Day 40.

What's that warm glowy thing in the sky?

    I believe the worst is over. My worst symptoms now are due more to lack of sleep and nutrition than anything else. (HAVE I GOT THE WEIGHT LOSS PLAN FOR YOU!) I think. Withdrawal is more like a roller coaster than a steady decline or descent. It comes in waves, so it’s impossible to say. But there have been moments, represented above, when light punches through.

    The insomnia is not a whole hell of a lot of fun. Nothing over-the-counter touches it. My insomnia scoffs at melatonin. Nothing available with a prescription that I have been allowed so far touches it. Trazodone? Nada. There’s only one thing I’m aware of that would work (like a charm, in fact). But people in a treatment center get a little freaked out when one asks for a benzodiazepine like Xanax or Valium (Ativan? Something? ANYTHING?), drugs with an apparently high potential for abuse – something I do not understand at all (“Hey, let’s party! By sleeping!”). So I have not gone so far as to ask for them. And I don’t expect an offer to be forthcoming.

    So instead, I just get up, walk around and drink a glass of milk. And sigh. A lot.

Day 31: The Longest Hour.

Salvodor Dali knows what I'm talking about.

    I wake up feeling more or less like I was run over by a bus, but sleep is impossible, so I make myself go to a 7am AA meeting. Which is just as well, because that meeting is supposed to be required reading here at the Notdisneyworld Sober Ranch, although in my current condition, I could get a special dispensation if I wanted it. But it really wouldn’t do me any good to toss and turn in bed for another hour, so I go.

    We get back around 8:15. Our nurse arrives promptly at 9:00am to dispense medication, including my paltry little 3mg (!) of Suboxone. The worst I feel all day is in the morning between 8am and when the nurse shows up. It goes without saying that that time…passes…very…slowly. Our nurse gets a chuckle now when she shows up at 9 to find me in the group room lying in some state of repose, with the best hang-dog expression I can muster, so as to say: “before you do anything else, please tend to me.”

     Being a first-born (the world revolves around me; never forget this) and somewhat of a drama queen, I have perfected the hang-dog expression to something of an art-form.  Our nurse is the one person in the whole facility who does not have some kind of personal experience with addiction. We call them normies. I have to think that she occasionally (I went to school for like 100 years and I never spell “occasionally” right the first time) gets a kick out of  the theater of the whole thing. But if she does, she never shows it.

    She’s as patient as you would expect a matronly woman in her choice of profession would be. Reading between the lines, you should take my sentiment towards her to mean that she does in fact tend to me before anything else. The real trick is to evoke that kind of sympathy without it appearing intentional. Like I said, it’s art. I have 35 years of experience at this (and I have had a few good teachers along the way), so all you aspiring drama queens, take heart: you too can master the art of evoking pity. You don’t want to overdo it, but it’s not such a bad skill to have when the occasion (really?! two “c”s, one “s”, how hard is that to remember?!) calls for it. Keep reading, and you’re bound to continue getting these invaluable life lessons.

The Misery Index: Day 28.

I will kill you. /shoots lasers from eyes

    Remind me not to get addicted to opiates again. I’m currently taking 4mg of Suboxone a day. If you remember, I started at 24mg only 20 short days ago. Ouch. I’d put myself at about a 6 on the misery index, with 10 being full-blown withdrawal. That’s what Suboxone does for you: allows you to trade a 10 for a 6.

    And just for good measure, yesterday the universe dealt me a healthy dose of irony (I’ll get to that in a minute). First, you need to review the symptoms of opiate withdrawal. I’ll wait.  First of all, let me point out that looking at the symptoms of withdrawal written in cold black and white gives you about as much of a sense of the real thing as reading the Cliff’s Notes of Dante’s Inferno.

Dysphoria. Not a real country.

    Take “dysphoria,” for example. Dysphoria sounds like it might not be too good, but then again not so bad, either. It sounds like a country in the former Soviet Bloc. Maybe the government’s corrupt, but there are economic opportunities everywhere. A loaf of bread no longer costs a week’s pay. Sure the Russian mob controls all the entertainment rackets, but at least there is entertainment. Which is better than your options in the before times, limited to mainly kick-the-land mine or…well, not much else.

