Levity
10-12-2006, 04:55 PM
I’m posting this here because, well, no one else in my life knows about my addiction. My fiancé knows I abuse my legally prescribed opiates on weekends or days off, and I have a few friends who like to get off with me. Saturday night often consists of me and three friend parachuting Loratabs, Percocets, snorting a few lines of Xanax or OxyCotin, maybe smoking a bowl or two, or even doing some high-test cocaine, tested MDMA, or whatever else we can get our hands on.
No one notices that while one 10mg Oxy can get them going, I slip an extra three or four I my mouth. No one notices that my parachute is a little fuller, that my drink a little stronger, and maybe even spiked with some Hydrocodone cough syrup I faked my way into the other day when I had an “upper chest cold,” which was nothing more than me drinking half a gallon of milk, snorting some pepper, and going to the walk-in clinic with a cough and insurance card.
It’s not like we don’t all know better; half of us are therapists treating drug users in an in-patient, (mostly) voluntary program. We see the ones who’ve hit bottom; crack head mothers who sold their babies for a ten dollar rock, forty year old meth heads so out of their mind on crystal they’re hallucinating and trying to rip out their own throats. Of course, we’ve even seen the pill heads. Guys with a 250mg a day Oxy habit with their noses running down to their knees saying they’d give us anything is only we’d sneak a few pills into the hospital for them.
Sometimes I do.
But still, after six days of this, we gather around and pop, parachute, and snort our way into forgetting what the lessons of the previous week taught us. I forget the most, because it’s Thursdays like this where I come home and stare at my impressive collection and wonder how many pills I can take before it all just slips away. Lessons learned and so, so easily forgotten.
Last week we released eight patients. We had hopes for five of them. Realistically, we knew maybe – maybe – one would manage to stay clean for a month. Today three of those patients overdosed on their respective drugs. One did almost three hundred dollars of the high quality crack they call butter in less than thirty minutes. His heart literally exploded. One did so much meth between the day he was released and today he had a mental break and did not who he was. We were told he shot himself twice. Once in the chest and once in the head. The last guy was my patient. He had a pill addiction which started out like most of ours’. He broke his leg and the doctor gave him hydrocodone for a few weeks after the surgery. We can all imagine his story… Missing the euphoria hydrocodone brought him, he turned to the streets where he found morphine pills, more hydos, some percs, and, eventually, OxyCotin. Not realizing his tolerance had decreased in the month he spent in-patient, this guy nearly doubled his usual dose of 150 plus milligrams.
So I come home. Class cancelled this afternoon because your assistant professor needs to get lit. I suggest you do the same. Inside the door, bag and jacket dropped on the way to the bedroom. Tagament chewed. Kitchen. Grapefruit juice poured, spiked with 100 proof vodka. Gulped down. Wait thirty minutes, stared at my reflection in the aluminum refrigerator. Bedroom. Sock drawer. Organized perfectly. I hate a mess. Right hand side, pill bottles neatly organized. OxyCotin 10mg, ten out. Percocet 5mg, five out. Loratab 7.5mg. Eight out because I don’t feel like splitting a pill. Kitchen. Mortal and pestle. Crushed into a fine powder. Office to get blue construction powder out of desk. I like blue, its soothing, I use it for everything. Pour powder on paper. Refrigerator for a cherry coke. Pour it into a glass. Upend the paper into my mouth, coke to wash away the taste. Take a shot of vodka.
Bathroom. Antacid taken. Pepto bismol for oncoming nausea.. Xanax 2mg. Take two. Anything else? Old bottle of Demerol Syrup. 50ml left. Drink it.
My father is a construction foreman. But primarily, he’s an alcoholic. My mother had chronic pain since I was eight. She broke her spine in seven places, both legs, and fractured her skull skydiving. Her parachute didn’t open in time. She became addicted to Oxycodone pretty damn quickly, especially when she mixed them with every housewife’s favorite medication - vine and valium. I went to college to escape them. Studied psychology to learn how to help them. Learned about psychopharmacology, abuse counseling, and combined the two. Save the ones society left behind. Marginalized by poor choices, poor genes, poor brain chemistry. Messiah-complex? Upper-middle class white guilt?
I’m wreck. Destroyed. Not overdosing, but close. Maybe that was my intention. Maybe it would be best. No…
The other half of our group are artists from my fiancé’s program. They paint pretty landscapes and take pictures of trees and birds and shit. I deal with the people society forgot, hoping I can make them better. Even if I can help one person how to control their addiction, my life has meaning.
