It is important that I figure out why I chose to take the path I took....why I decided to continue taking narcotics and numb out. What was it in my life that I couldn't or didn't want to face. I have thought about it a lot in the last few weeks. Today marks the 14th day of no OxyContin. The doctor wanted me to titrate off of the Vicodin following a 3-week schedule. I did it in 1 week, but then I ran out of the OxyContin and I had 3 days before my doctor's appointment to get my refill. So, I bridged with Vicodin. It made more sense to me, since the OxyContin was a long acting narcotic, to titrate off of it first using the Vicodin to bridge and take a little bit of the edge off. So that is what I did. When I went back to see my doctor who was helping me get off of the narcotics, I shared this mindset with him. I was told that since I was the exception and obviously dedicated to meeting my goal, any way I could find to make it work for me was fine with him. So this is what I am doing. I usually take 3 to 6 Vicodin in a 24-hour period. Usually I take 2 at a time at night when I wake up with back pain. I also have Lidoderm patches that I can put on my back to keep the pain from radiating down my left leg and waking me up, but some nights I am so tired, I forget to put them on before bed. This regimen seems to be working, as I am celebrating my 14th day.
It hasn't been easy, though. Some days I am so exhausted, I just lay on the couch watching TV. On the days that I have to work, it is all I can do to get through my day and collapse in bed. I get these headaches that start in my neck and travel up to my forehead. One morning I awoke at in the morning with the feeling of needing to run to the bathroom and throw up. That feeling stayed with me the whole day.
So, back to my point....I think it is important to understand why I continued to numb out with pills. When I was 15 years old, my mother signed the license for me to get married. I had just broken up with a boy whom I thought I was going to marry and live happily ever after. My dad and I got into a huge yelling match on evening because he didn't think the boy was good enough for me. Long and the short of it, I broke up with him. I sent him a 'Dear John' letter when he was stationed in Germany
We got married and within a year we had our first Daughter. She was so much like her father. At that time, that would have been a compliment, but since the divorce......not so much. About a year and a half later, we had our second daughter....(yup, you guessed it...just like me). We were married for 6 years. Before I knew it, I was a single mother with 2 children who had a father that didn't know how to be a part time father, so he wasn't a father at all. I remember the first Christmas when we didn't have the money for gifts or Christmas dinner and I was living with my then single mother, who also was financially challenged at the time. It was pretty grim. I got really angry with my situation and called DSHS and found out that the state would collect child support for me so I didn't have to beg him every month for the few dollars that were thrown our way. That was a relief.
So then I met my second husband. He was a kind person who was very nurturing. It didn't take very long and I was once again walking down the isle.....much to my older daughter's defiance. We ended up buying a house in a little suburb and the kids had to walk 3 blocks to school in the morning. I loved that house, even though the kids teased me about the mauve and light blue interior. What can I say, that was in at that time.
I got a job in a local retail store in the hardware department. I was pretty proud of the fact that the older men would come in and tip their noses up at me because they didn't think that a 'girl' could be helpful in finding what they needed. Most of the time I had a smile on my face and a huge feeling of satisfaction as they walked to the registers, having not only found what they needed, but being educated on how to use whatever tool or what not they had chosen to buy that day. It was a good feeling.
I remember one day I was in the warehouse upstairs moving our summer stock around so we could get to our fall stock. I reached up to either grab a lawn mower when I felt a tremendous amount of pain in my left shoulder. I was a lean mean muscle machine at that time in my life, so I sucked it up and finished out my day. The next morning when the alarm clock went off, I couldn't move out of my bed......literally. I had one of the kids bring me a phone to call into work to let them know I wasn't going to be in that day and why. I remember hearing some argument out of my boss, but I reassured him that I really could not get out of bed. That was the last time I got to see the inside of my hardware department from an employee point of view.
