Tales of Recovery from Crystal Meth Addiction
You are currently browsing the archive for the Living in Recovery category.
I’ve been sober five years today and I’ve been writing and erasing this post for 2 hours now. I can’t seem to be able to communicate this without sounding pathetic, so maybe I should just say it in the most concise way possible.
Recovery has made nearly everything in my life better, except for one thing. I am still profoundly lonely. And I think I may need to move if that is ever going to be different. Read the rest of this entry »
The corniest nurse at St. Luke's Hospital cut the dressing into a heart. I could use more corny in my life.
I got a pacemaker a couple of days ago. All those tests revealed a 2nd degree type 2 heart block so in to the hospital I went a couple of days later and now my heart beats every time instead of every other or every third time. I can’t believe how much better I feel. I’m in a little pain at the place where they implanted the device and a little tired from the trauma – but other than that I feel great.
I remember getting clean was kind of the same. I hadn’t really noticed in the process of becoming an addict just how much worse things were getting. I didn’t see the pain I was in because the slide was a little bit incremental – and for a long time the “benefit” of using, the temporary getting out of pain, deceived me into not seeing the problem clearly. And then when I got clean and sober, I was in pain, because getting sober can be hard, but I was also so relieved. I guess these progressive diseases are like that. They sneak in and slowly destroy us while we aren’t paying attention.
Just like with getting sober, I am very fortunate and very grateful that help was available to me when I needed it. I would never have been able to get this kind of treatment if I hadn’t had affordable health coverage. The investment I made in attending school for a semester immediately paid me a 500% return.
Anyway – I’m home and I’m healthier and I’m bionic now. Yay!
My decision to go back to school was influenced partly by the fact that my cardiologist wanted to do a cardiac catheterization and angiography, a procedure I wouldn’t have been able to afford to do with my old health insurance with its $450/month price tag and its $5000 deductible. Student health offered by my school is under $900 a semester and only carries a $250 deductible. I scheduled the procedure for right after the end of the semester. Every time I’ve been to the doctor he’s observed some other thing wrong which is why he wanted the cath, and of course the cath revealed something else entirely.
I had been preparing to become really angry with myself. Chronic crystal methamphetamine abuse is implicated in a host of cardiac and pulmonary problems, and if I had somehow done serious damage to my heart through my drug abuse I wasn’t sure how I’d forgive myself. Luckily it doesn’t appear that I need to be concerned about that. We did the procedure last Tuesday. That test revealed a brand new problem, so we put a Holter monitor on the next day and I suspect I’ll get the results of that by Wednesday of next week.
I’m super relieved that none of the problem I have are the kind of problems that appear to be caused by methamphetamine abuse. If the diagnosis doesn’t change between now and Wednesday it looks like I’ll get a pacemaker, hopefully before the next semester begins. I know that all sounds kind of scary. At least it sounds scary to me, but there is an up-side to this. I don’t appear to have created this problem myself, so I have no impulse to beat myself up over it. It is probably congenital; that is, I was probably born with it and it has progressed to a stage where I am experiencing symptoms. Today’s pacemakers are very smart little machines, they’re easy to install, and when they are installed properly they can significantly improve the quality and length of life for patients like me.
I’m thinking that deciding to go back to school may be among the best decisions I ever made, second only to getting sober.
With the help of the staff of drug addiction centers, many former drug addicts have successfully dropped their dangerous habit.
