I always know when it�s time to write about something because the words just spill out of my head like an overfilled glass. I repeat phrases over and over in my head and I cannot rest until my fingers take to the keyboard and make noises like rain showers. This is one of those times.
Have you ever noticed that when a writer starts out a story with �it all started X amount of years (months, days, whatever) ago� they don�t tell you what �IT� is until much later in their story? Well, I�m going to do the same fucking thing to you right now.
I�ve been waiting to write this entry for a while, mostly because putting something in writing means admitting it. Admitting it means change it. I haven�t been ready for change.
Last summer, it seems really like worlds away from where I am right now, and yet at the same time, I�m not that much different. I remember right after Brian got home, how unstable I felt, like a skein of yarn that was unraveling and tangling and had 20 kittens playing in it. I never felt calm inside. The Tour De France was taking place in my nerves and I was powerless. Or rather, I felt powerless. If his PTSD made him withdraw, I took it so personally. I would shrivel up and cower in my room, afraid of the world, afraid of my emotions. And they were so strong. My anger, my grief, my shame. I would lash out at myself.
I knew that I needed to work on me, work on being an adult around my emotions. Learn to invite them over for tea, but not let them thrash my house in some teenage drunken orgy. Therapy helped a bit. Friends helped a lot. And time worked its magic too. When July rolled around, Brian and I seemed to be doing better, but still had so many issues. We decided to take a few steps back. We broke up but decided to remain friends, still date, just not be exclusive. It felt like the end of a dream. I felt like I had waited a long time to be with Brian and that the world was just working against us. I tried dating other people, but found it hard to connect to anyone new. The rest of July just seemed like a blur.
During this same time, I was dealing with harrassment from my boss. My employer, though seeming to be sympathetic, was not really doing much to alleviate the problem. Supposedly, he was �being counseled� and taking classes and all kinds of malarkey. But I still had to work with him. I had surgery (hernia repair) scheduled for August 3rd, so I was really just trying to make it until then. I�d be off work for a couple of weeks and was hoping the situation would improve before I returned.
In the last week of July, my mom had surgery to begin post-mastectomy breast-reconstruction. The day after her surgery, my father was admitted to the hospital with a suspected heart attack. He was in the hospital for almost a week. They said he didn�t have a heart attack but had blockage that needed to be repaired. They were going to try to do it with angioplasty but if they couldn�t he would need open-heart surgery and would most likely not survive it. He had his angioplasty the day before my surgery and came home the day of my surgery. He did fine through the surgery, but it did little to ease my worries about losing my father.
I don�t really like stories that just have a play by play listing of events, but this is how this story wants to be told� short of opening up my head and pouring you all into it, this is how it shall have to be.
I tend to get really nervous before all of my surgery (yes, ALL, this one was number 8 in my lifetime and number 3 within 1.5 years). What�s strange about this, is that I tend to freak out the most over the minor surgeries. My bypass surgery was the most intense, invasive (hello � they were rearranging my internal organs) and dangerous of all my surgeries. Yet before that one, I was so calm and relaxed, I even took a nap. The hernia repair was particularly nerve wracking. I started out upset because I didn�t get my �good luck� phone call from Brian the night before. I was still worried about my dad, and still kind of absorbing all the stuff that was going on in my life. I didn�t think the surgery was going to kill me. Honestly, what worried me the most was that feeling you have right after the surgery � when you are just coming out of that anesthesia fog, you�re disoriented and miserable and in pain everywhere. And then the effects of the anesthesia seem to linger for a few days, and I hate that feeling. Its not even something I can describe.
As I was prepped and waiting for surgery, I was so nervous. My sister had driven me and was out in the waiting room. I just wanted Brian to be there. I wanted someone to hold my hand and tell me it was going to be okay. But I was all alone, in my backless gown, watching doctors and nurses tend to patients and wheel new ones in for surgery. I kept feeling all this junk in my belly (I hate to use the cliched butterflies analogy) and the only way I could make it go away was to pull my knees up to my chest. I was so nervous that my body was actually shaking. It was like I had the chills from being out in the cold. I think my teeth were even chattering. Finally, the anesthesiologist came and gave me some �happy juice�. Actually, he said, as he plunged the needle into my IV, �here�s a glass of wine� and then �here�s a martini, I�ll see you after the surgery.� And then they wheeled me away. The sleepy feeling overcame me, but that scared me just as much. It felt like I was slowly drifting off to sleep, but I was afraid I wouldn�t wake up and I felt mentally groggy, like my brain was full of sludge. I would later associate this feeling with falling asleep.
I woke up from surgery in that post-anesthesia haze that I was dreading. God, I hate that feeling and yet cannot find the words to describe it. It�s like your brain is not attached to your body. You don�t remember where you are. You try to move but find that the signal isn�t leaving your brain. Every tiny thought takes so much effort. And your whole body feels uncomfortable. Like when your leg falls asleep and it�s starting to wake up. And you try to move � but then OH! The pain!!!! Because you WERE just cut open.