    But that’s not dysphoria at all. Dysphoria, at least as it’s experienced in withdrawal, is a feeling like – not only am I not happy now – but I’m not ever going to be happy again. Ever. And Santa died. In bed with someone not Mrs. Claus. In fact, it was  Mrs. Bunny. Husband named Easter. And the Fourth of July was cancelled, along with New Years. Now I think the picture is clear.

    So with that backdrop, I’ll note certain other symptoms of withdrawal. The ones involving the gastrointestinal tract. Given my description of dysphoria, let me assure you that every other symptom on that list is equally magnified. So you can understand my consternation when I went to Public (that’s the singular) yesterday and found out that Imodium had been voluntarily recalled. All of it. There was nothing left on the shelf. No store brand. Nothing.

    There is cosmic irony in this scenario. I get that. It’s probably hilarious. I would appreciate it even more, were it not for the fact that laughing riotously is NOT A VERY GOOD IDEA WHEN YOU HAVE SYMPTOMS YOU WOULD OTHERWISE TREAT WITH IMODIUM OH THE HUMANITY.

If you look close, you can see God laughing.

    I know, I know, I doubt God was behind the imodium recall. But you can’t rule it out entirely. So I will soldier on today in my quest to defeat addiction (subdue might be a better word).  But for the next few days, the battlefield will never be too far from a bathroom.

One thing there's never a shortage of on the internet - other than depravity - is cats.

Day 18: Sober in Paradise.

    It’s just another day in paradise, and other than feeling a vague lack of profundity, today is a beautiful day. I suppose I’m being presumptuous to assume that anything I say is profound. In any event, I don’t suppose anyone is profound every day.

Not. Too. Shabby.

    I’m down to 10 milligrams a day of Suboxone. From 24 only 17 days ago. That’s a pretty steep decline, and explains why I have extreme lethargy throughout the day. It probably also explains some of the aches and pains that plague me, especially in the morning. Lethargy is the most prominent symptom of the “light” withdrawal  associated with the gradual step-down approach my doctor has taken to ween me off Suboxone. He will probably prescribe something to help with the lethargy for a few days to get me over the hump. One possibility is hormone therapy because past opiate addicts generally have low testosterone levels. My blood test confirmed this today.

    Interestingly, everything else checked out well. Liver enzymes, blood glucose, thyroid. A bunch of stuff I didn’t understand. And my resting heart rate was 47 and my blood pressure was 130 /81. I guess I can thank my parents for hardy genes. Of course, none of those tests demonstrate what is going on in the ol’ noggin, but at least they demonstrate a level of foundational physical health from which I can continue to build good mental health to complete the picture.

    I’m having a difficult time with a few people and boundaries. And it’s not necessarily the people I would have expected. It’s amazing how certain people who I do believe want me to get well have no problem blowing right through boundaries I set in an effort to maintain sobriety. Especially during this very early period when that sobriety is at its most fragile. They see drug addiction as a thing unto itself; the disease itself, rather than a symptom of a disease. The disease of addiction involves a lot more than just using drugs and alcohol. So it’s not just a lack of use that has to be maintained. I have to maintain a state of mental and emotional well-being the best way I know how. Right now that involves setting a lot of boundaries and sticking to them. Which takes some people aback. But as I am constantly reminded, this is my sobriety, not anyone else’s. And like a good friend once told me, I need to just not give a shit what anyone else thinks.

Honesty. The Only Policy.

In addition to being honest, Abe also spit mad game, yo.

     If don’t start being honest, I will die, and probably sooner than later. I don’t know how to put a finer point on it. If I did I would. Without honesty, I will relapse and die from this disease. I can’t directly apply my free will to an addiction and expect to get a handle on it. That approach would be doomed from the start. But I can indirectly use my free will to tell the truth, and telling the truth can in turn tame my addiction.

