Please read: my addiction story and more
Welllll, it has been a LONG time since I posted in here. I've made a lot of changes in my life recently, and one of the promises I made myself is that I would reach out to people I have put at a foot-ball field's length. I know that maybe not a lot of people are left on my friend's list, and that's OK. Let me give you an update.
So, I was a drug addict. It started, really, you know, that first thrill of narcotics, with a shot of Demerol after a tonsillectomy when I was 20. After that first shot I made sure I got it every four hours round the clock for the day I was in the hospital. Then I got a second tonsillectomy. Same thing. In fact, I believe the knowledge that I would get Demerol made me want the surgery, although the doctor thought the growth in my throaght where my tonsils were might be cancerous: but he didn't tell me that until after the surgery,when he came to my bedside and said "Well, we got everything and it was benign." I think I was happier that I got to have drugs than the fact that I dodged a bullet I didn't even know I had. Then nothing for awhile. During my pregnancy with Chloe, I had something called icepick headaches, and my ob/gyn gave me a bottle of low dose demerol. I don't consider this as a part of my addiction path because it did not work at all. I mean, I felt the high, but the drugs didn't cut the pain at all, so I just didn't have a "good time." I started having regular pain in 1988, at the age of 21. It went undiagnosed for almost 10 years, and that is a lot of years of having pain on and off year-round, but I was never given pain medication except for the Stadol given me during my labor before the epidural. That was nice, but the labor was more important. The real addiction truly started when in Pittsburgh, my stupid husband (now ex) refused to pick up and install a small room air conditioner when I was boiling hot one day. So I did it, no biggie. I was proud of myself. Next day, I woke up in excruciating pain. Great shooting waves of pain in my lower back extending down my left leg. I thought I had a kidney infection, so I went to the Dr. and found out I pinched my ciatic nerve, and was given a bottle of Percocet. That is when I found the primary drug of my choice, oxycodone. That bottle lasted awhile, and I used it for a long time after the backpain went away, and not for pain, but to get high. Then, after I left my husband, I began having Restless Leg Syndrome. I called my Dr. on the phone (Pittsburgh again), and he prescribed me .25 mg. Klonopin. Not only did this drug fix my RLS, it ended my now-33 year struggle with insomnia. The next year, I went to the Dr. again for headaches. She upped my Klonopin to .5, and gave me another bottle of Percocet. I didn't abuse that bottle, but Klonopin became my hero. She gave me lots of refills. Then I got my Ph.D. and moved to TX. I got pregnant, and most of you who have been around know that my second pregnancy was horrific. I couldn't take Klonopin (it is teratogenic), and I didn't know that opiods stopped the RLS. But I did know that the Percocet stopped the horrible feelings, so I took it judiciously during the first half of my pregnancy. Then I ran out. Horror. One hour per night of sleep for 5 months. I cannot explain the horror. It changed my entire personality, resulting in part in me breaking up with Shawn (there were many other factors, but certainly this was one). At any rate, after I had the baby, they gave me Lortab. I like it. A lot. They also gave me more Klonopin, .25 again, so that was good. After her birth I had a year of unending lower back pain. I slept on the recliner for almost three months because it was the only thing that didn't hurt. So I went to a doctor in Corpus. He gave me a big old bottle of Lortab and a big old bottle of Soma. I loved them both, and this is when my drug seeking began. I went to the web to look up rumors about Corpus doctors who would prescribe opiates. I never got anything over Vicodin, but that back doctor at the Back Pain Center kept my supply rolling. It did cause the back pain to disappear, but I also used it, increasingly, to get high. This doctor, I found out later, was also charging my insurance company $500 for a surgery that was not ever done each time I got a new prescription. I later realized that this is a common practice for opiate-giving doctors. I also had a prescription for Klonopin from the doctor who found my brain tumor, but no pain meds. He did give me valium, but only a very small amount for dizziness. It wasn't a problem. I had the two drugs I wanted: opiates and benzos.
I moved to West Virginia after I got fired from TAMUCC. That firing had nothing to do with drugs, and everything to do with my continued codependence with my ex-husband, who moved to Corpus to get away from his girlfriend, hated it here, and then demanded that I get a job closer to his girlfriend, who he continued to date long-distance for many years. I followed his orders like a soldier, and that two years of job searches killed my job. I was also in a diseased faculty ruled over by a power-hungry egomaniacal man who decided to hate me for I don't know why. I know he hated me because in my first week, I was told that "I'm sure glad that Blalock hates you now, because I was tired of being his enemy." That person was fired the year after I was. I hate Glen Blalock. I don't know why he waged a campaign against me, but its effects were felt within the first month of my new job, which I loved, which I tried to improve my performance at, but which nothing I did helped. I was raging against a machine. Withing a month of being hired, I heard that the Dean wanted to fire me. For what? I didn't know. Blalock, that's why. So that fueled my job searches too. So, for two years, I was going on three to four day interviews at distant campuses and I couldn't tell my chair why. She hated me for those absences. She hated me for my excellent teaching evaluations. She hated me for having the girl baby she always wanted but which her husband refused her. She didn't believe that I had any physical health problems, and as most of you know, she laughed when she told me she thought I had made up my brain tumor as an excuse to miss class and meetings when she fired me. She was an evil bitch, and now she is associate Dean of Humanities at TAMUCC. Her name is Elisabeth Mermann Jozwiak.