Spring 2006 Grades
Fall 2011 Grades
My grades are in. I’ve made it through my first semester of school. Actually I’ve finished up my Freshman year finally. So here are my grades. Here are my current grades and my grades from the spring before I got sober. I feel like I should have a disclaimer on my recovery. “Results are not typical.” And while everyone’s experience of recovery will be personal to them, these pictures are an honest representation of what I was like and what I’m like now. What happened is I got sober. Read the rest of this entry »
I will sometimes, maybe even often, not do something because the idea that I will do it less than perfectly paralyzes me. I’m way better now at allowing myself to make mistakes than I ever have been before. Really, you don’t make the kind of catastrophic mistakes that we serious tweekers make, and not come to terms with them if you want to stay sober. My mistakes are visible from space. I’m thinking about having UNESCO declare them a World Heritage Site. Outfit them with some kind of perceived value that the “normal” world can understand as useful or meaningful or positive. Read the rest of this entry »
That is my favorite phrases in the book “Alcoholics Anonymous.” It is part of chapter 1, Bill’s Story and it is in a place where he has described his life and his alcoholism to that point in pretty graphic and heartbreaking detail. “Gradually things got worse,” he says, though one can hardly imagine how. Things in life are like that. Sometimes you cannot tell anything is wrong at all until, seemingly suddenly, they are terrible and then looking back you can see that you’ve been ambling down a gentle slope for a long time.
I started a part-time job recently; a little extra income to keep my hefty health insurance bill paid. After enduring what I went through two years ago I hope never to be without care again. So I got this little job at a discount retail store as a sales associate in the home goods and furniture department. The were happy to capitalize on the fact that I am 6’4″ and I was happy to have a little extra structure in my life that has lately been an emotional, economic, and professional free fall. And on my 2nd day at work I was asked to carry a large terra cotta pot to the front of the store.
I could not catch my breath. The effort required to do that simple thing shocked me. That small event drew my attention to the symptom and I noticed that breathing was often hard for me, even at rest. I remembered shooting a small video with my cell phone back in December and noticing that it’s most pronounced feature was the sound of me breathing. Well, having worked to maintain health insurance I took myself to the doctor’s office.
My own physician was booked several days out but the nurse suggested that my symptoms dictated that I be seen immediately so I came into the office, fully expecting that they would listen to my lungs, prescribe some kind of inhaler or pill or both and send me on my way, symptom free. They did listen to my lungs, and heart, and then they strapped an ECG on me, ran the test for several minutes, and sent me off to the emergency room.
If you have ever walked into an emergency room with cardiac symptoms you know it is a really different experience than a regular ER visit. I was scooped up in a wheel chair and rushed into the back faster than I could say infarction and within seconds a swarm (probably not the right word for a group of medical professionals) of people in scrubs surrounded me, putting stickers and electrodes on me, piercing my skin and drawing blood, hooking up IVs and sticking oxygen under my nose, and asking me questions.
The doctor, who to my delight was one of the most attractive young men I have ever seen, was in the room in record time. I love that young doctors tend to introduce themselves by their first and last names rather than Dr. Last Name the way older ones do. It makes me more comfortable. He had his stethoscope all over me with his lovely blue eyes closed and his head tilted and I am pretty sure my heart was beating out “I love you” in Morse code.
This post will come to talk about my experience, strength, and hope regarding my addiction, but that is going to happen in part 2. Right now I have to go to work so I can keep myself covered with health insurance.
I seem to be less possessed of hate today, so that’s nice. It isn’t that I don’t still hate; it just doesn’t seem to own me today. So that’s good news. There are still a couple of people that I feel I can be honest with safely and I’m glad of that. There is also a new cat that has started popping up in meetings.
Scott, the dude who helped me get high as I was getting on the bus to go to treatment, is out of prison and going to meetings. He got arrested not long after I got out of treatment and in his mugshot he looked dead. I always liked Scott, not because of the drugs, but because Scott is really smart and really funny. He comes from a really good family. He grew up in a way very similar to the way I grew up. And at the end of our using, he and I would talk. We both knew we had to find a way to stop. We knew if we didn’t we would end up in prison or dead. But the only time we felt good enough to discuss it was when we were high. We understood the irony of that, too.
So when we could no longer distract ourselves by making mandala out of Jelly-Bellies or taking pictorial essays of Ken dolls in flagrante delicto, we would talk about our fears about trying to get sober again and we would wonder if it was possible. He told me that as I was getting out of his car to get on the bus to go to treatment, high out of my mind remember, I asked him if he wanted a can of tuna. He said he didn’t, so I produced one from my pocket and gave it to him anyway.
