Addiction

There are some who don't even know they have it. It creeps up on you like a thief in the night, not knowing what it is or where it came from. I am going to speak of someone very dear to me, so I am going to change her name and a few other minor details, but only to protect her identity. The percentage of addicts that grow each year is appalling. Even though most everyone can get healthcare that will treat drug addiction, that is only a quarter of the problem.

I have a friend named Ann, who had a child young, and when she gave birth at the age of 15 the nurses gave her Demerol. Which is a very powerful painkiller that is administered directly into your vascular system. She says that was the first time everything was right in the world, and she craved that sensation every minute of every day until she found it again. The closest she came was a medication called oxy-codone and oxy cotten which she spent years of her life wasting on finding, working for the money, and buying these pills just to realize that she could not live a day without them or she would go through serious pain called withdraw. After years of not only her abusing this drug it was taken off the market. She was devastated, not to mention in the most pain she'd ever experienced. A person in her life reached out an olive branch to her introducing heroin. The very thought of this paralyzed her because she never thought that she would ever have to rely on what "junkies" rely on just to get themselves well every day. Her days went from sniffing just a little to take the edge off until she came up with a solution, to becoming too familiar with needles, and having that same, if not worse addiction to heroin. I'm skipping over the parts where her daughters would only be 6 or 7 but try to make mommy coffee to keep her from falling asleep the way she does. The years that went by in a flash and it seemed like her kids were all grown up, but she had nothing to do with it. With some help from her kids and family they brought it to her attention and said that this absolutely could not go on any longer. I was at her side for the darkest days and there was nothing that I could do to help. When battling with this disease no one can help you but you. You can spend your days and nights with them, but all you can do is listen, care, hope and watch. To be honest, there were times when she was hopeful that maybe she could keep herself afloat by only taking 4 pills of whatever, and add to her addiction two medications that were supposed to help you with your addiction. Methadone and Xanax. Which to me seemed to be the worst decisions she ever made, and these drugs were given to her by actual doctors. She tried, I can say as someone who watched her struggle with heroin and a needle, crack in a pipe, this decade was just going to a clinic every day to take this liquid and take these pills four to six times a day which, I'll never understand why a doctor would prescribe one of the worlds most addictive drugs and one drug that the withdraw will kill you. I once asked her why she couldn't take exactly what was prescribed or less/ She said to me to imagine having some kind of symptom, then going to a doctor, getting the medication needed for it, if I were to take that medication the symptom would ... go away, For her the symptom always seemed to linger or always came back. Or because she did have an addicts brain that did not work like ours, she was always looking for relief, to feel better. Yeah, when her drug use began it may have started as fun, feeling numb from all her troubles, or getting a piercing rush from smoking coke, but it turned into not feeling human without eventually putting something in her veins, or not even being able to get up and make dinner for her children if she didn't have that push from cocaine. She told me that she had wished someone would've shown her or told her what the words addition and withdraw meant. Being physically addicted to anything for anyone is a beast, even if it's simple nicotine. Just simply quitting smoking is relentless, and you don't have to be an addict to feel withdraw. When you feed your body something then take it away it's as if you don't know how to act because your body is craving that substance. If you take a heroin addict, it's a whole new ball game, because you have to add in all the factors of what heroin does to the human brain and then what the brain tells the body to feel while getting high. Lets say heroin is simply pushing a button that tells your brain to release every chemichle to make your body feel as good as it ever could. Even a person who does not have the gene of being an addict can get addicted. After this person pushes this button once a day for five days, then says, "enough of that, maybe a break is needed", after five days of that button releasing the chemicals, the body needs those chemicals for every day living. What do you think happens when they are no longer there for daily living, daily energy, smiles, kissing your children when they return from school, the simplest things that you may not have ever thought was joyful, but when taken away, these things are truly missed. Even more so withdraw kicks in and you are sick. Most times violently ill. Not able to keep anything on your stomach. Like the flu, hot, sweating but so cold, but unlike the flu you are unable to sit in your own skin because it feels as if it's crawling off of your body. I would think the person that has not been cursed with the addiction gene, would do their best to put their heads down and plow through. But the addict, but I'm not saying all addicts, struggle with what is called relapse, trying to get through the withdraw but uses again, because they know once the do that feeling will go away. I've looked my friend in the eyes year after year, and even though she knows this disease had consumed most of her life, to this day she cannot imagine the pain of withdraw, and it's been nothing but a circle, a never ending deadly cycle, in which she feels she has no options. Year after year I have held her while she tries another avenue to try to gain control, but every time the door slams in her face, she has to come to terms with the inevitable, that this cycle is going to be what she needs to deal with for the rest of her life. Sometimes she'd beg for the sweet release of death, because first there is the fear of the agonizing pain of withdraw, then if she has nothing to prevent withdraw, comes the agonizing pain. Honestly, from what I have seen, I'm confused as to why there are not more suicides because of dealing with withdraw.

She got to the point to where she was taking methadone, and although it didn't stop the cravings or the unbearable desire to do what comes so easy to her didn't stop we were able to flip her addiction to heroin over to methadone. If you ask some people it's just as bad if not worse, the withdraw from heroin takes a week, maybe a little more, methadone is still coming out of your body 3 or 4 months later, and the pain is unbearable for at least two months if you do not take the correct measures by coming down so slowly it is as if you have to trick your brain and body into depleting it all from your body. My friend is stricken with fear every day because she does not know what her fait is when it comes to be taken off. Even though she is not a criminal and there is no way that the worst of the worst could happen, which is go to jail and detox on your own, but she is still afraid because it is in this clinics hands whether or not she'll stay on it and if need be taken off at one point, will she be thrown off in 21 days or will they slowly take her down, or the option she would chose because she knows that this is how she will be for the rest of her life, keep her at a comfortable dose that lets her live her life day by day without "getting high".

In this story I just wanted people to see a glimpse of a day in the life of someone who struggles everyday. Not only with day to day issues, but add on the chemical dependency, and psychological issues that have to be dealt with daily