Draconian Detox (Part 1)

On the road to recovery from opioids

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

(This is a 5-part series that will be dripped out periodically throughout the next few months. It is my hope that if you or someone close to you has an opioid problem, my story will help you understand what to expect from opioid addiction into recovery.)

Drug addiction doesn’t discriminate. It is easy to become addicted and very difficult to get help and recover.

What were opioids invented for?

For centuries, opioids have been used as medicines to manage or treat pain. Natural opioids (sometimes referred to as opiates), such as morphine, are derived from the opium poppy plant, while synthetic opioids like methadone and fentanyl are made entirely in a laboratory. — Congressional Research Project 2022

May, 2001, Saint Petersburg, Florida, dusk

The lovely fragrance of gardenias mingled with the aroma of freshly cut wet grass clung to the night air. I was sitting on top of a worn picnic table in a small courtyard just outside of High Point Detox, waiting for the security door to open. A glint of metal from the tall barbed wire razor fence caught my eye. The fence began past the concrete building and beyond the gravel driveway, and continued into the black night.

A tall gray-haired man and a heavy-set black woman with long braided grey hair sauntered out through the metal door of the concrete building carrying clip boards and lit cigarettes in hand. His name tag read Buck, no initials; and her badge read Darlene, LPN.

Buck asked me for my identification.

“I’m Jane Doe and I’m here for treatment—opioid addiction,” I said.

My friend runs a homeless shelter down the street. When I reached out to him for help, he said to check in this way so I didn’t have to pay out of pocket, but I didn’t ‘fess this up to these two.

I was worried about keeping my job and health insurance in Las Vegas—catching wind of my addiction would put both in jeopardy. I was still under an LOA because my father died 23 days ago.

The drug-stigma was so great I simply couldn’t bear being labeled an addict for the rest of my life because I reached out for help.

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Buck stood over me and asked questions such as how many pills I was taking—(6-8 a day); and how long I’d been taking them for—(almost five years); and why did I start taking them (I spent two years in pain prior to an insurance approval for a partial hysterectomy, and the last three years, because I was addicted and couldn’t quit on my own).

Darlene sat across the table and recorded my answers on her clipboard.

After we finished with more questions, they both snuffed out their butts on to the ground beneath the picnic table. Buck stood, picked up my suitcase for me, and the three of us ambled to the front door.

Darlene pushed a metal button off to the side and the door silently swung open. We entered into a dark foyer of the lockdown facility as the metal door loudly slammed shut behind us.

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Jails, institutions, and death are the ends to addiction.

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I’d just entered through door number two of the three. I’d been to enough Narcotic’s Anonymous meetings over the years to recognize door number three was slowly cracking open—I just hadn’t walked through it yet.

I tried quitting pills in outpatient twice with a psychiatrist and failed miserably both times.

A few weeks ago, the day after my dad died, I was out buying shoes for the funeral and a copy of neuropsychiatrist Daniels Amen’s book, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life to learn about how grief affected the brain chemistry—it was all about brain health and recovery. I bought the book and started reading.

The book detailed photos of a brain before and after addiction at various stages of the disease. According to the book, my (once healthy) brain resembled a large white pillar candle burning brightly—a beacon of thought, emotion, and creativity. Inside the addiction process my cerebrum was now melted down to a puddle of confused neurotransmitters, and the white matter was misfiring. Axons could no longer commit to transmitting proper signals to the gray matter, the thinking part of my brain.

In other words, I was a fucking mess.

I was terrified that my mind might not fully recover—it was an irrational thought—used in the past to justify continuing taking the opioids.

After reading Dr. Amen’s book cover-to-cover, the irrational feeling morphed into the horrifying possibility of losing my mind forever— never gaining back any sense of normalcy or quality of life—unless I took the chance and stopped the drugs to give my brain an opportunity to heal.

Was it too late? I didn’t know.

The grief that followed my father’s unexpected death was the impetus to try to stop one last time.

Otherwise, the only alternative I could see was to prepare for my own early death.

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Buck and Darlene led me into a small utilitarian room just off the entryway. Dirty, stained white paint was peeling from the institutional walls, and the floors were a dull linoleum with black and faded yellow diamond pattern. I traced my eyes over the pattern to stay focused and in the present.