So I quickly got a job in West Virginia. I still had some leftover drugs from Corpus, but I wasn't too concerned about getting new ones. I was too excited about my new job. It seemed like the faculty was great. But I was wrong. The rumor mill started almost immediately. I told the chair in confidence with a promise of secrecy that I had a brain tumor, that it was stable, but that if it grew that I might need surgery, and that it might make me dizzy and forgetful (MORE likely, something else did that). So I heard a few weeks later from "concerned faculty members," mostly those whose faction I didn't pick, that I was dying from brain cancer. I was also publically told I was a shitty poet and writer by a horrible, sexist man.. But I set him straight. Then, I started feeling depressed. I randomly (seriously) picked a psychiatrist from the phone book who lived close to me. I went to the office, and the paperwork was . . . weird. I had to fill out forms about opiates. Well, of course, this pricked my interest. I almost frantically ordered my patient records from my neurologist in Corpus, who had documented my tumor, my RLS, my migraines (which were horrible after Cosi's birth), and my fibromyalgia. I went to him. He started me on Lortab. Next month ratcheted me up to 15 mg. pills of pure oxycodone -- up to five a day! This made me feel -- like I was normal for the first time in my life. I didn't have pain. The drug made me motivated, awake, excited to work, happy. I lost 30 pounds easily. Within two months, he added 20 mg. of Oxycontin 3 times a day plus the original dose of those 150 15 mg. oxycodone pills. He also gave me, from the start, Klonopin, .5 mg. four times a day, and Zoloft. He also gave me Stadol, the kind you sniff up your nose, for migraines. He almost killed me with it by prescribing me four shots per nostril, which would have killed me if he hadn't realized his mistake before writing the script (it is one shot only). Stadol is also an opiate agonist, as any good opiate giving doctor should know, which means it puts you in withdrawal as soon as you take it. At any rate, I was soooo happy with this doctor, and the drugs seemed to be working so great. So what it soon after I started them, two of my colleagues became concerned enough with my drug use that they confronted me? I gave them my sob story and they left me alone. Then I reconciled with Shawn. I wanted to give him, give us, one more baby, because in my mind our reconciliation was permanent. It is permanent. I went to the ob/gyn and said I wanted another baby, but this time I came armed with huge piles of research about pregnancy and RLS. I told her, showed her, the research that proved that only two drugs were OK for RLS during pregnancy: oxycodone and methadone. She promised she would help me, because I told her that I was suicidal during my last pregnancy, that I held knives to my hips wanting to dig them into my thighs until I got the awful awful crawling out. She promised she would help with low dose opiates. But what I didn't know was that I was already pregnant. I went to my opiate dr. again, got another script, and then a week later admitted my pregnancy. He told me to stop all opiates immediately, and gave me a two week plan to get off Klonopin. I followed the Klonopin plan, because I knew it could cause birth defects, and my last baby had been born with a single-vessle cord, which I blamed on myself, even though I dropped Klonopin the moment I knew I was pregnant. I didn't drop the opiates, because my obgyn told me dropping oxycodone could cause a miscarriage, and that I slowly needed to stop it. But I didn't. I took it, it is a class B drug, so I felt it was safe, and I took it to ward off the immediate onset of RLS. I didn't take as much, not by a long long shot, but I took it. After the first trimester, my obgyn had me go to a maternal fetal medicine specialist, without whom she wouldn't prescribe opiates. That doctor gave me a two hour sonogram and an OK to take oxycodone. I told my dr. that I felt that oxycontin would be the best choice, because it would deliver a continual dose to the fetus without any spikes up and down. I felt this was the safest for the baby. I really did at that time. So they gave me 20 mg. oxycontin 3 times a day for the length of my pregnancy. I also had the hemmorhoid horror during this pregnancy, which introduced me to Dilaudin. Of course, the pain and the shock that I went through wasn't worth the medicine. I almost had to deliver Anais at 32 weeks. I felt it was all my fault. But I pulled through, dramatically reducing the Dilaudin in the hospital, and I went home. Kept up the oxycontin which destroyed the RLS. I can tell you, honestly, right now, that if I had not had the oxycodone, I would have aborted early. I couldn't have survived another nine months of that torture, couldn't, and Anais would not be here if not for the compassionate doctors that gave me the oxycontin. I took it according to plan, and the pregnancy went well, except for the pneumonia, food poisoning and the awful awful hemmorhoids which ended in complete bedrest for the last six weeks of my pregnancy. After I delivered, they gave me a script of Dilaudin for five days, and three more weeks of decreasing oxycontin. I flipped out when it ended, and went through withdrawal. But I did it. I wanted to go back to my old pain doctor, since now it was "OK" to get back on opiates, but he refused, saying I shouldn't have taken opiates during my pregnancy. Might I also say that this doctor was arrested in Boston at the airport for trying to bring a loaded gun onto the plane? That he was the highest oxycontin prescriber in the state? That workman's comp dropped him and sued him to try to take away his license because of his practice? He was not a good doctor.
But I had to have my fix. I went to another doctor, again found on the internet. He was my downfall. On my first visit he gave me oxycodone and . . . it is hard to believe, but he did, without me asking, but when I asked for help with migraines, he, without hesitation, gave me a script for a large dose of Actiq lollipops whose active ingredient is fentanyl. Within two months he increased the dose on those, and put me on oxycontin. My psychiatrist gave me Klonopin only because I begged, but also put me on Requip. The Requip didn't work, but she didn't believe me. The doctor who gave me the fentanyl, the most heroin like drug available through presciption, quickly began signing me up for painful procedures to "end" my headaches. They involved shots to my temples, to my neck, many of them. I just went along with it. I trusted him. He seemed so nice.
