A Pharmacological Phamily.

Now that the worst of it has passed - the shakes, the chills, the twitching, the sweating - and was made a little easier by a prescription of Zanaflex which has had me dozing off and on for the last 24 hours, I figured I'd write a bit more about me since I'm a narcissist and writers are supposed to write what they know.

I've grown up around drugs, both legal and illegal.

One of my my most painful childhood memories was taking my mom to the airport - she was flying to Oregon to participate in an experimental drug trial after several car accidents had left her in excruciating pain. It was the first time she had ever been away. I still remember crying on the ride home while The Spinners covered "Working My Way Back To You" on the radio. She came back a couple of weeks later with bottles of DMSO. She typed up adhesive labels for them and they sat on the floor of my dad's closet for years. I was in those accidents too, but I guess I was the lucky one since the pain waited a few years to hit me.

In 1996, I decided to drive to Missouri for a friend's New Year's Eve party and, since I knew my buddy and I would have to drive in shifts to make it, asked my dad if he had anything he could give me to make sure I slept. He handed me a couple of small pills and said they would do the trick. He gave me Paxil. At that point in his life, he had gained dozens of pounds and slept nearly all day after having spent several years on disability. I don't know what else he was on, but when I found out Paxil was an anti-depressant years later, everything became so much more clear.

Most of the people in my family had substance abuse issues. My dad never admitted to being an alcoholic and never went to meetings but admitted that he might have gone overboard a few times in the past. I saw it firsthand when my mom threatened to leave him after he drove home drunk from a golf game and brought a few friends with him. She was pissed, rightfully so. All of us had almost been killed by a drunk driver when I was very young - he didn't see what the problem was and his golf buddies thought my mom was being a bitch ... she was, but they came by it honest. He was on a cornucopia of medications after anti-inflammatory drugs ate out his stomach lining and I had to give him a blood transfusion to keep him alive. Sleeping pills, painkillers, muscle relaxants - you name it, he took it. He had a medicine cabinet filled with prescriptions to help him deal with the damage that bleeding out had caused.

My half-brother was a disaster of drugs. Legal, illegal, smokable, snortable, injectable, drinkable, inhalable - if he could get it into his system somehow and it got him high, why not take it? I don't know what what he was on, but I know that he was high when he tried to kill my dad with a butcher knife at my fifth birthday party. I had gone to his bedroom to see if he was okay because he had been sent to his room after everyone but me realized he was loaded again. I found him on his knees and praying - he screamed at me to get out and the next thing I knew, my dad was holding a 2x4 like a baseball bat while my mom stood between them and restrained my half-brother until the cops could show up. I stood at the window in my grandmother's living room watching my half-brother throw himself face first against the glass in the back of a prowl car until they drove off. I only talked to him once after that - when I was 12, he had called my mom from somewhere and wanted to talk to me. I picked up the phone, told him that I'd kill him if I ever saw him again and hung up. The last I heard, he was in prison for shooting a cop during a drug deal gone bad. He's probably dead now.

Most of my friends from junior high and high school had substance abuse problems - my next-door neighbor, an older kid who was my only friend for a lot of years, developed a coke habit and started making and selling meth to support it. A lot of the kids I went to junior high with bought their drugs from him. With four meth dealers and two labs in a two-block radius, I slept with a bat by my bed.

I've lost track of how many friends I've lost to overdoses or alcohol-related accidents - most of them were just trying to kill some kind of pain, or mask it with fake happiness that evaporated when the whiskey or heroin wore off.

This is what I've grown up around. This is what I know. And, save for prescription medication given to me by a doctor for specific conditions, I've stayed drug-free, somehow. I've never even really had a problem with trying. And, as most of my friends knew, the thing that was most frustrating to me about this whole experience was knowing that I was almost certainly dependent on painkillers to some degree and that any dependency would only worsen over time. I could accept the possibility of having multiple sclerosis without even thinking twice. There is nothing I can do about that. But a dependency? That's well within my ability to control. I did 28 hours cold turkey with a small amount of vicoprofen left here. That's 28 hours of pain and suffering that I knew I could alleviate at any moment just by taking a pill which was only a few feet and a glass of water away.

Instead, I kicked.

I know and have known too many addicts. I have a lot more sympathy for them than most people do because of what I've gone through - I have been in their shoes. I just took them off and put my own back on as soon as I could.

So now my medication regimen is Lyrica, Cymbalta and Zanaflex. No opioids for the moment and probably not for a while. I have no idea what comes next, but 8 hours of continuous, restful sleep that begin in the evening and end in the morning would be a blessing.

It's funny, how we take the little things for granted.

Stumble It!