| Subject: Just need someone to talk to |
Author:
MarlboroLady
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Date Posted: 23:46:45 07/01/06 Sat
I'm new to this forum. I performed an Internet search looking for a forum for families who lived with members that are addicted to drugs. I found this forum and thought I'd give it a try. Everything inside of me needs to go somewhere, and it might as well spill out here.
I've known for quite some time that my husband has been addicted to painkillers. He has been disabled since 1993 due to a bowel problem. On the surface he looks normal as anyone else; but inside, his intestines are a mess. It began as each time he had a problem with his back (osteoporosis) or his intestines, we would go to ER and he would get a pain shot along with a take home bottle of medication to get him through the night. He was referred to pain management in which he was a patient there for about 2 years which seemed to work well for him in managing his problems.
He started getting 80- to 200 pills of Vicodin or Percocet to last him a while. The clinic moved him around from month to month on different meds because his body would quickly become immuned to the drug's strength, so he was on pain patches, suckers, and then back to pills again. The pain management clinic closed and moved to a city further away so my husband didn't continue with pain management anymore. Now his General Physician handles his pain medications. And this same physician also prescribed Xanax for my husband 4 years ago to help with his nerves, anxiety, and to help him sleep at night because the pain medicine would make him wirey, and he wouldn't sleep.
My husband started taking the Xanax at first by following the prescribed dose which was 1 tablet 4 times a day. Then I started noticing that he became really sluggish and his speach was very slurred like he was talking with a swollen tongue. I counted his Xanax and found that he had taken 18 of the pills. This continued to be a problem from one month to the next. I would come home from work, find him in this condition (explained above), and I would hide the pills. He would tear the house apart, throw things at me, yell, scream, I mean he would get VIOLENT.., but he never hit me! And this is not like him. This man has been soft spoken, happy, energetic, enthusiastic, and just had a love for life in the 12 years I've been his wife. No one would've ever expected THIS to be happening to HIM of all people!
So back to hiding the pills... I would hide them and the next day when I come home from work the house would be in shambles and he'd be high as a kite. He'd find the pills, I'd find a new hiding place, he'd tear the house apart, and so repeats the story. Finally after we called his doctor and told him about what my husband was doing, he lowered the dosage. This seemed to work well because we never had another problem for over a year. The problem that seemed to arise was pain pills. My husband would even drink cough medicine or take 6 or 7 sinus tablets for cold and flu to feed his system. He'd lie to get money from his parent's to buy pills with. He'd take the ones he was prescribed in a week. He'd get a prescription for 60 pain pills and they'd be gone before the week was out. He'd start buying pills after that. What he'd do is he'd sell or trade his Vicodin for Oxycontin. It started out as 10s, then 20s, then 40s, and then 80s.
When swallowing the pills no longer worked he started snorting them. Any pain pill he was prescribed, that he bought, or that he was given on trade, he'd crush and snort. I caught him doing this a few times and I went off. He knew I didn't approve it, so he'd go off places by himself and do it with people who did it too. Then he met up with a guy who lives in this town that's got a bad name in the community for being a druggie. My husband started running around with him and we found out that he was snorting cocaine. This came about when he went to the ER saying he had back pain and they admitted him.
The urine and blood tests from ER come back showing that my husband had cocaine in his system. The doctor who was treating my husband came in the room right infront of me, didn't even ask me if I was his wife or not, and started telling my husband about how he lost his oldest brother to a cocaine addiction. His brother had gotten so high that he fell asleep at the wheel of his car and went off a bridge into a creek. It killed him instantly. My husband listened to this doctor attentively and swore to the doctor that he didn't do cocaine and that they must've mixed his tests up with somebody else. My husband went on and on about his disgust for drugs. I believed this, but little did I know that when you get on Xanax you do things you don't know you're doing when you've taken too many.
My husband swore up and down to me that he had never done cocaine. He swore the tests were faulty. I was foolish enough to believe him because here again, I've known this man and been his wife for 12 years and I know his disgust for street drugs. Now I know that I don't know him as good as I think I do. I found out 2 months later that he WAS doing cocaine because the guy he was doing it with told on him. I asked my husband about it and he said that he'd only tried it twice and didn't like it. He promised me it was a thing of the past and it would never happen again. I let him think I believed that promise, but deep down I knew better. I searched his face everytime he came home, or everytime I came home from work, looking for evidence that he was high on something besides painkillers that his doctor gave him.
He'd take off going to the store to buy a drink, cigarettes, or whatever we needed and sometimes he'd come back in 3 or 4 hours, sometimes I wouldn't see him for 12- to 16 hours. He would never tell me where he'd been, or who he had been with, but he was high. I knew something HAD to be going on more than just painkillers to make him disappear like that, but I just couldn't put my finger on it. I assumed it was cocaine.