And then . . . disaster. I began abusing the Fentanyl, of course. It was like heroin. When I got a new two week supply, I remember thinking as I shakily and quickly opened two pops that I was acting like a heroin addict. I blew through a box of 30 800 mg. lollipops in one week. The doctor refilled it EVERY TWO WEEKS WITHOUT QUESTION. And I also had late-onset psychotic postpartum depression. I became suicidal. I went to my psychiatrist, who did not respond appropriately. So I checked myself into a mental hospital. They wrongly diagnosed me, in about 20 seconds, with "bipolar two" disease, whatever that is. They also gave me a scrip for 2 mg. Klonopin 4x per day. I needed it then, believe me. They also gave me Risperidal and Trileptal, and let me out of the hospital before they could wage how my body handled these drugs. I was highly allergic to them; highly allergic to all dopaminergic drugs, I came to find out. I lost my ability to speak with any sense.. . I was aphasic. I began to hallucinate. I completely lost my short term memory. I began self medicating to sleep as much as possible. then I broke out in a full body rash and went in and out of consciousness for a day. They slightly lowered my drugs, but that was all. I rechecked myself into the mental hospital, where they changed my drugs to Remron and Zyprexa. At this time, I could no longer teach, and made the decision to return to Corpus so that Shawn could work while I recovered, or whatever.
Corpus was the beginning of my salvation. My new psychiatrist took me off all bipolar drugs, saying that it was obvious I was not bipolar, and upped my Zoloft. He kept the Klonopin as is. I quickly found a new pain doctor, who, give him credit, didn't bug out his eyes when I showed him my doctor's letters from WV. He took me off all opiates and put me on methadone with a rescue dose of oxycodone 5 mg. The methadone saved my life, along with the cessing of the brain-damagine dopaminergic drugs (Requip, Remron, Zyprexa). These drugs had put 60 pounds on me in six months, and my psychiatrist was not surprised by that at all. However, I could not give up Klonopin and other downers like Flexeril and Restoril and Lunesta and Ambien. I still slept my life away. Then I found that Shawn, who I married in March '06 in Vegas, was taking my oxycodone because I wasn't. The methadone had ended my desire to get high. It cured my pain without the highs. So I just didn't use it. I kept getting it because I thought, well, just in case, but what happened was Shawn became addicted. When I found out the depth of his deception and addiction, I went ballistic. I wasn't going to let happen to him what had happened to me, partly because Shawn was an enabler, co-dependent, and always stole some of my drugs. He liked me down and out. It left him in total control. After he stopped the oxycodone, which I made him take random drug tests for, in front of my face so he couldn't trick me, he started smoking. I also cut off all supply of oxycodone by stopping my script, much to my doctors' surprise. He also smoked/smokes weed. OK, this is the story up until three weeks ago.
I went to St. Louis. I had an epiphany. I joined weight watchers with my sister (my idea) and started halving my Klonopin. It had an immediate huge effect. My sleeping, while still a lot, cut in half. My activity went way up. Long conversations with my sister led me to self-realizations that I had already made but suppressed to save Shawn's feelings. I talked to a woman who provided me with a plan to end my addiction to Klonopin. I am now three weeks to ending that drug, and have stopped/thrown away ALL other drugs but methadone. I will continue methadone, because I do not abuse it. You can't get high from methadone. And the fact is, I have pain disorders which cripple me, and I have three children. I want to be present for them. The final brick that destroyed the wall of my self-delusion was that Chloe cried to my sister, saying she wanted her mommy back the way I was in St. Louis, awake and active and happy. I promised myself I would never go back to sleeping 12-18 hours per day, weighing 226 pounds, addicted to benzos as a way to escape certain problems with myself and a post-traumatic stress disorder from something horrific that happened to my family which I prefer not to discuss. I wrote a nine page letter to my husband, stating how I was going to change, because he did all the work. He cooked. He took the kids to school and the babysitter (why did I need a babysitter? I was so drugged from downers I couldn't stay awake to watch my babies). He did the laundry. The only thing I did was clean, because of the post-traumatic stress syndrome. In the letter, I also asked him to change. To stop smoking. To no longer keep or smoke weed in or near the house or anywhere near the children. To stop feeding our children fast food (partly my fault, partly his, we fed our kids fast food most of the time for dinner). I asked him to accept his enabling behavior in my drug addiction, and to stop it. I asked him to take partial responsibility for the tragedy that happened to my family, and to forgive the others who participated, most of all my ex husband, who had ended, mostly because of my own stopping of the abusive cycle, verbally abusing me two years ago. And partly because of the large part he played in the tragedy. I vowed to become an active, awake, thinner, more wifely, more motherly human being. I had ABANDONED my children for three years, to the point where they were almost injured to I don't know what. That admission nearly crippled me, but it also healed me.
After I read the letter to Shawn, which I sobbed through, he hugged me and said it was good and brave. The next morning he attacked me, saying I was keeping none of my promises. That just wasn't true. Was I perfect yet? Of COURSE NOT! I had just started. But I had cooked, had offered to help cook (he said no every single time), had kept my youngest child home a majority of the time, had a renewed and very positive relationship with my eldest daughter, and began healing deep wounds with my middle daughter, who I had left to Shawn to raise almost entirely alone. I got up every morning to dress them, feed them, clean them. Shawn bathed them, because it hurts for me to bathe my kids (bending over, kneeling, so much pain), but after the bath I dried them, clothed them, brushed their hair, and put them to sleep. Shawn helped a little, but I did most of it. I begged him to get the car out of hock, which he did, and I took responsibility for picking up the children, and often for dropping them off (remember, this is still new). I made the decision yesterday to go to NA and admit my addiction and work the twelve steps, even though the only higher power I believe in is love. I believe that Chloe saved me, Shawn allowed me not to die by supporting our family the best he could, and that the two youngest children inspired me to become the best me I can. But Shawn, oh, he is not dealing well. He admitted the explosion, which ended with him FORGIVING ME for not helping him since my return to Corpus (i HAD NOT APOLOGIZED). That incensed me. But he admitted that his explosion was about his loss of control and the threat that my renewed independance meant to his life. To his delusion that he was superman, and that I held the weight of all the sins of my family. The drugs also kept me isolated from family, friends, and any support structure. He liked that because he wanted control. He was so threatened by my obvious and enormous change in just two weeks that he has been pretty much a dick since I came back. He couldn't believe I said he fed our kids junk. That Chloe didn't like being here because of it. He believed that was a lie. He didn't want to stop smoking weed. I gave him a bottom line: if he ever exploded like that at me again, I would leave for a week. That while I understood that change is hard, and that failure happens, I also understood that change means getting up EVERY time you fall. It means admitting with Pure Harsh Reflection (what AA would call a seriously honest moral inventory) your faults, his faults, his part in my addictions. He didn't like that, and still doesn't. But that is for him to deal with. I can provide my own reactions, but those reactions are for my own mental and physical health.