The next thing I knew I was going in for surgery. I guess I had torn up my shoulder pretty bad and needed surgical correction if I was ever going to be out of pain again. If that wasn't bad enough (to add insult to injury) I ended up needing a second surgery because I had formed a bunch of scar tissue in my shoulder joint during the healing process and lost quite of bit of range of motion in that arm. So I went for round 2. I remember a followup appointment with my regular doctor some time after that...sitting in the chair in the examination room and him in a chair directly across from me. I remember it so clearly in my mind. I explained some symptoms I was having a hard time dealing with lately. By that time I had been through vocational rehab and was retrained to be a medical transcriptionist, so I got away from the real physical work I was previously doing.
The symptoms I was having at that time were a lot of fatigue, lethargy, widespread pain all over my body, headaches.....and so on....and so on.... So that is when I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. He assured me that it was not a progressive disease, but that it was incurable and I would have what he called 'flares' that may come in cycles. It sounded like such a foreign word, but it rang in my ears for days. I was panicked and scared and in denial. I started compulsively searching out any information I could find about the disorder. Back then there wasn't a lot of information so I really had to dig. It was a new diagnosis for the medical profession. I guess there were enough people complaining about the same symptoms, they finally linked it all together and called it fibromyalgia. It took another 20 years before medical billing assigned a diagnosis code to it and it became recognized. Then George and everybody were running to the state offices signing up for disability. That wasn't going to be me, though. I was into my second marriage with 2 kids and I was not going to fail my family and become a burden.
I remember the next thing, I was working in a local medical office as a transcriptionist. We had a D.O. who worked upstairs. Her field of choice was chronic pain patients and I was typing a lot of her notes and learning a lot about how this new drug that came out was potentially a new miracle drug for people with chronic pain. The FDA assured us that it was not addictive, even though the main chemical was morphine. Wow, what a breakthrough! I was excited that there was a therapy that was so easy as to just take a pill and it would take my pain away, and it wasn't addictive! I bet you can guess what line I went and stood in.
Before I knew it, I was up on top again. I could work my full time job, my part time job on the weekends and I could be there for my kids. Life was great.....at least in that respect.
My second husband never really got along with my kids. My older daughter had a chip on her shoulder about the fact that he was not her father and she didn't have to listen to him because of that fact. I heard that often out of her mouth. My husband didn't know how to deal with her. He had never had kids of his own. You would think that by coming from a family of 8 kids, he would have a little bit of a clue.....but no....yup......clueless.
There were awful yelling matches between my older daughter and he. Then she would drag her sister into the act and before I knew it, the whole house was filled with total chaos and dysfunction. I didn't realize just how really bad it was until my mother came to live with us after she injured herself at work. It was a terrible time for her. She and dad had been split for a few years at that point in time and she really didn't have anywhere else to go. I love my mother to the core. Her only fault is that she loves too much.
One afternoon I left for work. When I arrived home that evening, mom called me downstairs. My husband was gone and it was only the kids, mom and I who were home. Mom sat me down and explained to me just what was going on when I was not home. My husband would yell at the kids until he lost his voice. He would call them names and stoop down to a child's level. She heard him tell them that they WILL respect him because he is an adult. I didn't matter to him that he was verbally abusing them and no respect had ever been earned. Before I knew it, my older daughter was moving in with her father and my younger daughter and I were looking for an apartment.....yup....strike 2!
All throughout those years, I was taking narcotics. It was my save all. It was the only way I could manage my life and take care of the things that needed to be taken care of. I couldn’t allow the pain to take me over, not with so much at stake. I was once again a single mother living on my own with my younger daughter. My mom and dad had gotten back together and had moved in with each other in their own place. I was scared for my mom because I didn't want to see her ever go through being hurt like that again. But I had enough on my plate at that time, I had to trust that she knew I would be there if she needed to talk. Mom and I are like that and I have always been very thankful that she knew how to move our relationship from mother/daughter to friends as I grew up. Dad still does not really understand our relationship in that respect, but that’s okay. I think it is not only a mom/daughter thing, but a girl thing as well. At least it is a mom/daughter thing for people whose mother's care. I know there are a lot of people on this earth who are so much less fortunate that I am in that respect. It makes my heart ache to think that a mother can be anything else than loving, nurturing, kind......but it is a cold hard fact of life and my heart goes out to people who have been cheated of that experience.