Sorry, this has got to be the longest and stupidest rant in this forum’s history. I just needed t have someone like me hear (well, read) this words. Thanks for the opportunity to vent.
No one notices that while one 10mg Oxy can get them going, I slip an extra three or four I my mouth. No one notices that my parachute is a little fuller, that my drink a little stronger, and maybe even spiked with some Hydrocodone cough syrup I faked my way into the other day when I had an “upper chest cold,” which was nothing more than me drinking half a gallon of milk, snorting some pepper, and going to the walk-in clinic with a cough and insurance card.
It’s not like we don’t all know better; half of us are therapists treating drug users in an in-patient, (mostly) voluntary program. We see the ones who’ve hit bottom; crack head mothers who sold their babies for a ten dollar rock, forty year old meth heads so out of their mind on crystal they’re hallucinating and trying to rip out their own throats. Of course, we’ve even seen the pill heads. Guys with a 250mg a day Oxy habit with their noses running down to their knees saying they’d give us anything is only we’d sneak a few pills into the hospital for them.
Sometimes I do.
But still, after six days of this, we gather around and pop, parachute, and snort our way into forgetting what the lessons of the previous week taught us. I forget the most, because it’s Thursdays like this where I come home and stare at my impressive collection and wonder how many pills I can take before it all just slips away. Lessons learned and so, so easily forgotten.
Last week we released eight patients. We had hopes for five of them. Realistically, we knew maybe – maybe – one would manage to stay clean for a month. Today three of those patients overdosed on their respective drugs. One did almost three hundred dollars of the high quality crack they call butter in less than thirty minutes. His heart literally exploded. One did so much meth between the day he was released and today he had a mental break and did not who he was. We were told he shot himself twice. Once in the chest and once in the head. The last guy was my patient. He had a pill addiction which started out like most of ours’. He broke his leg and the doctor gave him hydrocodone for a few weeks after the surgery. We can all imagine his story… Missing the euphoria hydrocodone brought him, he turned to the streets where he found morphine pills, more hydos, some percs, and, eventually, OxyCotin. Not realizing his tolerance had decreased in the month he spent in-patient, this guy nearly doubled his usual dose of 150 plus milligrams.
So I come home. Class cancelled this afternoon because your assistant professor needs to get lit. I suggest you do the same. Inside the door, bag and jacket dropped on the way to the bedroom. Tagament chewed. Kitchen. Grapefruit juice poured, spiked with 100 proof vodka. Gulped down. Wait thirty minutes, stared at my reflection in the aluminum refrigerator. Bedroom. Sock drawer. Organized perfectly. I hate a mess. Right hand side, pill bottles neatly organized. OxyCotin 10mg, ten out. Percocet 5mg, five out. Loratab 7.5mg. Eight out because I don’t feel like splitting a pill. Kitchen. Mortal and pestle. Crushed into a fine powder. Office to get blue construction powder out of desk. I like blue, its soothing, I use it for everything. Pour powder on paper. Refrigerator for a cherry coke. Pour it into a glass. Upend the paper into my mouth, coke to wash away the taste. Take a shot of vodka.
Bathroom. Antacid taken. Pepto bismol for oncoming nausea.. Xanax 2mg. Take two. Anything else? Old bottle of Demerol Syrup. 50ml left. Drink it.
My father is a construction foreman. But primarily, he’s an alcoholic. My mother had chronic pain since I was eight. She broke her spine in seven places, both legs, and fractured her skull skydiving. Her parachute didn’t open in time. She became addicted to Oxycodone pretty damn quickly, especially when she mixed them with every housewife’s favorite medication - vine and valium. I went to college to escape them. Studied psychology to learn how to help them. Learned about psychopharmacology, abuse counseling, and combined the two. Save the ones society left behind. Marginalized by poor choices, poor genes, poor brain chemistry. Messiah-complex? Upper-middle class white guilt?
I’m wreck. Destroyed. Not overdosing, but close. Maybe that was my intention. Maybe it would be best. No…
The other half of our group are artists from my fiancé’s program. They paint pretty landscapes and take pictures of trees and birds and shit. I deal with the people society forgot, hoping I can make them better. Even if I can help one person how to control their addiction, my life has meaning.
Sorry, this has got to be the longest and stupidest rant in this forum’s history. I just needed t have someone like me hear (well, read) this words. Thanks for the opportunity to vent.