I have lost ten pounds. I have started exercising. My ex-husband bought me a bike, and told me that while he could tell I lost weight, the real change was in a new glow in my personality, the old Susan who has a will of steel, who never, EVER gives up. The one who got a Ph.D. from the hardest institution in my field, just to make myself a better teacher and scholar. The one who watched my grandmother die and then wrote a eulogy that gave healing to 100 people despite my own deep, deep grief at losing the last person who had shown me love in my childhood, and then losing my grandfather six days later, but still, continuing my dissertation and weight loss. The girl who climbed up from the working class hand over foot over tooth, who survived rape, sexual abuse, covert incest (i.e., the espousing of me by my father in nonsexual ways which has had and still has devastating effects on my life and marriage), parental neglect, physical abuse, a marriage of 13 years that was relentlessly verbally and emotionally abusive, a divorce, a child, all while getting a Ph.D. and losing 60 pounds, THAT girl. THAT funny, active, life-loving girl who accomplished almost all of her goals and then some, and who decided, because of drugs and a history of abuse too heavy to carry, that I would give up on life. But the truth was I gave up on my kids. My husband, who I love very, very much, despite his faults, he is 100 times the man my ex ever was or ever will be. My eldest daughter, who is my best friend, the most important person in the world to me, I let her down in her hugest hour of need, as her father continually abandoned her with greater and greater frequency, as she beat against the hormones of adolescence, attended a cruel and academically abusive school, I was GONE FOR ALL OF THAT AND IT WAS AND IS MY FAULT. But past sins do not equal future failure. Recognition of our faults is the first step to health, and I am starting at a run, even though I endoed my bike when I foolishly decided to go from pavement to soft sand and was thrown HARD on my side. I got back up after I was sure nothing was broken, biked back home, hosed down my bike to protect its quality, hosed down myself, dug a teaspoon ful of sand out of my right eye, and cried tears of hope and relief as I watched Barack Obama, a man not unlike me at my very best, accept the first black nomination for president, something I thought I would never see in my life, and for the first time in my life I am proud to be an American. Barack did that. I was so bitter about Washington that I though America meant Washington; but America means all those kids and adults I taught for 15 years, and who I will continue to teach next year at community college. It means the working poor who I helped through outreach at Carnegie Mellon, and who I will help soon through community organizing programs. It means I MUST get healthy so that I can answer the call I received years ago, from a man as unlikely as the poverty born Brazilian Paulo Freire, to help those who most need it because I have a gift to do so. I have a gift that I have squandered for sleep and drugs. I am an addict. To opiates. To benzos. To muscle relaxants. To sleep. To food. To laziness. I throw off the smothering layers of my multiple addictions and I declare NO MORE OF THIS BULLSHIT. YES I CAN. YES I CAN.
My daughter Chloe, my beloved, who wants to be a writer just like her Mommy when she grows up (but she is already a writer, look her up at Quizzilla. She writes mostly vampire stories and anime stories, mostly fanfic, but some fantastic original material. She writes a LOT. She is GOOD. She is ONLY almost 15. Please read her stories and tell her her Mom sent you and tell her what you think. It means a lot to her. She wants criticism and positive feedback for the enormous effort she puts out, and after what I put her through, she deserves it. Find her stories at:
http://www.quizilla.com/user/LamiaXxXcruor/profile/
My daughter is: punk cook, will of steel, kind and ethical and moral and humanist, doesn't have a racist or homophobic or classist bone in her body, will never take drugs after she saw what happened to me, won't have (at least unprotected) sex because she knows what it is like to mother young children and babies. She is my hero. SHE IS MY HERO AND I DEDICATE MY RECOVERY TO HER. BUT I PLACE ALL RESPONSIBILITY OF MY RECOVERY ON MYSELF.
My first NA meeting is Monday at 10 p.m. Wish me luck. I go forward with clear eyes. I hear that after stopping Klonopin, memory improves after six months, and is normal at a year. Maybe I can see movies without passing out and having complete amnesia of what I saw. I hope so. Because if that is true, the brain damage I thought I had is not brain damage, but addiction to a powerful benzodiazapine I abused for years, sometimes taking 6 mg a day, all at once at night. I could confess forever, but this is here for you, my friends. I abandoned you too. I am sorry. And for those of you who think you might be addicted, please contact me at susan.swan@gmail.com. We can make this voyage together. If you want to lose weight and join Weight Watchers, contact me and we will buddy it up. It works because it teaches you how to eat. I can still have my beloved Slimfast, but I also heap in enough fruits and veggies and yogurt and fiber and even treats until I want to pop. It WORKS. And with just ten pounds gone: I am more energetic. I fit into clothes I left behind a month ago when I packed for St. Louis because they were grossly camel toe tight. My skin glows. My eyes glow. I exercise. ME! Join me if you wish.
I love you all. I am sorry for abandoning you, especially Stefan. I'm back. I might be a different person, but that person is wiser and ready to do battle against so many things: drugs, fat, inactivity, lazy mothering, John fucking McCain who I hate, and fighting for the hope and grace that Barack Obama will bring to this country as the first black President of the United States of America. Congratulations, President Obama. I already love you in so many ways, you noble, grace-filled, empathetic, completely guileless, grease-free, oil-free (think of Clinton the man), not a bad bone in his body you MUST believe what you see in his face because he is the genuine article. He is the hero of the new millenium, the one we have been looking for since we lost Dr. King, since I lost Freire. And forgive me, Friere, for dropping your call. I pick it up again. Forgive me, all of you.
