Real Talk: Addict

Transcript

So, I was listening to the playback of an audio I did a few nights ago and I don't always re-listen to my stuff, sometimes I'm pretty like, no, I know that was good, I don't feel the need to go back and double check that I need to edit stuff out, but sometimes I'll do something and then I'll be just on a tight schedule and I don't have time to just post it right then, so I'll throw it on the back burner and I'll come back to this. Like I'm totally going to remember everything I said and did, because two things, usually when I do this, I probably at least am a little bit high, and that's because for pain management for the last three years I have been taking capulets of THC, so marijuana. Some people don't really care when I say it, they're like, oh okay, whatever, sure, people use it for pain.

Other people don't get the difference when I say I am taking pain medication, and what it used to mean for me and what it means now. I will preface by saying I'm really lucky that my situation didn't become a statistic. I am blessed with amazing genetics in the sense of, well my physical body is falling apart 24-7, and has been literally since the day I was born.

Things like the addiction gene, and I do believe it is a gene, I do think that it's definitely something we can inherit from our family and our parents. It's something that can just be present in us with no correlation. I actually feel kind of, my heart breaks for those that have that situation, where they themselves find, they do tend to lean towards addiction, but nobody around them, nobody in their family, nobody they trust has that issue, or has had that issue.

I can't imagine how isolating that would be. In my case, I know for a fact that on my father's side of the family there is definitely the addiction gene. I'm Scottish, and drinking is not even something you think about, it is just a small aspect of social life.

You get together with friends, you drink, you have dinner with family, you drink, you celebrate something, you drink. For me, I grew up with my grandfather had a bar in his house, my father was a bartender before he went on to his major career, and still is the bartender at family functions. But I know for a fact my grandfather had to go through AA, because for him, at his worst, he became an abusive person, physically, and that does not help when he is a Navy officer, and a former Golden Club boxer.

That's a bad combination to have, and somebody who has an alcohol issue, and for them, succumbing to that particular craving doesn't make them the jovial person that say my uncle and my mom's side was, where I never knew he was drunk, I just thought he was really happy all the time. Which is why he was kind of my favorite uncle, but I digress. My grandfather though, and his father from, I knew my great grandfather, he was the one of my family to come over from Scotland.

He actually did the boat thing, and came to Ellis Island. I actually have seen his, because I do the Ancestry.com thing, I was actually able to see his signature when he came over, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever. And my great grandfather lived until I was almost 20, so I was able to see several generations of the men on my dad's side struggle with alcohol, and with all of them, when they gave into it, they were just bastards.

So I've always been really careful. I don't think I've ever been truly drunk. I have been slightly intoxicated, like tipsy.

Like ooh, okay, my face feels flushed, the room is taking a second to catch up, and I'm really more affectionate than I ordinarily am, which is saying a lot. Honestly, I didn't find out I was bisexual until I got drunk and I realized that I had one hell of a good time kissing the girls. At first, it was for all the wrong reasons that girls, particularly cis girls, do this.

It's, oh, the boys pay attention when you kiss the other girls, cool, I like the attention. But then I realized, oh no, wait, I really kind of like the girls, they're so different than playing with boys, they're softer, and they smell nicer, and they know right where to touch, because they've got all that stuff too. You know, women just get each other on a different level.

It's a weird dynamic, but I discovered that because I let myself get a little intoxicated one night. When I say I've never been drunk, I've never been to a place where I slur my words. I actually tend to get more verbose and more coherent sounding when I am intoxicated.

And I don't think I've ever been wobbly. I have dizziness issues 24-7 anyways, so I couldn't test it now just to see, oh hey, when I get drunk, do I have equilibrium issues? Because I always have equilibrium issues, literally.

I sometimes use a cane, I have used a walker, I keep a wheelchair for when I've got to do any activity that is going to make me walk more than a couple of blocks, or have to be on my feet for longer than 20 minutes. Because those things are not possible in my life without a wheelchair. Again I digress.

So for me, I've never been falling down, vomiting, drunk, never. I've never had a hangover. One time I thought I had a hangover, it turned out I was pregnant.