I noticed that Buck had tremors when he took my vitals.

“Is Buck a recovering addict? Will I get tremors? Will I lose my mind? Will I still be able to perform complicated math formulas in my head? Will I end up in the nut house permanently? Will I recover?”

The two examined the insides of my old brown suitcase probing for contraband while I sat in a stiff-backed chair waiting for the body search. Darlene rechecked my suitcase again and again, seemingly not satisfied that she’d found nothing illegal. She finally clasped it shut—but not before taking out the energy bars I’d stuck down inside the worn lining of the suitcase.

She then took me into a small bathroom and instructed me to give her a urine sample while she stood there tapping her foot, never taking her eyes off of me.

“Everythin’s goin’ be awright. We’ll forget the body search for now,” she said, as she looked into my eyes and smiled a toothless grin.

She examined the plastic cup filled with a slight urine sample, and then walked me back out into the small intake office.

I sat next to the large desk piled high with stacks of files that threatened to overtake the small room while Buck and Darlene finished filling out the paperwork, and completed my admission.

Buck picked up my suitcase. He grabbed two worn towels, two sheets, a single pillowcase, one threadbare washcloth, and then led me through a maze of corridors to my room.

Mine was the last room down a long hallway on the right, closest to the emergency exit.

He knocked and without hesitation, entered through the heavy wood door. He placed my belongings on top of a vacant bed on the left side of the room. My new address was Women’s Wing 1, Bed 2.

He wished me luck and closed the door halfway behind him.

The other bed was made up of big fluffy pillows and a brightly colored pink comforter. Hair accessories and make-up were scattered over the top of the bed and bottles of shampoo and hairspray were toppled over on their sides across the floor.

Zombie 00 by Brad Gooch sat on the shelf above the headboard. Pre-admin instructions said anything other than spiritually based books were not allowed and would be confiscated.

My roommate had contraband and was clearly breaking the rules. This might not be so bad after all.

I unclasped my suitcase and started unpacking. At the bottom under my clothes sat my two books, A Coffee Break with God, and Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul. I brought photos of Mom, Brother, and Mew—my precious cat, who’d died just three weeks before my dad died—to try and ground me with reminders of family.

I left all precious remnants of dad back home. It was too painful and some irrational part of me didn’t want Dad to see me in here like this. I was certain he could see me.

It was an impulsive decision that I could have held off a bit longer.

Bullshit.

Who was I kidding? I didn’t have enough pills to last another 30-days. Was I really in here to get clean, or was it because the threat of running out of pills, and the access to get more frightened me into to doing something about my addiction?

“I still can’t be honest with myself.”

When the opening came I had to take it while the bed was still available. The facility gave me four hours to report to intake or the opening would go to the next patient waiting.

Beds weren’t easy to come by.

There were so many addicts— court mandated or who were committed involuntarily—that space was limited.

I knew this from past years while vacillating between fighting getting clean or accepting I was a full-blown drug addict and that death was the only way out.

There was no in-between. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.

I didn’t want anyone to find out I’d checked in here other than Mother and Brother.

My life as I knew it, came to a grinding halt 23 days ago, when Dad died. Divine Intervention and resources were made serendipitously available to me, I deem them both miracles.

It took Dad dying for me to finally face me.

My new roommate named Julie came waltzing in through the door shortly after I’d gotten undressed and jumped into bed. We introduced ourselves and quickly took turns sharing our stories. She said my addiction didn’t amount to much—I’d be out in no time. How did she know?

She was going on 63 hours without sleep.

Addicts lie. Either more or less what they claim it is, is always a lie.

Julie described her withdrawal from 1800 milligrams of OxyContin, the most potent of opioids; she’d been taking (daily) for over a year— and mentioned we were both on a heroin withdrawal protocol—our wing was for opioid users only.

“I’m taking doctor prescribed Loratab, not chasing a heroin high.”

I didn’t confess to Julia I’d come in here afraid of losing my mind forever. I wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t already lost hers from having the brief conversation we shared.