   I’m not trying to play cute rhetorical games (maybe a little): this concept is the single most important thing for me to take away from treatment. I’ve been in active addiction for a long time. I do not have a habit of telling the truth. For an addict to continue using, they almost without exception create a world that is built on lies and deception. Sometimes the lies are overt, and sometimes the lies fall into a category we might call deception by omission. But a lie is a lie is a lie.

I cannot tell a lie: I CANNOT tell a lie.

   It’s interesting to me that we have two Presidents who are noted for their honesty. Out of 44. Come to think of it, that sounds about right, and not just because Presidents are by definition politicians (and politicians are by definition – you know – scum bags). I think people who strive for 100% honesty are the exception, not the rule. It’s just not a priority for most people, which is odd, because most people are revulsed by the idea of a perpetual liar. But most people are unconcerned with the concept of “little white lies.” I believe that in my post-treatment world, I can no longer indulge myself that distinction.

Does this make me look fat? Yes. Yes it does.

   Lying is an action that is rooted in one of two emotions, both of which are fatal to addicts: shame and fear. Every lie is the result of one or both of those emotions in some combination. I posit that shame and fear drive most, if not all, of the awful things human beings do to each other. Think about it. Except for the few that are rooted in anger (which almost singularly drives violence), nearly every other negative human action or emotion is borne out of fear or shame. Prejudice, envy, gluttony, gossip, sloth, judgmental-ism, stereotypes, xenophobia; even that dragnet of all negative human emotions – hate – is very often, if not always, rooted in fear or shame.

   So I’m going to take my cues from a character from the real Disney World, a character who sets an example from whom we addicts here in the Notdisneyworld Sober Ranch could all learn a thing or two. So much the more that he – like us – learned his lessons the hard way.

Pinocchio: providing pithy analogies since 1883.

Treatment Day 2: Suboxone Therapy

Three a day, dissolved under the tongue.

    I have been doing Suboxone therapy for an opiate addiction for about a month now. I have detoxed from alcohol and stopped taking all other drugs, but Suboxone is an opiate in its own right, and I ultimately intend to stop taking that as well. The plan is to do that gradually. I will diminish my dose by two milligrams every second day. Two milligrams is the equivalent of 1/4th of a strip. This won’t be a pleasant part of this experience, because there will be withdrawal symptoms. Mitigated symptoms, but symptoms nonetheless.

Sure beats heroin.

   I have a background in marketing and advertising, so lets all bask in the glow of a clean and effective package design. Suboxone has an extremely well-designed, coordinated and integrated marketing campaign. The materials the doctors give out in addition to consistent branding aesthetics in the website and other marketing materials scream EXPENSIVE. And I’m here to tell you, that price is passed along to me, the erstwhile drug-addled consumer.

    And you would have to be on drugs to pay these prices in the first place! These things are seven dollars apiece. At three a day, that costs me $21 a day, $147 a week. That is outrageous. Considering that many Suboxone MD’s charge a monthly subscription fee – sometimes as high as $500 a month – I am slightly cynical about the whole thing.

    But the fact of the matter is, drugs are a lot more expensive. My opiate habit ran about $120 a say. THAT is outrageous. Am I better off with the Suboxone? Yes. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think there isn’t maybe just a little bit of exploitation of a captive market going on here. That money all goes to the manufacturer, too. I can tell you that the Notdisneyworld Sober Ranch isn’t making a penny off of my Suboxone.

How We Think.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

– Henry David Thoreau

 

I immediately connected with Thoreau when I read this phrase; it is one of the those pieces of prose that is tattooed on my subconscious. It’s really a simple thing. We are imperfect beings on an imperfect, fallen world. When – God, if – we come across something that makes us feel better – even for a little while – it is completely natural for us to do that thing. I would say it is inevitable that we do that thing.

Under the right circumstances, anyone would use, and become addicted to, heroin. The only reason more people don’t do drugs is because they have no idea how they make you feel. I’m here to tell you: cocaine is not an acquired taste. Yet there are a whole lot of people in this world who hear words like “heroin” and “cocaine,” and swiftly mount their high horse (named Judgy McJudgensteed). 