So, I was a drug addict. It started, really, you know, that first thrill of narcotics, with a shot of Demerol after a tonsillectomy when I was 20. After that first shot I made sure I got it every four hours round the clock for the day I was in the hospital. Then I got a second tonsillectomy. Same thing. In fact, I believe the knowledge that I would get Demerol made me want the surgery, although the doctor thought the growth in my throaght where my tonsils were might be cancerous: but he didn't tell me that until after the surgery,when he came to my bedside and said "Well, we got everything and it was benign." I think I was happier that I got to have drugs than the fact that I dodged a bullet I didn't even know I had. Then nothing for awhile. During my pregnancy with Chloe, I had something called icepick headaches, and my ob/gyn gave me a bottle of low dose demerol. I don't consider this as a part of my addiction path because it did not work at all. I mean, I felt the high, but the drugs didn't cut the pain at all, so I just didn't have a "good time." I started having regular pain in 1988, at the age of 21. It went undiagnosed for almost 10 years, and that is a lot of years of having pain on and off year-round, but I was never given pain medication except for the Stadol given me during my labor before the epidural. That was nice, but the labor was more important. The real addiction truly started when in Pittsburgh, my stupid husband (now ex) refused to pick up and install a small room air conditioner when I was boiling hot one day. So I did it, no biggie. I was proud of myself. Next day, I woke up in excruciating pain. Great shooting waves of pain in my lower back extending down my left leg. I thought I had a kidney infection, so I went to the Dr. and found out I pinched my ciatic nerve, and was given a bottle of Percocet. That is when I found the primary drug of my choice, oxycodone. That bottle lasted awhile, and I used it for a long time after the backpain went away, and not for pain, but to get high. Then, after I left my husband, I began having Restless Leg Syndrome. I called my Dr. on the phone (Pittsburgh again), and he prescribed me .25 mg. Klonopin. Not only did this drug fix my RLS, it ended my now-33 year struggle with insomnia. The next year, I went to the Dr. again for headaches. She upped my Klonopin to .5, and gave me another bottle of Percocet. I didn't abuse that bottle, but Klonopin became my hero. She gave me lots of refills. Then I got my Ph.D. and moved to TX. I got pregnant, and most of you who have been around know that my second pregnancy was horrific. I couldn't take Klonopin (it is teratogenic), and I didn't know that opiods stopped the RLS. But I did know that the Percocet stopped the horrible feelings, so I took it judiciously during the first half of my pregnancy. Then I ran out. Horror. One hour per night of sleep for 5 months. I cannot explain the horror. It changed my entire personality, resulting in part in me breaking up with Shawn (there were many other factors, but certainly this was one). At any rate, after I had the baby, they gave me Lortab. I like it. A lot. They also gave me more Klonopin, .25 again, so that was good. After her birth I had a year of unending lower back pain. I slept on the recliner for almost three months because it was the only thing that didn't hurt. So I went to a doctor in Corpus. He gave me a big old bottle of Lortab and a big old bottle of Soma. I loved them both, and this is when my drug seeking began. I went to the web to look up rumors about Corpus doctors who would prescribe opiates. I never got anything over Vicodin, but that back doctor at the Back Pain Center kept my supply rolling. It did cause the back pain to disappear, but I also used it, increasingly, to get high. This doctor, I found out later, was also charging my insurance company $500 for a surgery that was not ever done each time I got a new prescription. I later realized that this is a common practice for opiate-giving doctors. I also had a prescription for Klonopin from the doctor who found my brain tumor, but no pain meds. He did give me valium, but only a very small amount for dizziness. It wasn't a problem. I had the two drugs I wanted: opiates and benzos.
I moved to West Virginia after I got fired from TAMUCC. That firing had nothing to do with drugs, and everything to do with my continued codependence with my ex-husband, who moved to Corpus to get away from his girlfriend, hated it here, and then demanded that I get a job closer to his girlfriend, who he continued to date long-distance for many years. I followed his orders like a soldier, and that two years of job searches killed my job. I was also in a diseased faculty ruled over by a power-hungry egomaniacal man who decided to hate me for I don't know why. I know he hated me because in my first week, I was told that "I'm sure glad that Blalock hates you now, because I was tired of being his enemy." That person was fired the year after I was. I hate Glen Blalock. I don't know why he waged a campaign against me, but its effects were felt within the first month of my new job, which I loved, which I tried to improve my performance at, but which nothing I did helped. I was raging against a machine. Withing a month of being hired, I heard that the Dean wanted to fire me. For what? I didn't know. Blalock, that's why. So that fueled my job searches too. So, for two years, I was going on three to four day interviews at distant campuses and I couldn't tell my chair why. She hated me for those absences. She hated me for my excellent teaching evaluations. She hated me for having the girl baby she always wanted but which her husband refused her. She didn't believe that I had any physical health problems, and as most of you know, she laughed when she told me she thought I had made up my brain tumor as an excuse to miss class and meetings when she fired me. She was an evil bitch, and now she is associate Dean of Humanities at TAMUCC. Her name is Elisabeth Mermann Jozwiak.