Six months ago I found out I have ovarian cancer, Endometriosis, and Ovarian cysts. I have been prescribed pain killers to subdue my pain. I can't even keep my medicine because my husband steals it. I got 60 pills filled Monday at 4 p.m. and on Tuesday at 2 p.m. I found that my husband had eaten 30 of them. I don't think my husband even realizes that I am very ill. He hasn't been supportive of me.., he hasn't even put his arms around me to say that he understands. He just sleeps all day, stays up all night popping pills, or he leaves and stays gone for hours and no one knows where he is. He just comes home when he's out of money and out of gas. I stay home alone worrying myself sick trying to do my best to care for our three children.
So what brings me here tonight is I just left the jailhouse. My husband who is a Criminal Justice major at an online college has been picked up by the law for DUI (Driving While Impaired.) He left here at 5 a.m. with his bestfriend (another druggie) to go get treatment for his back that bothers him. When I woke up at 11 a.m., he still wasn't here. I immediately began to worry. Then came 2 p.m., then 4 p.m., and then 6 p.m. with no word. At 7 p.m. my father-in-law calls me to tell me that my husband's bestfriend called him and said that they got pulled over and my husband was taken to jail for DUI. This friend said that the sheriff told him to start walking, he didn't get charged with anything.
I was stuck at home with all the kids and no car, so I couldn't go to the jailhouse. I have a block on my phone for long distance calls so no one can call me collect, and I couldn't call the jail to find out what happened. About 30 minutes after the phone call from my father-in-law, my husband's bestfriend shows up in a patrol car. Another sheriff picked him up and brought him to my house. He comes in and tells me what happened.
He says that my husband had eaten 20 Xanax, went to an Emergency Room and recieved a pain shot of Dilaudid and Phenegran. He said that after they left the hospital, that my husband took HIM to another ER where he also got a pain shot. He said they were coming home and a cop got behind them and noticed the car was all over the road so he pulled them over. When the cop saw how messed up they were, he took my husband to jail and made HIM walk home.
My father-in-law calls me back and tells me that my husband borrowed $30 from him, and after he gave my husband the money, my husband and his friend left. Well my father-in-law said that when he got back home that his dog--an inside dog--was standing outside and the front door was unlocked and standing partly open. He said that the two of them must have waited for him to leave because they broke in his house and stole $180 in old money that's valued at hundreds of dollars, maybe even thousands.
My mother-in-law comes home (she lives in front of me) and she tells me that she saw my husband's friend walking. She wanted to know what happened with my husband. I told her that he was in jail for DUI. She said, "Do you know how they got caught?" I said, "No." She tells me that they were driving down the road and my husband's friend was on the passenger side asleep and that my husband was so messed up that he fell asleep and hit a concrete wall and that's what stopped them. A cop saw them asleep in the car with the car smashed into the concrete wall and immediately called for EMS and pulled my husband out of the car.
When we got to the jailhouse I got a different story from the cops. My husband's friend was high so he doesn't really know WHAT he was saying to us. The cop said that they were very, very messed up on something and that it wasn't alcohol related. He said they had hit something somewhere and apparently hit it hard because the metal bumper on my car and the entire passenger side of the front of the car was smashed in like the corner of the car hit something at a high rate of speed. The cop said he thinks my husband passed out at the wheel. The cop said that obviously they were so messed up that they continued to drive because the rubber piece that goes around the fender well was worn down from it scrubbing against the tire. They finally pulled into a gas station and turned off the car. They fell asleep in the car. Customers noticed how they looked and that they were asleep and made mention of it to the cashier inside the gas station. The gas station clerk called the cops.
I went to look at the car and I just cried. It was a wonder that the two of them didn't get killed tonight. God was definitely on that car or else they would have been killed. I just paid my car off last month. I made the final payment on it and now it's totaled. There's not a chance it can be fixed. My husband is lying in the bed in the bedroom passed out. He doesn't even know what all happened tonight. The cops did a blood test on him and I'm waiting for the results of that to find out what all was in his system other than Xanax, Dilaudid, and Phenegran. I found out from someone tonight that my husband has been doing crack. I didn't know that! I've not seen anything that could've let on that this was going on along with the pills. But I found out that my husband has been doing crack since December of last year. And the person who told me did it with him and stands to lose much more by telling on himself than my husband could stand to lose.
I wish I could've seen the signs. I wish I would've known. I thought when he walked in here quiet and numb that it was pain pills. I never knew it was crack and that it was happening in MY HOUSE! I thought my family would NEVER be touched by anything like this. Here we are both in college for our Bachelor's Degree in law and he's doing this! How!??? I just want to fall on my knees and ask God "HOW did I miss all the signs!???" So what do I do now? Where does it go from here? How do we deal with this? What happens from here on? I need some help, some guidance, and some answers and I just don't know where to go to get them. Please somebody tell me what to do.
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