There is a saying in recovery that says 'While you can never be too dumb to get sober, it's possible to be too smart'. People had been telling me this since my first relapse. Everything I needed to stay sober was right in front of me. My friends were staying sober. They were going to meetings, hanging out with other kids in recovery and working the steps. My buddy JM is a good example. Since I had met him, he had stayed sober. I had gone in and out, but JM had over 3 years of sobriety. He had steadily gotten better, but I had slowly gotten worse. This isn't to say that I was smarter than JM and, therefore, couldn't stay sober. Quite the opposite, really. JM realized that he could not kick the drugs and alcohol on his own. He was smart enough to rely on other people to help him. I couldn't get this for the longest time. And as I stayed drunk, I was slowly driving people out of my life. The thing is, though, I WANTED to be left alone. All I wanted to do was drink and if Katie or anybody else was going to stop me, I would rather not be around them. That was my state of mind when I moved into my grandma's house.
My grandma and mother lived together in my grandma's house. I was the third person in the house and I felt like the proverbial wheel. I would go to work during the days, then come home and try to drink without getting caught. Sometimes I smuggled bottles of vodka downstairs into the room I was staying in. Other times I would keep the bottle in the trunk of my car outside. Not going to meetings, I had plenty of spare time. I read a lot, watched a lot of TV, and accomplished very little. My tolerance for booze was coming back pretty quick. I was drinking a bottle every two days. When you go through bottles like this, access to booze is pretty important to you. My worst fear was to get caught on a Sunday with no booze. I was starting to measure how much I was drinking in glugs. As in tipping the bottle of vodka upside down and drinking. 'Glug, Glug, Glug' would be 3 glugs. A whole bottle might have 12 or 15 glugs to it. With a smile on my face and feeling the booze rise to my head, I would mentally pat myself on the back for being so funny. Then I would black out and come to at the sound of the alarm going off. Time for work again.
After a couple of weeks I had a resurgence of the desire to get sober. I got in touch with Katie and told her that I was going to try to stay sober. She agreed to let me stay home if I would stay sober. Thanksgiving and Christmas that year were really tough. Mixed in with the sadness that my father in law was gone was the guilt that I stole from him. While Katie's family seemed to come together through this, I felt like an outsider. The wrist I had surgery on a year before started hurting again and I was headed towards another surgery. I saw the doctor and got pain pills before I had the surgery. I was abusing them before too long. For one of Katie's brothers' birthday that year, we went to dinner at his favorite restaurant. Both her brothers and their families were there as well as my mother in law and Katie and I. I had lied to Katie about having took some pills and was nodding off from the opiates. There were my young nieces and nephews staring at me as I quite literally put my head into my plate. Katie would kick me or elbow me and I'd slowly raise my head, wiping the drool and food off of my face. At that age they couldn't have known exactly what was going on, but they knew something was up.
There are people in recovery who will say that they are only an addict or only an alcoholic. While I readily admit that I am both, it was really easy to believe 'at least I'm not drinking' when I was getting high on prescribed medicine. After all, hadn't the doctor prescribed them for me. And I'd had surgery, right? That's one thing about recovery that kind of makes me laugh. It's like some type of a sick reverse caste system. The joke goes: The people who inject cocaine and heroin (H) look down on people who smoke coke and H. The smokers look down on the sniffers. The sniffers look down on the alcoholics and EVERYBODY looks down on paint huffers.
In my mind I could justify using these pills. I had told Katie that I wouldn't drink, and so as long as I didn't drink I was keeping my word.
One day I got my hands on a couple of sleeping pills. I took one, blacked out and came to a day later. Katie was afraid when I wouldn't really talk and just stared, zombie like. She took me to the emergency room. I don't really remember going there, but they said I was fine and if there were any problems to come back. My stomach started hurting pretty badly a day or two later and I was unable to go to the bathroom. (I wasn't aware of it, but this is a fairly common problem among opiate users) We went back to the emergency room. They took me back and were starting an IV, but the unfortunate nurse couldn't get one going on me. I wasn't helpful. I was shouting at him each time he drove the needle in, missing the vein. Eventually I told him that I would suffer rather than wait for him to hit a vein on me. I got up and left. A few days later Katie was out with her friends. I had taken quite a few pills and was nodding off. I was having a hard time breathing and I panicked. I called the ambulance to come get me. What it comes down to is that I was playing a game with life or death consequences. There was no glamour in what I was doing. I was acting like I wanted to die, but every time I got close to that I had an overwhelming desire to stay alive.
I started going to meetings regularly after months of not going at all, or only going sporadically. I was about 30 days sober when I started seeing a psychologist thinking it couldn't hurt. She referred me to a psychiatrist. She met me once and said that I may be suffering from ADHD as well as being bipolar. I disagreed with her wholeheartedly on both counts, but didn't speak up. She prescribed me some medicine for the ADHD. I knew from what I'd heard in meetings and from my own experience that I should stay away from the stuff. I didn't, though. I filled the prescription. I took a couple of pills. Then I took a couple more. We went to see a scary movie and my heart was beating like crazy from the legal speed I was on. Later that night I was back in the emergency room. I told the doctors what I had taken, but not how much.
Katie was nearing the end of her rope with me. We started talking about splitting up for good. I kept going to meetings and picked up a 60 day chip, despite abusing the medicine. I was invited to go to a 12 step mens' conference in Las Vegas with my friend JM, his sponsor, and another guy. I decided to go. It was scheduled for March 29th-April 1st, 2007. My life was about to change in ways I never imagined.
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