Years went by like this. I was working myself to exhaustion to keep up with the bills again and get my daughter through school. She was very quiet at that time in her life. I always wondered if it was the calm before the storm or if that was just a part of her personality. My older daughter was so overwhelming in every way, that I often wondered if my younger daughter was quiet because of that. As life went on with just she and I, she started becoming more outgoing and, I think, more happy. My heart was breaking those years because of my older daughter's decision to live with her father. I think it set up a wide separation between us that would never be healed.
But I had my pills.....thankfully.....my safety net.
The years went by and everything around me changed. The relationship between my older daughter and I never did heal. I was even told after her marriage and her first pregnancy that she didn't think that I was the type of person she wanted as an influence in her children's lives. That was a huge blow to me. I knew we never really saw eye to eye, but to deny me the right to love my grand babies and watch them grow up was way too much for me to bear. That was hugely painful....so painful that at first, I didn't know what to do with all of it. It blinded me and it made my whole body ache with emotional pain and the feeling of loss was almost too much to bear. I thought I was going to literally loose my mind. It still cuts pretty deep, but I think I have replaced the pain with anger.....anger in the thought that we can never go back....I will never get to be a part of my grand baby's lives, because if I am.....she could do that to me again....hurt me so badly that it blinds me. I can't bear that again.
So this is where we are.....like it or not. I don't know how to overcome it and I don't think I would have the strength to try.
I honestly don't remember when I hurt my low back. I remember having an MRI a lot of years ago and the doctor telling me that I had torn the pad in between my disks in my low back. When my doctor asks me what the pain feels like, the only thing I can come up with is that it feels like a toothache running down my left leg. It wakes me up at night and I cannot lie still. It is very frustrating....especially with my sleep. It has always been my belief that, unless you cherish your life as you know it, DON'T wake me up!! It was hard enough to get through my days with the fibro, but without sleep, it multiplied the difficulty substantially. Thankfully I had my pills.....and yet another reason to make sure that I was going to my doctor every month, that I had enough money in my wallet to pay for my prescriptions, that I was working and maintaining my health insurance so I could afford my doctor's visits and my prescriptions......
I think you get my picture. In and among all the other stuff life was throwing at me, there was an underlying feeling of panic and fear that I was going to end up in a position where I wouldn't have my pills to help me through. I even had visions of my doctor retiring some day, or even worse....suddenly dying.....then where would I be.....(I know, pretty selfish, huh?).
Then one day I was watching the news on TV....and guess what?.....the FDA came out with a report and OxyContin after all....was addictive! Imagine that! What a shock...(no, your not mistaken, I am being condescending). I guess it didn't surprise me so much. I think I already knew from personal experience. It didn't change my course much, though. Not at that time in my life.
More and more I heard news stories and read articles on the addictive properties of OxyContin and how the FDA had made a mistake. By that time, the doctor in the clinic I was working in had 2 patients who had overdosed on it and administration was changing their viewpoint on that type of medical practice. They started making it hard on her during her evaluations and I remember she came to me a couple of times in tears out of frustration because she wanted to do the right thing for her patients, but at that time, she wasn't sure what that was. I think a lot of doctors started feeling that way at that time.
I quickly saw a huge social stigma surrounding doctor's prescribing narcotic drugs to people who maybe really didn't need them. It gave me a sick feeling inside the pit of my stomach. I felt ashamed of myself for not being able to stop taking them. I hid what I was doing from my friends. I stopped being as social as I used to be. My whole life depended on them. How could I work? Was I going to be one of the people that ended up on disability? The fear was numbing and the panic was real. My pride wasn't ready to take this blow...the thought that, if I do not have my pills, what will happen to my life...what will happen to me....who will I be?
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