Two Decades Clean and Sober

 

*This post contains these sensitive topics: drug use, self-harm, sexual assault.

Twenty years ago, I woke up in a hospital bed, sat up, sighed deeply, and thought, it’s over, done, enough of this. Visitors gathered around the other occupied bed in the room, annoying and simultaneously sweet in chatter, emphasizing how alone I was. When the doctor signed off on me leaving, I pulled on jeans and caught a bus home. Leaning into the window, I confirmed that I’d changed inside, moved to a new place within. My mood, though remaining as grey as the low hanging fog, didn’t fade my resolve, my faith shining like the sun about to burst through clouds.

And it was over, the constant sitting in my room inhaling deeply from a bong, calculating how to conserve the weed I had left, smoking a measured amount and holding the hit to get it all, making some art while listening to public broadcasting on a borrowed radio, stepping onto the porch for a coffee and cigarette, and plotting how to find my next quarter ounce while I hoped the corner store had Ben & Jerry’s, the only thing I’d eat, bought without a word, then back into my box, creeping past roommates I didn’t care to see; that life was over. It led to pain and nothingness.

That’s how my sobriety, my getting clean started.

In all honesty, the process started months earlier. I knew I had a problem, mixing heavy marijuana use with bipolar disorder and the meds for that, and then sometimes trying inpatient psych hospitalizations in hopes that a break from my box of never-ending highness might snap me out of it. Mental health practitioners referred me to a chemical dependency recovery program but 2 tries with that only made me sad and desperate about giving up the smoke. The social workers there told me to think long and hard for a few months and then return if I wished.

I had to wait over the weekend to call that program again, to tell them I was done. In the meantime, I threw out my bong, paraphernalia, and empty bags that were stuck in odd places all over my room. And I went to various Anonymous meetings because I already had the schedules and locations.

But why was this Saturday, November 2, 2002, so remarkable that it swayed me from desires to dwell in a constant drug haze, and why did I wake up in a hospital bed?

The night before wasn’t about me coming down off some wild Halloween partying. I’d just been in my room, one day like the next, sucking up bong hit after bong hit. By Friday night, I was down to scraping resin off the bowl and realizing I was just as scraped out. Nothing felt like anything, tomorrow I’d have to go searching for weed, and the cycle would repeat. Darkness fell over me, and I self-harmed, not badly, then got myself to the ER. A male guard was assigned to watch me, me in nothing but a hospital gown, under a blanket, in a bed in a room alone with this male guard. He took the opportunity to sexually molest me, touching when nobody was looking, washing up…and I didn’t scream because the shock sent me into a disassociated state where I observed but had no means of communication.

For some reason, I wasn’t put on a psych hold, but instead placed upstairs for the night, on a medical floor.

The next morning, when I woke up and assessed, and comprehended that confining myself in a room, staying high as my primary focus, had run its course, I was quite aware that the sexual attack factored into that epiphany. I could go into lower depths, but this was enough. I knew that for myself, and planned to keep it to myself. Plus, I had shame and felt I wouldn’t be believed, written off as the crazy bipolar woman imagining things, delusional about the guard’s inappropriate touching.

Monday morning, I called my former case manager at the chemical dependency recovery program (CDRP), telling him I was ready now, asking if I could return, and he said, of course, we have space for you today. And that’s what I did.

Treatment was fine, a day program with groups, education, individual meetings, drug testing, and requirement to attend a certain number of Anonymous meetings or the alternative available there called LifeRing. Most of the staff were in long-term recovery, salt of the earth, approachable and honest. My days consisted of program attendance and 5 outside meetings in the Oakland/San Francisco area, not because 5 per day were required, but because I lived with roommates currently using and needed to be home only to sleep and shower. Those meetings really kept me glued together, that’s for sure. Even though I lost my desire to get high almost over that one night, I had to find connection to stay with my new mode in life.

About a week into my return to CDRP, on my walk over to the building, I was struck with a thought. What if that ER guard who molested me is doing that to other women, or to girls? What if he is right now touching a poor 13-year-old  –and I couldn’t bear it. I could not keep my secret if it put others at the same risk.

In the women’s group that very afternoon I revealed that I’d been sexually assaulted in the ER, and, with that, the social workers swiftly acted. They stayed with me while a police officer came to take my report. I had been able to get the guard’s name and the time he went on break, because he said it to other staff out loud, including the name of the bank where he was going to deposit his paycheck. Yes, it was very uncomfortable to recount details of what he did and why I didn’t tell other staff, but I wasn’t disregarded.

Two days later, detectives came to my house, sat at my kitchen table, and showed me photo lineups to identify the guard, but I really couldn’t. I hadn’t studied his face and there was the dissociation and all, so…

But a few weeks later, my therapist said she’d found out that, although police didn’t have a good case for charging the guy with assaulting me, he was on parole for previous sex crimes and at his home they found guns. They hauled him to jail for weapons possession.

The hospital had not done a background check.

I felt better because now he was not “guarding” vulnerable women in the ER, and he was in jail, and the hospital administrators who were neglecting to do background checks were reprimanded.

I went on along, maintaining sobriety, going to meetings, filling my life with things besides weed, weed, weed. And yet, I continued having psych problems and frequent hospitalizations, so much so, that I was put on conservatorship, faced with a choice of one year institutionalized or moving back to Virginia and in with my parents.

I chose moving to Virginia, of course, in with my dad, widowed 2 years previously, and his new wife, so it was a test for all of us. We got along fine. I did as I was asked, kept my space tidy and my life busy with meetings, a painting class, and a part-time job. Gradually I made friends at the meetings and formed a strong social network. As months passed, my parents helped me get an apartment close to their house. I’d hooked up with a new therapist and psychiatrist, which was all okay for a while, but then wasn’t. The therapist had…odd ways…but I didn’t home in on that for a long time, and the psychiatrist kept trying new meds and from one of those I acquired the autoimmune syndrome IgA vasculitis. Then the therapist said I wasn’t progressing, which the psychiatrist agreed about, so they referred me to the county mental health center. There, I was drugged to the gills, had monthly psych hospitalizations because my self-harm urges ramped up, and then more drug changes and additions and adverse effects and drugs for those. And one day, in 2019, the psychiatrist decided to stop several meds, no taper, because the psychiatrist at the hospital the week before noted that I seemed too sleepy.

That led to horrible withdrawal, which I knew nothing about until I googled “stopping quetiapine” and “stopping gabapentin…benztropine…desvenlafaxine…pramipexole” and then I was in an ambulance, then the ER, then an ICU room for 2 days. Since then, I’ve left psych treatment (I mean, why would I stay in treatment that’s not working and is mistreatment) and have also stopped taking the other 2 drugs I was on, lithium and naltrexone.

I’ve stayed off alcohol, marijuana, any other “illegal” drugs the whole time, this entire 20 years. But every now and again, I wonder, since I was told at the chemical dependency program, in early recovery, to avoid all mind-altering drugs, where do psych drugs fit in all that?

I wonder, because now that I’m long past the initial psych drug withdrawal, the really mean part that threw me into manias, psychotic thinking, and vivid nightmares, I’m much more level, peaceful, and sane than when I was on all those meds, taken as prescribed, mind you. I feel like my sobriety wasn’t complete until I cleared psychotropic drugs out too. That’s how it feels for me but doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone (so don’t stop taking your meds because you’re all worked up by this blog post).

Anyway, I mull that over from time to time. But I’ll still celebrate another year of sobriety. Happy 20 to me!