Addiction, true story Options

[elaboratedream]

For photography, we had to interview someone and ask them to tell us a true story about themselves.
I interviewed my aunt for it. This is her story.



I pulled the worn comforter up around my face – freezing, shaking, so cold, I was so cold. I rolled over and felt something warm and uncomfortable below my waist. No! I bolted upright. Not again. Wasn’t it just last night? A vision oozed into my mind. I could see myself walking so slowly – staggering really – up the walk late at night, urine stains down both legs. Yes, that was last night.

I reached over and extracted a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table. I lit it then reached for the roach of a joint, lit it too. It was barely 5 AM and they were here for me already – the Heebie Jeebies. When had I run out of it – my hippie heroin? Ten years solid I had never missed a day – 4-6 Vicodin every 4 hours 24 hours/day.

I sucked down the joint, stomped out the cigarette. I rocked back and forth for a minute but it was no use. Sweat was forming on my forehead – and I knew soon it would be pouring off me. I didn’t know if I was hot or cold but I knew one thing for certain – the relentless cramping would only grow worse and I needed to find the bathroom quick.

This was nothing new – I awakened this way daily. It didn’t help that I had done the better part of an eightball the night before. I was sick sick sick. I knew it would be hours of unmitigated suffering until I got my Vicodin.

I spent the morning smoking weed and running to the bathroom to pass something that looked like black silt. The seconds dragged until noon. I was shaking all over from the inside out and hurt from head to toe. When at last the 100 double-strength Lortab were safely in hand, I washed down six of them without a second thought. I felt the warmth creep in around the edges then descend upon me like a thick rich cloud.

It was dark the next time I noticed my surroundings. I wasn’t sure where my day had gone; I started cutting the rest of the cocaine when an idea came to me. I would crush up some of the Vics and some morphine and snort them too – my own version of a speedball.

Two days later I woke up in a sea of white – a white sheet was stretched across my freezing, aching, sweating, hurting body and something was poking my arm. I struggled to open my swollen eyes and looked down at my arm to see a needle in my forearm.

I was in St. Vincent Hospital where I would spend the next six days in severe detox. Methadone staved off the Heebie Jeebies but nothing could touch the vomiting, the sweats, and the chills. I was angry and sick and felt sorry for myself.

It was six long weeks of the Intensive Outpatient Program before I was released. The day I left the hospital I was stunned by the brightness of the sun – how it stung my eyes. A slight breeze brushed over my skin, felt like knife blades. The world had grown too big, become too intense, a burden to every sense. I lost 20 pounds the first two weeks, but I remember little of that period.

Gradually the fog that had settled in some 25 years previously began to lift. By the time I graduated from rehab, it was gone.

On the last day of treatment, I walked into the Green Room for our last group session. The Green Room was not green at all but rather beige and sterile, normally a drab affair. Today, however, it was festive, filled with gifts and treats and balloons.

‘What’s the occasion?’ I asked, and everyone laughed.
‘It’s your graduation,” they announced.

As we proceeded through the ceremony, it all came back to me. They told me I was the one they had voted least likely to succeed. They thought I’d relapse before I finished the program. They told me I lost a lot to get there. They told me there was no medical, scientific reason I was still alive, that I should have died years before.

‘There’s a reason God kept you alive,” they said. ‘You need to remember that.’

Treatment ended in May 2006, and every day since I have remembered those words. ‘You are a living miracle,’ they said.

It has been a struggle since March 25, 2006 to stay clean. Every day I must find the strength to fight for my sobriety, but the payoff has been worth it. Every day I have seen a new miracle in a life I never knew existed. Most importantly, I got my family back, but I also got my career back, my self-respect, and my financial security.

Staring death in the eye and walking away from it changes one’s perspective on even the most mundane aspects of life. It is only then that we finally are able to look at one another and see that we are all a living miracle!

[*MyMichelle*]

I like this a lot.

You should submit it to ...something. A book on drug addiction for short-stories, like Chicken Soup for the Soul or something similar?