I had dope cancer, and I never thought it would go into remission

It was someone in my household that turned me on to pills in the first place. I was self medicating. I got depressed, and I was miserable all the time, and I lived in a violent household and I couldn’t deal with anything.

You have a problem that you want to feel better. But then, if you don’t know what addiction is, you don’t realize that it infects every part of your body. And if you don’t know what withdrawals are, which I didn’t, first go around, withdrawals can kill you. And they make you go crazy. That’s how you wind up with a needle in your arm, trying to get your medicine so you can feel better.

Most of us, not all, but most are just trying to be normal like any other person. All we want to do is be normal. You wake up in the morning and you drink your coffee and you go to work, and you laugh and joke with your friends; you’re functional. People like me, we get up in the morning like, how am I going to walk out that door unless I’m feeling better?

The escalation

My addiction was so bad, I wound up in prison too, and that didn’t even help. I was just forced to be dry for a while. And when I got out, the first thing I did was get high again.

I have chronic pain and stuff. I have back injuries, so I had a legitimate reason for even being there, but they treat you like you’re dirty before you ever even do anything. They make you shameful right as you’re walking through the door, and you might not have done anything wrong. So you wind up buying the pills, or you’re buying the fentanyl, or you’re buying the heroin, just so people don’t judge you.

It was by accident I started using fentanyl, because it looked like OxyContin. I thought I was getting OxyContin. And then I was hooked on that, like, immediately. It was horrible. And I was gonna die.

Hitting bottom

It was December 27th. By this time I was 49 years old. I remember I took, I think it was like eight morphine pills that morning. Didn’t feel them. And I went and got some fentanyl.

I remember just sitting there, just miserable. It was like it was never going to end. I never thought I’d have a day where I didn’t have a needle in my arm, or wasn’t eating a handful of pills.

If you’re in a house where they’re doing dope and you OD, they’re going to run, because they don’t want to get busted. And you’re going to die on the floor. We just accepted it. We’re like, well, hopefully it’s not my day to die.

Why I started treatment

My dealer had told me about QuickMD, of all people. He said, hey man, have you ever done Suboxone? And I’m like, no, what is that? He says, if you want to get off, it’s like methadone, but not. He saw that I was going through all my money. He saw that I was so sick of it, and I was gonna die.

I said, they’re gonna want me to pay them, it’s gonna be like a pain clinic. He said, no. Just call them.

Don’t you think it was the higher power telling the dealer to tell me? That was a miracle.

What treatment looked like

I’m computer illiterate, so I had a hard time filling out the questions, but I got the appointment made in three minutes. He was calling me in a prescription, and all he said was, “let’s get better.”

I was finally treated with respect. He didn’t interrogate me. He didn’t ask me a bunch of questions like, okay, how often do you go to the dope house. He didn’t want to test me, which is embarrassing too, because they watch you sometimes.

I had dope in the house just in case it didn’t work. I had it like, well, if this don’t work, that’s all right, I can fix it. All day long it was a 24 hour period, I was waiting to see if I was going to snap. But it worked. It worked. And the next day, I threw all the dope away. Everything.

I thought, if I could just go 24 hours without using, I know I could go a week.

Three months into recovery

I started telling my son about it. I’m like, we could do this. I’ll help you do this on the phone. But he was so far gone. I was three months into my recovery when he died. And all of that could have been avoided if he would have just come home. He was only down the street.

The drugs nowadays are so dangerous. They can just wipe you out in a heartbeat. If anybody’s onQuickMD’s website, I think it’s because they know they don’t want to die. I know they don’t.

In remission

I never called it being an addict. I always said I had dope cancer. And I never thought it was going to go into remission. But it did. I look at Suboxone as chemo for my dope cancer.

Programs and meetings are like buffets. There’s a whole bunch of everything there. But you have to put on your plate what you can digest. You can’t overload yourself. Eventually you’ve got to come up with a program of your own. Something you can live with 24/7, because that’s what you’re going to be doing.

I embrace my denial. Yesterday never happened and tomorrow never comes. I wake up in the morning and I’m normal. That’s not for everybody. But it’s for me. In the beginning, it’s every hour that I’m not doing drugs, I’m a miracle and a success. And then eventually it’ll get to be a whole day.

If life was a toolbox, I had a hammer and duct tape. That’s not going to fix a whole lot. You got to learn better tools, better coping skills.

Life today

I’m not selling everything that I have and running all over town to dangerous places. I’m not playing Russian roulette every day anymore. Most addicts are really poor. But I’ll tell you what, if you took half of the money you spent on your addiction, you would be amazed at what you can get.

I would rather have one good friend than ten dope friends, because they’re not friends. My life is quiet, and I have peace for the first time in my whole life. For the first time. I get up and I look around and thank God that I’m alive.

I tell them, you have options and you don’t have to die today.

My message to others

If you’re thinking about a way out, that means there’s a door that’s open. All you got to do is step through, because, believe me, it cannot be any worse than what you were going through as an addict.

Once you realize you can feel normal again without eating a handful of pills or having a needle hanging out of your arm; that right there is enough to keep anybody from falling off the wagon.

Addicts are good people with bad habits. We’re basically good people with a bad problem.

If it can happen for me, and I was a raging tornado addict, I know it can happen for somebody else.