Ok, so before I get into this I should explain that when I first got to "The Villa", as I affectionately call it, I was feeling lower than low about my life and all that had occurred in recent years. I was in a horrible place emotionally and physically. Oh and I had one hell of a shiner from an incident that had occurred on that horrible night everything came to a head. My heart and spirit were broken. I'd made horrible "choices" that had left a path of destruction in relationships and in my own health. I was LOW. I was chin deep in guilt. And the counselors there kept telling me those first few days that it wasn't ALL MY FAULT! I was blown away. I kept thinking... I made those choices, I put those drugs in my body, I did all those horrible things! I DID IT! I wasn't buying into this excuse that I had a DISEASE of some kind. I was calling them out on what I believed to be BS! But with their help in a few short days, I came to realize that they were probably right. The OLD me, the me before drugs, would never have done most, if not all, of the things I had done in recent years. Ever.
The benefit of the advice and knowledge that came from my counselors was that they were all, all three of them, in recovery themselves. Plus, they had degrees in the Drug/Alcohol treatment world. They had approximately 50+ years of sobriety between the 3 of them. So who was I kidding? They gave me literature to read and as I attended AA & NA meetings, I realized that those people there were like me, like my grandma, like my old next door neighbor. These weren't horrible scary people like the movies sometimes make addicts out to be. They were me, they were you! Except that they (and I) had this horrible disease. It is still hard for me to accept this at times when I speak to a friend or family member about this subject, because they seem to think I am skirting blame for my actions. What needs to be understood is that "despite my best efforts' (as my counselor Bill would say) I could only make wrong decisions at that time because I was thinking "like a crazy person". He always had the nicest way of putting things. LOL. But he got the point across. In admitting that I have this "disease", I am not trying to make an "excuse" for my behavior and decisions I made. I am simply stating fact. I often look back at the things I have done and said and am shocked that the woman I once knew was nowhere to be found in that addiction. She was gone.
It is nice now, in recovery, to hear people like my mother say that they see some signs of "the old Stacey" coming back. It's reassuring that I am doing the right thing, That my family & friends see SOME progress in this effort. I still have a long, long way to go, but it's happening. Then I think to myself, do I really want "the old Stacey" back? Obviously something in her was broken. When my injury occurred and pain killers were prescribed, things that were broken inside me must have latched on to the "euphoria" provided by those powerful drugs. Looking back, as I do so often everyday, I see how the signs were all there from the very beginning. That my life was headed in the wrong direction and through the cloud of the addiction, I could not see how to stop it. My Narcotics Anonymous Book is like my second bible in my recovery. In reading last night I came across this passage, which talks more about how this disease makes one's life SO unmanageable.
"As addicts we turned our will and our lives over many times to a destructive power. Our will and our lives were controlled by drugs. We were trapped by our need for instant gratification that drugs gave us. During that time, our total being - body, mind and spirit - was dominated by drugs. For a time, it was pleasurable, then the euphoria began to wear off and we saw the ugly side of addiction. We found that the higher drugs took us, the lower they brought us. We faced either two choices: either we suffered the pain of withdrawal or took more drugs. For all of us, the day came when there was no longer a choice; we had to use. Having given [up] our will and lives to our addiction in utter desperation, we looked the other way." *
For those of you who don't necessarily understand the disease of addiction, it is real difficult to put this previous paragraph into perspective. But I will try. One of the biggest things an addict of Opiates or Painkillers fears in their addiction is withdrawal. Some of these symptoms are :
Early symptoms of withdrawal include:
- Agitation
- Anxiety
- Muscle aches
- Increased tearing
- Insomnia
- Runny nose
- Sweating
- Yawning
Late symptoms of withdrawal include:
- Abdominal cramping
- Diarrhea
- Dilated pupils
- Goose bumps
- Nausea
- Vomiting**
In my experience over my years of use and misuse of these medications, withdrawal is like torture. The symptoms above, it should be known, are often times worse in some than in others. My experience with withdrawal was traumatizing-every time. There were times when I would, for days at a time(at the most 9) vomit violently with even the smallest sip of a liquid. It's horrific to watch, by the way, someone going through this. The agitation, anxiety, and muscle aches feel like someone is touching, pulling, pushing, grabbing, at you and it makes your brain crazy. Insomnia is a form of torture through withdrawals. And add all of these symptoms together for 9 days straight and you would do ANYTHING to make it stop. It is scary and painful and insane. I've been told that the only thing worse than opiate withdrawal is detox from alcohol.
Unfortunately, the quickest way to feel better is to use again. And the cycle of insanity goes on. In mentally reliving this craziness over in my head these past few months with a clean and reflective mind, I can totally see "disease" as the definition of what I put myself through so many times. I tried several times, too many to count, to get clean and sober on my own, but honesty the withdrawals were so physically difficult for me, that I went back to the pills EVERY time. I didn't understand why I couldn't do it.
Now that I understand this is a "disease". And I am never going to be "cured" but I am in what I guess one would call remission and it feels good. I feel like I am beginning to feel freedom again.
That is worth it to me.
* Narcotics Anonymous page 25 (Step 3)
** http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000949.html
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