So I quickly got a job in West Virginia. I still had some leftover drugs from Corpus, but I wasn't too concerned about getting new ones. I was too excited about my new job. It seemed like the faculty was great. But I was wrong. The rumor mill started almost immediately. I told the chair in confidence with a promise of secrecy that I had a brain tumor, that it was stable, but that if it grew that I might need surgery, and that it might make me dizzy and forgetful (MORE likely, something else did that). So I heard a few weeks later from "concerned faculty members," mostly those whose faction I didn't pick, that I was dying from brain cancer. I was also publically told I was a shitty poet and writer by a horrible, sexist man.. But I set him straight. Then, I started feeling depressed. I randomly (seriously) picked a psychiatrist from the phone book who lived close to me. I went to the office, and the paperwork was . . . weird. I had to fill out forms about opiates. Well, of course, this pricked my interest. I almost frantically ordered my patient records from my neurologist in Corpus, who had documented my tumor, my RLS, my migraines (which were horrible after Cosi's birth), and my fibromyalgia. I went to him. He started me on Lortab. Next month ratcheted me up to 15 mg. pills of pure oxycodone -- up to five a day! This made me feel -- like I was normal for the first time in my life. I didn't have pain. The drug made me motivated, awake, excited to work, happy. I lost 30 pounds easily. Within two months, he added 20 mg. of Oxycontin 3 times a day plus the original dose of those 150 15 mg. oxycodone pills. He also gave me, from the start, Klonopin, .5 mg. four times a day, and Zoloft. He also gave me Stadol, the kind you sniff up your nose, for migraines. He almost killed me with it by prescribing me four shots per nostril, which would have killed me if he hadn't realized his mistake before writing the script (it is one shot only). Stadol is also an opiate agonist, as any good opiate giving doctor should know, which means it puts you in withdrawal as soon as you take it. At any rate, I was soooo happy with this doctor, and the drugs seemed to be working so great. So what it soon after I started them, two of my colleagues became concerned enough with my drug use that they confronted me? I gave them my sob story and they left me alone. Then I reconciled with Shawn. I wanted to give him, give us, one more baby, because in my mind our reconciliation was permanent. It is permanent. I went to the ob/gyn and said I wanted another baby, but this time I came armed with huge piles of research about pregnancy and RLS. I told her, showed her, the research that proved that only two drugs were OK for RLS during pregnancy: oxycodone and methadone. She promised she would help me, because I told her that I was suicidal during my last pregnancy, that I held knives to my hips wanting to dig them into my thighs until I got the awful awful crawling out. She promised she would help with low dose opiates. But what I didn't know was that I was already pregnant. I went to my opiate dr. again, got another script, and then a week later admitted my pregnancy. He told me to stop all opiates immediately, and gave me a two week plan to get off Klonopin. I followed the Klonopin plan, because I knew it could cause birth defects, and my last baby had been born with a single-vessle cord, which I blamed on myself, even though I dropped Klonopin the moment I knew I was pregnant. I didn't drop the opiates, because my obgyn told me dropping oxycodone could cause a miscarriage, and that I slowly needed to stop it. But I didn't. I took it, it is a class B drug, so I felt it was safe, and I took it to ward off the immediate onset of RLS. I didn't take as much, not by a long long shot, but I took it. After the first trimester, my obgyn had me go to a maternal fetal medicine specialist, without whom she wouldn't prescribe opiates. That doctor gave me a two hour sonogram and an OK to take oxycodone. I told my dr. that I felt that oxycontin would be the best choice, because it would deliver a continual dose to the fetus without any spikes up and down. I felt this was the safest for the baby. I really did at that time. So they gave me 20 mg. oxycontin 3 times a day for the length of my pregnancy. I also had the hemmorhoid horror during this pregnancy, which introduced me to Dilaudin. Of course, the pain and the shock that I went through wasn't worth the medicine. I almost had to deliver Anais at 32 weeks. I felt it was all my fault. But I pulled through, dramatically reducing the Dilaudin in the hospital, and I went home. Kept up the oxycontin which destroyed the RLS. I can tell you, honestly, right now, that if I had not had the oxycodone, I would have aborted early. I couldn't have survived another nine months of that torture, couldn't, and Anais would not be here if not for the compassionate doctors that gave me the oxycontin. I took it according to plan, and the pregnancy went well, except for the pneumonia, food poisoning and the awful awful hemmorhoids which ended in complete bedrest for the last six weeks of my pregnancy. After I delivered, they gave me a script of Dilaudin for five days, and three more weeks of decreasing oxycontin. I flipped out when it ended, and went through withdrawal. But I did it. I wanted to go back to my old pain doctor, since now it was "OK" to get back on opiates, but he refused, saying I shouldn't have taken opiates during my pregnancy. Might I also say that this doctor was arrested in Boston at the airport for trying to bring a loaded gun onto the plane? That he was the highest oxycontin prescriber in the state? That workman's comp dropped him and sued him to try to take away his license because of his practice? He was not a good doctor.
But I had to have my fix. I went to another doctor, again found on the internet. He was my downfall. On my first visit he gave me oxycodone and . . . it is hard to believe, but he did, without me asking, but when I asked for help with migraines, he, without hesitation, gave me a script for a large dose of Actiq lollipops whose active ingredient is fentanyl. Within two months he increased the dose on those, and put me on oxycontin. My psychiatrist gave me Klonopin only because I begged, but also put me on Requip. The Requip didn't work, but she didn't believe me. The doctor who gave me the fentanyl, the most heroin like drug available through presciption, quickly began signing me up for painful procedures to "end" my headaches. They involved shots to my temples, to my neck, many of them. I just went along with it. I trusted him. He seemed so nice.
And then . . . disaster. I began abusing the Fentanyl, of course. It was like heroin. When I got a new two week supply, I remember thinking as I shakily and quickly opened two pops that I was acting like a heroin addict. I blew through a box of 30 800 mg. lollipops in one week. The doctor refilled it EVERY TWO WEEKS WITHOUT QUESTION. And I also had late-onset psychotic postpartum depression. I became suicidal. I went to my psychiatrist, who did not respond appropriately. So I checked myself into a mental hospital. They wrongly diagnosed me, in about 20 seconds, with "bipolar two" disease, whatever that is. They also gave me a scrip for 2 mg. Klonopin 4x per day. I needed it then, believe me. They also gave me Risperidal and Trileptal, and let me out of the hospital before they could wage how my body handled these drugs. I was highly allergic to them; highly allergic to all dopaminergic drugs, I came to find out. I lost my ability to speak with any sense.. . I was aphasic. I began to hallucinate. I completely lost my short term memory. I began self medicating to sleep as much as possible. then I broke out in a full body rash and went in and out of consciousness for a day. They slightly lowered my drugs, but that was all. I rechecked myself into the mental hospital, where they changed my drugs to Remron and Zyprexa. At this time, I could no longer teach, and made the decision to return to Corpus so that Shawn could work while I recovered, or whatever.