Knowledge is the primary thing (which is not the same as the only thing) that seperates the addict from the non-addict. When heroin, or cocaine, or methamphetamine or WHATEVER crosses the blood-brain barrier for the first time, the user experiences something that approximates the tasting of the tree of knowledge of good and evil all over again. It is impossible to un-ring that bell.

 

So it’s not fair for you, the non-addict, to judge us the same way you would judge yourself. We are operating under a different set of facts than you are. For you getting through a day without using means…nothing. You did nothing, you resisted nothing, because you know nothing (sorry man, no offense). But we, the addicts, know things. We know how every anxiety in the world washes away – even if for a little while – with one dose of a certain chemical. And if you’ve got a lot of anxiety, a lot of dissonance, a lot of sadness, or loneliness, or anger – knowing makes the doing all but inevitable.

 

Getting through one day under that set of facts makes me, the addict, a damn hero. This is why AA and NA are fascinated with days. Our milestones are measured in days. We say things like ”one day at a time.” Because a day can be real shit. And we know things. It seems silly to some people the way they give out chips at AA meetings. Not me. I see a guy with 100 days getting a chip and I’m looking at a freaking wizard. A quintuple-degree ninja blackbelt. I got more respect for that guy than the president of the United States. 

 

 

The one on the left is one of the first enablers.

Human beings have been getting themselves messed up since the beginning of time, because that is precisely how long we have been imperfect creatures living on a fallen planet. This is nothing new. What modern science has done over the last hundred years or so, is give us the ability to get effed up in an extremely efficient manner. Oh, and we made the concept of physical addiction more than a theoretical possibility. We are way beyond chewing on a coca leaf or drinking the juice from a fermented piece of fruit. Somewhere around the time we synthesized diacetylmorphine, roughly 1895, we unleashed a new tree of knowledge of good and evil on humanity.

As a species, we have not yet un-rung that bell. And I doubt we ever will. But the kind of thinking that creates an addict isn’t evil. It is characteristically human.

Day 3. Chicken Salad.

Today I felt a little better and I felt a little ambitious and so I went out there and I did some stuff and I drove a little bit. I didn’t actually accomplish anything, or remember the whole thing, and I required a three-hour nap when I got home. But boy-howdy, we did stuff today. I’ll make a note tomorrow to check the undercarriage of my car for a dead pedestrian.

In a Prius, the pedestrian has at least even odds. This is not a Prius.

I did manage to make one hell of a chicken-salad sandwich today; to wit: pulled chicken (from one of those rotisserie chickens you can get at just about any grocery store now), mayonnaise, sour cream, relish,  salt, pepper, dill seasoning, grapes (cut in half), walnuts, served on grilled bread with lettuce, apple slices and melted swiss. Dill sprigs are optional but now I’m just showing off. Not necessarily health food, but a lot better than main-lining Kit-Kats.

The team of my choice had an important event today, but if I revealed who and what I would significantly narrow down my potential biographical particulars. So I’ll just have to say that a sporting thing happpened today and it went pretty well. Not as good as a win, it’s the off-season, but it was pretty good. You can tell my committment to my anonymity is less than resolute. The truth is that it may not matter to me as I continue to write, but since it’s impossible to put that toothpaste back in the tube, I will be circumspect in handling the subject. For now.

I hope that once I get through detox there will be a little more cohesion to my narrative. There’s a lot of prologue to my story (beyond my clever post titles from a few days back), and a lot a of texture to my personality. The past few days it’s all I can do to write something down. I’ll crank up the narrative in the next few days.

Oh, today’s drugs: phenbobarbitol, 60 mg, three times a day; clonidine, .1 mg, three times a day; visteril, 25 mg; three times a day. Yummy.

     

Put Title Here.

"Sunny days" my ass...