After he told me that I had the vaguest recollection of it and I’m sure its true, but I really thought my behavior was more ‘normal’ than that. That kind of crazy probably really is beyond the reach of human aid.
Anyway, I hope he sticks around.
That I am not too well at the moment may not be the most obvious thing to those around me, but it is true. I am not too well at all. I have for some time now been trying to conceal the fact that I am enraged; that I wish for the slow and painful death of my enemies. I am so angry that my work is impaired, my life is diminished. I cannot fall asleep and once I do I have a hard time getting up.
I don’t remember being this unhappy at Christmas. Four years ago, maybe, but definitely not since. Maybe I’m just emotional, but God gave us emotions for a reason so I suppose there is something there that I can be growing from. So you’ll excuse me if I rant for a second, right?
I sent my mom off to rehab earlier in the month. My step-dad was trying to figure out a way to get her thrown in jail, but I managed to talk him into rehab and then I had to talk her into going. Hours of screaming. It took hours of screaming. He promised to do several things while she was away and he promised he would attend family week. He has done none of the things he said he would do and he is not attending family week. He is a flaming bag of assholes and I wish he’d die. But if he isn’t going to die, I hope my mom survives divorcing him.
The older of my two sisters has been a raving lunatic for nearly a month, (plus some 40-odd years, but who’s counting) and in spite of the fact that my other sister bought her a plane ticket to fly down from Siberia, she decided not to come and to blame everyone else in my family for causing her to not use her non-refundable ticket.
I have spent an inordinate amount of time defending myself against my step-father’s assertion that I am on the verge of relapse, an idea he is anxious to tell everyone. It is possibly a marijuana induced delusion, but he doesn’t have a problem with pot. He’s just an alcoholic. Ironic, isn’t it? That someone who claims to be sober, but isn’t, would be warning about the imminent relapse of someone who is actually sober?
I realized when I was barely able to keep myself from crying over it at a meeting tonight, that I am already fearing the day that my sponsor dies. He’s 76, I think. He isn’t going to live forever. I hadn’t realized before tonight, though, how strongly I feel love for him.
And just for a wacked twist to everything, I’ll throw this in. I haven’t thought about the Imaginary Future Ex-Husband in a long, long time. He crossed my mind briefly on the 13th which is the anniversary of the night he vanished on me, making my recovery possible, but except for that, he is not part of my consciousness. Tonight I ran into his brother at a meeting. He has been sober for 4 days.
All of these things, and more, have been weighing heavily on me and I have barely been pretending to be normal-ish, and I am only one more disaster away from bursting into tears and running away from home. I feel powerless to change any of it. I feel unable to even change my point of view or my attitude. I am not sure, but I don’t think I’ve been this fucked up in 4 years.
“But what’s to be done? What can one do in such a case? Must one despair?”
“No. It is enough that you are distressed at it. Do what you can, and it will be reckoned unto you. Much is done already in you since you can so deeply and sincerely know yourself.”
-Feodor Dostoievsky, “The Brothers Karamasov”
It hardly seems like the fact that I am distressed is enough. I suppose, however, that it is a beginning of a first step on the situations that face me. I have been trying ‘The Best Short Prayer” for awhile now, and it seems to not yet be working. I suppose if I just said ‘fuck it’ I would get up and go paint my bathroom or something. Pink, I think I have gotten all the hideous wallpaper down so I suppose it is time to do something. There is plenty around here to busy myself ‘doing’ – and in that I might at least find myself ‘being’ productive or distracted. If I found something to do for someone else, like Zossima suggests farther along in the narrative, I might even grow to again have faith in a plan and a purpose for me and a connection to a Higher Power that can solve all my problems.
“But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther from your goal instead of nearer to it at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you.”
Recent Comments