Literally the night I conceived my child was the last time I remember being slightly tipsy. Yes, there was lots of girl kissing that night. But my husband and I were out of town for a friend's wedding.

So we ended up in a hotel room, just the two of us going to bed that night. Granted at first I kind of had to put one toe on the floor, because the room did feel a little spinny. And my husband and I had sex.

And the next day I thought, oh we've got a raging hangover. But the thing was that I had been really sure to hydrate. I had drank that amount before.

The only thing different was that someone gave me rum for the first time. And this is why there's a long story about the rum in my life. But rum is my crazy lady drink apparently.

Like some women drink tequila and like get wild and loud and you're like, hmm, Joanie, you need to stay away from the tequila. That is not your drink. This one just makes me pregnant while I'm on birth control that I have been on forever that I took religiously.

That's the only time I've ever gotten pregnant in my life. Total accident at a friend's wedding after karaoke and rum, the first time I'd ever had rum. It's the only thing I had high ingested at all that day that was foreign to me that, you know, I'm like, I don't know what caused my birth control to fail, but it did.

I was that one. I'm always that 1%. If there is a 1% chance of something bad happening medically, that's me.

And my parents were not happy. I'd just been recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and we did not know what that was going to look like for me as a pregnant woman. So it was, yeah, definitely not planned.

But you know, the next day I totally thought, oh, I just, I must've actually somehow, maybe the rum was just not my drink. It was my crazy lady drink and I had a hangover. But something in my heart, I knew that day, it's like, no, I'm pregnant.

I just know it. I can feel it. And nobody would leave me because of course I couldn't get a test to prove it.

It took six weeks almost to finally, I was in the emergency room for a totally different reason. And they're like, well, we need to just, before we do this test, we need to, you know, just make sure you're not pregnant. Typical.

They do this every time you have any radiological test, they're going to check if you're pregnant, if you can be, obviously. So sure. No problem.

I had been nauseous on and off for six weeks. I had taken at least five at home tests, all negative. I had gone to my doctor and had them test and their doctors tested four weeks said nothing.

I should have been showing at that point, at least in tests. So I thought I wasn't. And you know, then they came back and went, well, we've got some news for you.

You can't really do that test right now because you're pregnant. My husband and I were just like, what? Because I had been saying for weeks, I know I'm pretty, I know I am.

And he thought it was crazy because occasionally I do have these bits of paranoia where there's no goddamn way I could be pregnant, but I was, or at least I think I am. This time though, it came back of, oh my God, no. And they did a transvaginal ultrasound there and was able to actually see what I referred to as stage one of babyhood, which is the bean.

My baby was a bean. All I could see was just this little tiny see-through bean when they showed me the screen. There were other stages.

There's the frog, the alien and the actual baby. Pretty sure there's a tadpole stage in there, but I think I missed that one. I am so far off topic and I apologize, but I will come back to the addiction.

There is a point here. But yeah, so I ended up pregnant and I loved my husband, you know, even though it was not necessarily safe for me because at that point I was almost 300 pounds and I was dealing with having to have injections all the time. I was being given a thousand milligrams of steroids for three to five days frequently.

I should not have gotten pregnant, but I did and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. My MS totally went into remission. It was honestly, I wish I could just like stay in a permanent state of pregnancy.

I love my kid, but I really don't want to be a mom again, but I would just love to like reside in pregnancy permanently if I could just do that, please. Which I know sounds crazy because during that time, I also was nauseous all the time, had horrific heartburn and I had kidney stones eight times and had to be induced at eight months because my pelvic bone did not separate and my body was not going to let me give birth traditionally without a lot of help. But to the point, that was the last time I ever recall being in any way, shape or form impaired by alcohol and I had always been told my whole life to stay away from drugs.

I was born, so one of the first kids, I was born in 1980, one of the first kids they used to say that you couldn't be born with asthma, you tended to develop it at a young age. Usually like the first few months, sometimes some doctors even said as far as two years, you can't technically have asthma. It just doesn't develop until that point.

