you not think we already know how alone we are in our attempts to mitigate our disease? We know how alone we are, we know that we are the only ones that can deliver us from the belly of this beast, we know that we have to live in a hell that you can never even visit to gain perspective into our world. We fucking know how hopeless our situation is, so now can you please just stop fucking reminding us of it? Maybe making us feel like we're not as alone and discriminated against in our life and death battle to simply live a life after addiction and survive throughout it, isn't such a bad thing to reinforce recovery after all.