It was late and I wanted to sleep. I knew after tonight, sleep wouldn’t come easy. I stared at the ceiling, my mind revolving around how long it would take before the withdrawal symptoms would begin.

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I took my last three pills just hours before checking into the detox and said goodbye to my addiction by running five-miles down the beach and back and stayed in the moment—fast, furious, and free with the fiery afternoon sun blazing down on the top of my head.

I welcomed the beads of sweat that ran down my face as the droplets hit the pavement like tears, in my wake.

I remembered how my muscles felt, lengthening and contracting, fueling my legs forward in time, how I’d learned to function so well mentally and physically; fatigue and pain masked and disguised behind the haze of the little blue pills.

My heart raced and my lungs burned as I crossed the imaginary finish line, my personal best time. I jog/walked back to the family seaside condo, and realized I would never again feel that same exhilarating sensory overload for the rest of my life.

I took a cold shower, packed my suitcase, and now, here I was, sitting inside a drug detox waiting for the sickness and withdrawal to begin.

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Our lights were out by the 11:00 pm curfew. The lights outside the door continued to stay dimly lit.

My eyes blinked rapidly while I waited for the dreamless sleep to come one more time.

I repositioned, turning from side to side on the plastic that covered the mattress beneath the worn sheets. Each time I moved it sounded like balloons popping. I broke into a heavy sweat followed by a cold chill from the cold temperatures inside the room. I reversed and repositioned trying to get comfortable into the hours of the night as anxiety percolated inside my head.

I worried.

Mother was newly alone after 53 years of marriage, and I wasn’t there for her.

Would my job be there when I got back?

I needed to end a three-year dysfunctional relationship. I didn’t even like the guy.

Being on drugs covered up a bad relationship and helped to justify my addiction.

I memorized the details of the room in the pseudo darkness. There were large oversized cabinets, two single wooden bed frames, linoleum floors with the black and yellow diamond pattern, lightly colored tanned walls that all institutions favor, and one overhead light.

There was a long narrow window above our headboards, too high up to see anything except the faint shadow of a half-moon shining through the shadow of palm trees against the black midnight sky. The only distraction I found in my restless state was staring at the neon glow from the silver painted letters on the red emergency alarm above the door, that kept our room in a semi-light of dusk.

My eyes were patterning the letters overhead when a large shadow of a man wearing a Panama hat passed by the doorway, shuffling down the dimly lit hallway. I sat up on my elbow and looked to see why a man was walking down the women’s side of the ward. He wore a red flowered Hawaiian shirt, with long khaki Bermuda shorts, and open-toed boat shoes that housed elephant sized shoes and big feet.

I quickly got out of bed and stood next to the cracked-open doorway. Icraned to see this lumbering oaf lurching to and fro, until he finally halted at the emergency exit door.

I could hear the nurses station at the end of the hall start talking and yelling excitedly.

Overhead the loudspeaker boomed “John, where are you going? Go back to your room. Get out of the women’s ward. Jooooohn!!!”

John put his hand on the lever and pushed the door open, activating the alarm system.

Bells and whistle shrieked.

John propped the door open with his left foot. He looked over his right shoulder toward the nurse’s station as he unzipped his pants. He pulled out his schlong, bent over slightly and a slow, steady stream of urine flowed out the door.

Suddenly, the loud commotion seemed to startle him. His body jerked. He turned slowly, to face the nurse’s station. He shook Mr Flaccid dry, tucked himself back in, and zipped up his pants. He reached around and shut the door.

The alarm and bells stopped ringing. The lights continued to intermittently flash.

John reached up and tipped his hat into the direction of the nurses station, and once again seeming oblivious to all the commotion around him, retraced his steps back down the corridor; and into the maze of hallways, back into the bowels of the compound.

“Everybody back in bed” a blaring voice shouted over the loudspeaker. “There will be a room check shortly.”

Welcome to Women’s Ward 1, Bed 2.

Opioid use disorder and opioid addiction remain at epidemic levels in the U.S. and worldwide. Three million US citizens and 16 million individuals worldwide have had or currently suffer from opioid use disorder (OUD).—National Library of Medicine

1-800-662-4357 for help

See you next week!