Well, I was one of the first kids because of people smoking that we went, oh shit, no, you can be born with asthma and all of my earliest memories are in a children's hospital. What I can remember of being two and three years old, all of my memories are being in a usually terrifying hospital situation. So my doctors always told me, and asthma wasn't the worst of it, but there's, you know, obviously, my doctors have always said, you know, stay away from drugs because with your health, one bad batch will kill you.

So I was never into it. Then I got multiple sclerosis and I was in a car accident that should have killed me when I was 20. From that, I developed something called degenerative disc disease, which ran in my family, but usually genetically should not hit until your fifties or sixties.

My grandmother had it at age 30. That was rare. It was triggered in me at age 20 because of this accident.

For some reason, it just spurred it into me. I have had discs removed. I have had so many, so many things done to my spine.

But of course I was in that kind of medical care during the late nineties, 2000s, where, you know, the miracle drug was oxycontin or oxycodone and they were giving them out like candy. It got to the point where, and I still, I was trying to, I could not be on anything while I was pregnant and it was great and fine for me because as I said, my MS went totally into remission. I actually felt better pregnant than I did otherwise.

So I didn't mind not having any pain management then. I was, the worst thing I took was like Tylenol and after she was born, I did have postpartum depression and I went through a lot and you know, the pain did come back. And then there was additional pain because I had to have an unplanned C-section.

I had to deal with the fact my pelvic bone never separated when I was pregnant and there was so much going on and they just started piling, piling these opioids on me. Like it got to the point where I remember my kid had to be put into preschool even though I was disabled, a stay at home mom, really physically, there was no reason why I couldn't have been caring for my child if I'd been awake to do so. Just before pot became legal in the state of Washington, I was on, I want to say 250 micrograms of fentanyl via patch.

I was chasing that with either Dilaudid, Vicodin or Oxy depending on whichever thing I was not immune to at that time because I became very quickly, my body just doesn't want to absorb it anymore. Happens to most people. Most people, this is where addiction happens.

This is, wait, I'm not getting the relief so I need to take more to achieve the relief. And they take more and more and then that, whatever they're using doesn't work so they go to something harder. In my case it was, this shit doesn't work, can I try something else? And it never really occurred to me to take more than I was prescribed.

I think maybe it's my whole life having been taken care of by doctors. Maybe I just, no, that's not true. I just think I never increase, no, no, I take more Tylenol than I really should.

Even though the doctor's like, you really shouldn't take that much, look, I know it cures my headache and I know what's too dangerous. I'm not taking anything too dangerous and three helps my headache. I am sorry to tell you that doc.

I'm going to take three Tylenol. So, I'm sorry, it's a personal issue I recently had because a nurse was giving me shit about how much extra strength Tylenol I took for headaches in the ER and I'm like, this is not my problem, let it go away. But when it came to narcotics, for me it was just like, eh, it's not working, okay, let's move on.

To pain doctors that meant, let's move on to a different narcotic. What I was saying is, let's try something different. Physical therapy never worked.

Massage therapy was okay, but I honestly, I think I did that more just because the massage is nice rather than it was really helping me. And finally, we became legal medicinally if you could get your doctor to okay it. My parents have been stoners my whole life.

I didn't know it until I was way older. And for my father, that's how he channels his addiction issues. My grandmother once asked my mother, how can you stand letting him need to go and get high? And my mother said, well, you lived with a man that chose alcohol.

Your son is exactly the same way as your husband. On pot, however, he is more relaxed. He is affectionate.

He is funny. He is happy and gregarious. He is careful never to let it affect his business.

In fact, he just is better all the way around on it. So if he needs that to, I don't know, maybe not think about all the things he did in Vietnam, I'm going to let him do that. And it's funny.

I only ever saw my father truly drunk once, and it is one of the scariest memories I will ever have of him. Not because he was mean, not because he was loud, which he was. My mother tried to put my sister and I to bed so we didn't see it, but I could hear them.

And to this day, here I am at 40, my father is still alive, he is in his mid-60s, that's the only ever time.