As the title of today’s post suggests, I feel a little blah. Not up, not down, just blah. I have found it very difficult to post the past three days. So it is with a certain amount of authority that I can tell you alcohol withdrawal and detox saps your will to live creativity. This morning at 10 a.m. sharp, we had visit number seven from the nurse who takes my vitals and gives me the drugs (vistaril, phenobarbitol, and clonidine) that have the combined effect of putting me in a coma preventing seizures and keeping my blood pressure down. In case you haven’t noticed, I figured out how to use the “strike-through” feature today.

I suppose I feel a little better today, although I mean that in the I’m-not-miserable sense, not the I’m-so-happy-and-can’t-wait-to-tackle-the-day sense. However, I could probably bring myself to tackle other people who feel so happy they’re ready to tackle the day. People with perfect exercise outfits really annoy me right now; I’d start with them. From there, I’d move on to people who use catch-phrases like “24/7,” “it is what it is” or “stop stealing my laptop.” Lots of other people annoy me too: short-sleeves with a tie? Tackled (what are you, a dentist?). If you drive a Prius, I’m probably going to tackle you; while you’re driving your Prius.

OH THE HUMANITY!!!

People who are good at golf, wear captain’s hats without irony, and who have an iPhone 4. Tackled, tackled, tackled. Wow this group is getting large. People who have anything I don’t have, possess a skill I don’t possess, or who have cheekbones that are a little too high or who are otherwise incredibly good-looking: tackled, tackled and tackled.  There.  All that is left are the people I can look down on. Great, now I feel nauseous. I’ll publish this and come back later. Maybe I’ll even title it.

Day Two. What Doesn’t Feel Good?

I feel like hell, although I can’t tell you whether that’s because of the drugs to treat the alcohol withdrawal or the withdrawal itself. Which, I suppose, is the point. My initial thought this morning was that I felt hung-over. Which makes sense if it’s true – as people claim – that a hangover is really a mini-withdrawal. Ordinarily, I think the people who say things like that are the same as people who say that LSD stays in your spinal cord forever, or that it takes seven years to digest a piece of gum if you swallow it. People who start a sentence with “I heard that….” Then again, sometimes those people are right.

I always had to look away during this part. Hopefully they used a prosthetic tongue.

I wish I knew which one of the drugs I am taking that makes my mouth so dry; I would probably stop taking it. I avoid taking the Vistaril unless the nurse absolutely insists on it, because when I take that I can just go ahead and forget about the next three hours because I’m going to be asleep. The Clonidine feels familiar to me because it is the same as xanax or the other benzodiazepines. It’s a decent port in the storm.

My brain is definitely not firing on all cylinders. Which makes for interesting conversation when the nurse starts asking me questions. A common one is how do I feel. I don’t know how I feel. I feel like shit. But I can’t say that because then there’s a follow-up question: what doesn’t feel good. What doesn’t feel good is the lack of a drink in my hand, and unless you’re prepared to remedy that situation, don’t ask me to describe what doesn’t feel good.

I definitely don’t feel like thinking about how to describe what specifically doesn’t feel good. Even in an ordinary context, this irritates me. My wife had a habit of asking me  “what specifically doesn’t feel good” when I said I didn’t feel good. Like I hadn’t yet met my burden of proof that I really didn’t feel good. Unless I have an acute stomach issue – in which case I am probably lying on the bathroom floor, or calling the dinosaurs – there’s usually not just one specific thing. I just don’t feel good. They have a word for it: general malaise.

Under these circumstances, I really have a hard time telling you what specifically the problem is. It’s everything and nothing all at once. For one thing, I’m tired of being cooped up and not being able to go anywhere without an escort. I expected that giving up a portion of my independence would be part of this deal, but I kind of thought that wouldn’t happen until I went to rehab. I haven’t had my own car (in a meaningful sense) since Monday, and I guess I wasn’t quite ready to give up the ability to come and go as I pleased until next week.

Physically, I’m having a hard time deciding whether the disease is better or worse than the cure. The one thing I know for sure is that I hate everything. I hate having to ask if I can get in my car and go around the corner from the house. I hate not having control of my finances, my schedule, my life. I suppose this, as much as anything, is a reason to get well.