Corpus was the beginning of my salvation. My new psychiatrist took me off all bipolar drugs, saying that it was obvious I was not bipolar, and upped my Zoloft. He kept the Klonopin as is. I quickly found a new pain doctor, who, give him credit, didn't bug out his eyes when I showed him my doctor's letters from WV. He took me off all opiates and put me on methadone with a rescue dose of oxycodone 5 mg. The methadone saved my life, along with the cessing of the brain-damagine dopaminergic drugs (Requip, Remron, Zyprexa). These drugs had put 60 pounds on me in six months, and my psychiatrist was not surprised by that at all. However, I could not give up Klonopin and other downers like Flexeril and Restoril and Lunesta and Ambien. I still slept my life away. Then I found that Shawn, who I married in March '06 in Vegas, was taking my oxycodone because I wasn't. The methadone had ended my desire to get high. It cured my pain without the highs. So I just didn't use it. I kept getting it because I thought, well, just in case, but what happened was Shawn became addicted. When I found out the depth of his deception and addiction, I went ballistic. I wasn't going to let happen to him what had happened to me, partly because Shawn was an enabler, co-dependent, and always stole some of my drugs. He liked me down and out. It left him in total control. After he stopped the oxycodone, which I made him take random drug tests for, in front of my face so he couldn't trick me, he started smoking. I also cut off all supply of oxycodone by stopping my script, much to my doctors' surprise. He also smoked/smokes weed. OK, this is the story up until three weeks ago.
I went to St. Louis. I had an epiphany. I joined weight watchers with my sister (my idea) and started halving my Klonopin. It had an immediate huge effect. My sleeping, while still a lot, cut in half. My activity went way up. Long conversations with my sister led me to self-realizations that I had already made but suppressed to save Shawn's feelings. I talked to a woman who provided me with a plan to end my addiction to Klonopin. I am now three weeks to ending that drug, and have stopped/thrown away ALL other drugs but methadone. I will continue methadone, because I do not abuse it. You can't get high from methadone. And the fact is, I have pain disorders which cripple me, and I have three children. I want to be present for them. The final brick that destroyed the wall of my self-delusion was that Chloe cried to my sister, saying she wanted her mommy back the way I was in St. Louis, awake and active and happy. I promised myself I would never go back to sleeping 12-18 hours per day, weighing 226 pounds, addicted to benzos as a way to escape certain problems with myself and a post-traumatic stress disorder from something horrific that happened to my family which I prefer not to discuss. I wrote a nine page letter to my husband, stating how I was going to change, because he did all the work. He cooked. He took the kids to school and the babysitter (why did I need a babysitter? I was so drugged from downers I couldn't stay awake to watch my babies). He did the laundry. The only thing I did was clean, because of the post-traumatic stress syndrome. In the letter, I also asked him to change. To stop smoking. To no longer keep or smoke weed in or near the house or anywhere near the children. To stop feeding our children fast food (partly my fault, partly his, we fed our kids fast food most of the time for dinner). I asked him to accept his enabling behavior in my drug addiction, and to stop it. I asked him to take partial responsibility for the tragedy that happened to my family, and to forgive the others who participated, most of all my ex husband, who had ended, mostly because of my own stopping of the abusive cycle, verbally abusing me two years ago. And partly because of the large part he played in the tragedy. I vowed to become an active, awake, thinner, more wifely, more motherly human being. I had ABANDONED my children for three years, to the point where they were almost injured to I don't know what. That admission nearly crippled me, but it also healed me.
After I read the letter to Shawn, which I sobbed through, he hugged me and said it was good and brave. The next morning he attacked me, saying I was keeping none of my promises. That just wasn't true. Was I perfect yet? Of COURSE NOT! I had just started. But I had cooked, had offered to help cook (he said no every single time), had kept my youngest child home a majority of the time, had a renewed and very positive relationship with my eldest daughter, and began healing deep wounds with my middle daughter, who I had left to Shawn to raise almost entirely alone. I got up every morning to dress them, feed them, clean them. Shawn bathed them, because it hurts for me to bathe my kids (bending over, kneeling, so much pain), but after the bath I dried them, clothed them, brushed their hair, and put them to sleep. Shawn helped a little, but I did most of it. I begged him to get the car out of hock, which he did, and I took responsibility for picking up the children, and often for dropping them off (remember, this is still new). I made the decision yesterday to go to NA and admit my addiction and work the twelve steps, even though the only higher power I believe in is love. I believe that Chloe saved me, Shawn allowed me not to die by supporting our family the best he could, and that the two youngest children inspired me to become the best me I can. But Shawn, oh, he is not dealing well. He admitted the explosion, which ended with him FORGIVING ME for not helping him since my return to Corpus (i HAD NOT APOLOGIZED). That incensed me. But he admitted that his explosion was about his loss of control and the threat that my renewed independance meant to his life. To his delusion that he was superman, and that I held the weight of all the sins of my family. The drugs also kept me isolated from family, friends, and any support structure. He liked that because he wanted control. He was so threatened by my obvious and enormous change in just two weeks that he has been pretty much a dick since I came back. He couldn't believe I said he fed our kids junk. That Chloe didn't like being here because of it. He believed that was a lie. He didn't want to stop smoking weed. I gave him a bottom line: if he ever exploded like that at me again, I would leave for a week. That while I understood that change is hard, and that failure happens, I also understood that change means getting up EVERY time you fall. It means admitting with Pure Harsh Reflection (what AA would call a seriously honest moral inventory) your faults, his faults, his part in my addictions. He didn't like that, and still doesn't. But that is for him to deal with. I can provide my own reactions, but those reactions are for my own mental and physical health.