My sister drove me home after a couple of hours. The anesthesia was beginning to wear off and so the pain and discomfort was increasing. I am not sure what kind of pain I was expecting, but it was more than I had anticipated. I laid in my bed and could not get comfortable. I remember feeling such excruciating pain after the bypass surgery -�to the point where I could not take a deep breath � but in the hospital, I had that lovely Dilaudid IV to keep me company. It seemed more manageable. And with that, if I would just lie perfectly still, it seemed that the pain would subside. This time, the pain was constant. The Vicodin they gave me did not seem to do a thing. I could not get comfortable in the bed. Ice packs across my stomach seemed to help, but not much. And it was more than just pain, it was like my whole body was uncomfortable. I had the urge to move it but there was no comfortable position.
That night was one of the worst post-surgery evenings of my life. Not only was I in pain and the pain medication wasn�t working, but I began having anxiety attacks and I could not sleep. For some reason, everytime I started to fall asleep, I would freak out and pull myself out of sleep. I was relating the feeling of sleeping with the sensation of going under anesthesia. When you go under anesthesia, it�s a physical surrender. You are no longer in control. You are giving up control of (literally) your life and ability to breathe to another person. And while this person is controlling your life-sustaining bodily functions, someone else is cutting into you. It�s scary. And, upon later analysis, I also realized how much I felt my life was out of control at that moment. The boyfriend thing. The job thing. The parents health thing. So the feeling of surrendering control took on a whole new meaning on a sub-conscious level (so says my inner analyst � and yes, she has her PhD in Psychology from Janet University). I would sleep for about 20 minutes, wake up in a panic, lie in my bed freaking out for about 30 minutes, get up, go to the bathroom, come back to bed and fight sleep again for another 20 minutes, and then complete the cycle. It actually got to the point where, because I tended to go to the bathroom after lying in a panic and would fall asleep afterwards, going to the bathroom seemed to be the thing that would break the panic attack. I would go into the bathroom and sit on the toilet even when I didn�t have to go� because doing that would break the anxiety and then I would fall asleep.
This pattern continued on for the next few days. The Vicodin seemed to do little to ease the pain and, though I had bottles of it left from previous surgeries, plus the stuff given to me by the surgeon, I abandoned it in favor of Alleve, which seemed to take the tiniest edge off the pain.
It seemed to take a long time for me to heal. The pain continued for a while and was still accompanied by its friend � anxiety. After a particularly grueling day, filled with this constant dull ache that would not go away and would now allow me a moment�s peace, I took one of the Vicodin to see if it would help.
And now, I bring you to the �IT� of �It all started when.� I never understood when I would read about people getting addicted to Vicodin. It never made any sense to me. I had had bottles of Vicodin lying around for years (because of chronic pain from Lupus and also from my 8 surgeries). At one point, I had a doctor write a prescription with 12 refills (clearly a doctor who didn�t want me to come back into his office � here Janet, here�s some pain medicine now leave me alone) and I only filled 2 of them. I had a bottle of 100 pills sitting around from my gallbladder surgery the year before. Untouched except for about 7 pills. Yes, it would help the physical pain and would sometimes help me sleep when I was in pain, but beyond that, it was useless to me. If I wasn�t in extreme pain, it was no help to me.
But for some reason, the combination of my life at the time � the chaos that I felt, the anxiety and panic attacks, the sadness over the break up, the endless days of not working that I had no idea to fill � it was all just a recipe for addiction. When I took the Vicodin that day, my pain did not matter. It took the edge off the pain, but more so, it took the edge (and a few of the corners and a big bite of the inside) off of my emotions. I was numb. One minute, I was stressed about a hundred different things with a million thoughts flying around my head and each thought sparking an avalanche of emotion. The next minute, the thoughts were still flying but I DIDN�T CARE. It was bliss. That was my word for it. Bliss. Total absence of emotion.
And that is how I became addicted to Vicodin.
I knew it at the time. I�ve known it for the past 11 months since that day in late August. But admitting it to myself meant I had to give it up. And I didn�t want to. Truth is, I still don�t. But I have gone through all my Vicodin and I refuse to allow the junkie behavior of �trying to score� to manifest itself in my life. I maybe an admitted addict, but I will not be a junkie.
I don�t know how it�s all going to be for me. For now, for the future. I know that when I have to be alone with my emotions, I don�t know what to do with myself. I try to think of ways to shut them off. I try to think of ways to cope with them. I have lost all of my coping mechanisms. Except for this one, this diary, this vomiting of words on the screen.
I�m not in a place to say �hey, I need a 12 step program�. I admire those of you who are there, and go to these programs. I don�t think any less of you for going. I think more of you for going. It has taken me a while to just be able to admit it to myself, here, in this way that I can�t deny. Today, I think that is good enough. What comes after, I do not yet know.
