The Beginning

The first time I realized that taking painkillers and feeling good were directly correlated, I was 16. I'd just had three surgeries in one month for kidney stones. It was November of my junior year of highschool. The stones were broken up by soundwaves and a stent was placed in my ureter so I could pass them easier. I remember taking the Vicodin and painting surreal pictures that didn't really make sense to me, or anyone else, for that matter. I started at the ceiling for hours, but I was so content.

Two months later, the stones were passed and my prescription was done. I resumed school and my life, and moved on, just happy that I no longer had to deal with the intense and often crippling pain of kidney stones.

A year later, I had surgery again and went back on painkillers, but this time it was different.

From the start, nothing went right. Surgery took much longer than expected because of adhesions, my digestive tract was so badly scarred from so many childhood surgeries. Five days after surgery, I was not doing well. I developed a paralytic ileus, my intestines were not pulsating. I was opened back up to try and fix it. After ten days, things finally started working. I was sent home after a two week hospital stay, with a prescription for Percocet. I was determined to recover.

Becaused I had two surgeries in one week, my abdominal wound opened up. It wasn't a big deal and was sort of expected, so I had a visiting nurse come once a day to pack my wound with gauze. But after a few days, the fluid from my wound became thick and green. It smelled of rotting meat. Every day, there was more and more. I could not eat because of the smell. I could not get out of bed because once I moved, it was like a cork came out, and the fluid would just pour out. I was forced to change the dressing every hour, because the fluid would soak through and run down my side. I could not sleep, or I'd wake up in a pool of fluid.

Every day, the nurse told me it was fine. It was normal. After two weeks, I stopped believing her. My mom took me back to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston to be readmitted. In the emergency room, I had a ctscan done. The attending physician came back with the results and asked me if I was missing various organs. I said no, just my large intestine and appendix. He was absolutely puzzled. I asked him what was wrong, and he said, "Well...we don't really understand your anatomy. Usually on a ctscan, you can see the outlines of organs. Yours is just...a big blob of white."

After more tests, they found out I had a raging e.coli infection in my abdomen. It had taken over the entire cavity, one of the abscesses was the size of a basketball. I spent another two weeks in the hospital on intraveinous antibiotics, but I recovered. Or so I thought.

By the end of April, things were getting worse again. I began spiking fevers of 104 and it took so much effort just to breathe. One day, I found myself lying on the ground, unable to piece together what happened. The visiting nurse came to take my vitals and told my mother I needed to be rushed to the hospital. I was going into septic shock.

This cycle of seemingly getting better and then going into shock happened three more times. I spent the entire summer on intraveinous antibiotics. While all my friends were at graduation parties, I was home to hook myself up to an IV pole for an hour six times a day.

In June, I was put on MsIR (morphine sulfate instant release) and MsContin (morphine sulfate continual release). I loved morphine. It relaxed me, it made me happy, it made me forget about the fact that the type of infection I had carried a 64% mortality rate.

I never really took the MsContins. I wanted something that hit me quick and strong, like the MsIR. But, I found that I just kept needing more and more to feel good. In three weeks, I went from four pills a day to 12 pills a day. It just wasn't enough.

In July, I found out that not only did I had e.coli in my abdomen, but I also had Staph in my blood. I had picked it up from the hospital. But, because two won't go without three, I found out I also had a blood clot in my chest. I was getting worn out. Five months was enough. I had a semi-permanent IV placed in my chest, called a Hickman Catheter, because the doctors figured I'd be infusing myself daily with antibiotics for a very long time.

I had my doctor switch me to Dilaudid, hoping I wouldn't have such a tolerance to it. By this time, I was so depressed, I thought about suicide constantly. I didn't shower for weeks at a time, I lost touch with everyone...I lost myself. I felt so desolate and so desperate that I stopped caring about whether or not I lived. It just didn't matter to me anymore. I found solace in the pills, but Dilaudid wasn't euphoric enough. I remembered how when the nurses gave me Dilaudid through my IV, it was so euphoric and so pleasureable that it was almost too much. For a couple days, I tried to push the thought out of my head. I told myself no, you can't do that to your body, you have enough problems. But I just couldn't let it go.

I crushed the pill between two sterile spoons and added saline. I grabbed the syringes I used for my catheter and filled them with the solution. I sat in my room, staring at it. Finally, I worked up the courage, and I pushed it through my catheter. It was instant. I was in love.

I was banking on the fact that I simply wasn't going to live. My body was shutting down, I hardly had the energy to get dressed, let alone get out of bed. But the problem was, I lived. And I was addicted to IV Dilaudid.

Soon, I ran out of Dilaudid and started cooking the MsContins. Those lasted me a couple more weeks. But of course, they didn't last forever. I couldn't even fathom the effect injecting had on my life. It WAS my life. I was finally able to get out of bed, get dressed, and go out. It was a miracle. I went to parties almost every night with my best friend, and we partied sometimes until 4 in the morning. I was so apathetic about anything else in my life other than the drugs. I stopped giving myself the antibiotics, because I decided I'd rather get fucked up than hook myself to an IV pole all day. During the day, I'd shoot up then head to the mall to drop hundreds of dollars on clothes.

Nothing mattered to me, and I loved every second of it.

I never left the house without a dose in my purse. If I was out to dinner with my parents, I'd excuse myself to the bathroom and shoot up. I came back to the table strung out and glassy eyed, but nobody said anything. I'd pull over on the side of a quiet street and shoot up. I'd shoot up in dressing rooms at the mall.

It's a fucking miracle that I was never pulled over and searched.

After a month, I had no pills left. I couldn't get more, because my doctor would get suspicious. I was injecting up to 20 pills a day. I decided to quit. I told my parents I was addicted, but didn't say that I was injecting. I went through a week of hell. But after a week, the infection was back, and I was sent back to the hospital, where they gave me IV Dilaudid. It worked perfectly, because I was sent home with another script, but this time for Oxycontin. I never injected the Oxy, I just snorted it. Snorting it was enough.

Sometime in September, I went on the most ridiculous drug binge of my life. By this time, my Hickman catheter had been removed, so I was injecting peripherally into my arm. I injected 6mg of Klonopin, then snorted speed, then had two shots of vodka. I am really quite intelligent, but I honest to god have no idea why I did this. I knew mixing uppers and downer was a TERRIBLE idea, but I did it anyways.

I don't really remember what happened after that, but my mom found me laying on the ground outside with a glass of chocolate milk. I do not drink chocolate milk. She put me to sleep and searched my room, where she found my stash of drugs and needles. I admitted to everything- there was no way I could fool her this time.

I started going to Narcotics Anonymous, but went right back to the Oxycontin. This is where I am now. I've been on the Oxy since early September. I quit for five days during Christmas, but that didn't last. I'm not sure where I go from here.