I have lost ten pounds. I have started exercising. My ex-husband bought me a bike, and told me that while he could tell I lost weight, the real change was in a new glow in my personality, the old Susan who has a will of steel, who never, EVER gives up. The one who got a Ph.D. from the hardest institution in my field, just to make myself a better teacher and scholar. The one who watched my grandmother die and then wrote a eulogy that gave healing to 100 people despite my own deep, deep grief at losing the last person who had shown me love in my childhood, and then losing my grandfather six days later, but still, continuing my dissertation and weight loss. The girl who climbed up from the working class hand over foot over tooth, who survived rape, sexual abuse, covert incest (i.e., the espousing of me by my father in nonsexual ways which has had and still has devastating effects on my life and marriage), parental neglect, physical abuse, a marriage of 13 years that was relentlessly verbally and emotionally abusive, a divorce, a child, all while getting a Ph.D. and losing 60 pounds, THAT girl. THAT funny, active, life-loving girl who accomplished almost all of her goals and then some, and who decided, because of drugs and a history of abuse too heavy to carry, that I would give up on life. But the truth was I gave up on my kids. My husband, who I love very, very much, despite his faults, he is 100 times the man my ex ever was or ever will be. My eldest daughter, who is my best friend, the most important person in the world to me, I let her down in her hugest hour of need, as her father continually abandoned her with greater and greater frequency, as she beat against the hormones of adolescence, attended a cruel and academically abusive school, I was GONE FOR ALL OF THAT AND IT WAS AND IS MY FAULT. But past sins do not equal future failure. Recognition of our faults is the first step to health, and I am starting at a run, even though I endoed my bike when I foolishly decided to go from pavement to soft sand and was thrown HARD on my side. I got back up after I was sure nothing was broken, biked back home, hosed down my bike to protect its quality, hosed down myself, dug a teaspoon ful of sand out of my right eye, and cried tears of hope and relief as I watched Barack Obama, a man not unlike me at my very best, accept the first black nomination for president, something I thought I would never see in my life, and for the first time in my life I am proud to be an American. Barack did that. I was so bitter about Washington that I though America meant Washington; but America means all those kids and adults I taught for 15 years, and who I will continue to teach next year at community college. It means the working poor who I helped through outreach at Carnegie Mellon, and who I will help soon through community organizing programs. It means I MUST get healthy so that I can answer the call I received years ago, from a man as unlikely as the poverty born Brazilian Paulo Freire, to help those who most need it because I have a gift to do so. I have a gift that I have squandered for sleep and drugs. I am an addict. To opiates. To benzos. To muscle relaxants. To sleep. To food. To laziness. I throw off the smothering layers of my multiple addictions and I declare NO MORE OF THIS BULLSHIT. YES I CAN. YES I CAN.
My daughter Chloe, my beloved, who wants to be a writer just like her Mommy when she grows up (but she is already a writer, look her up at Quizzilla. She writes mostly vampire stories and anime stories, mostly fanfic, but some fantastic original material. She writes a LOT. She is GOOD. She is ONLY almost 15. Please read her stories and tell her her Mom sent you and tell her what you think. It means a lot to her. She wants criticism and positive feedback for the enormous effort she puts out, and after what I put her through, she deserves it. Find her stories at:
http://www.quizilla.com/user/LamiaXxXcruor/profile/
My daughter is: punk cook, will of steel, kind and ethical and moral and humanist, doesn't have a racist or homophobic or classist bone in her body, will never take drugs after she saw what happened to me, won't have (at least unprotected) sex because she knows what it is like to mother young children and babies. She is my hero. SHE IS MY HERO AND I DEDICATE MY RECOVERY TO HER. BUT I PLACE ALL RESPONSIBILITY OF MY RECOVERY ON MYSELF.
My first NA meeting is Monday at 10 p.m. Wish me luck. I go forward with clear eyes. I hear that after stopping Klonopin, memory improves after six months, and is normal at a year. Maybe I can see movies without passing out and having complete amnesia of what I saw. I hope so. Because if that is true, the brain damage I thought I had is not brain damage, but addiction to a powerful benzodiazapine I abused for years, sometimes taking 6 mg a day, all at once at night. I could confess forever, but this is here for you, my friends. I abandoned you too. I am sorry. And for those of you who think you might be addicted, please contact me at susan.swan@gmail.com. We can make this voyage together. If you want to lose weight and join Weight Watchers, contact me and we will buddy it up. It works because it teaches you how to eat. I can still have my beloved Slimfast, but I also heap in enough fruits and veggies and yogurt and fiber and even treats until I want to pop. It WORKS. And with just ten pounds gone: I am more energetic. I fit into clothes I left behind a month ago when I packed for St. Louis because they were grossly camel toe tight. My skin glows. My eyes glow. I exercise. ME! Join me if you wish.
I love you all. I am sorry for abandoning you, especially Stefan. I'm back. I might be a different person, but that person is wiser and ready to do battle against so many things: drugs, fat, inactivity, lazy mothering, John fucking McCain who I hate, and fighting for the hope and grace that Barack Obama will bring to this country as the first black President of the United States of America. Congratulations, President Obama. I already love you in so many ways, you noble, grace-filled, empathetic, completely guileless, grease-free, oil-free (think of Clinton the man), not a bad bone in his body you MUST believe what you see in his face because he is the genuine article. He is the hero of the new millenium, the one we have been looking for since we lost Dr. King, since I lost Freire. And forgive me, Friere, for dropping your call. I pick it up again. Forgive me, all of you.