Christopher's were meant to fly.

How wonderful is it that I can be happy without having to use drugs or drink alcohol to achieve it? I mean, how much more of a miracle could I ever ask for, to be able to go to bed grateful, and rise just as overwhelmed with gratitude, if not more? I used to believe I couldn't experience anything without being high. I would use abusing drugs as my excuse to feel more passion; the passion could be negative, could be positive, it was just more, intense, I would tell myself. 

I couldn't ever imagine or picture myself being able to feel the things I felt when I was high, while sober. I was not only addicted to the narcotics, but to the emotions that came with them, both high and low. I actually believed I enjoyed getting drunk and listening to bleak songs on my iPod, sniveling to myself until I passed out. Or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, I didn't think there was any fun to be had listening to joyous music without being under the influence. I thought, who on earth could have as good a time as the people popping bottles and getting wasted at the club? There's no way, as a sober individual, I can reach those heights!

It’s astonishing how much of an error I made with that assumption. While I was correct in stating it’s impossible to reach those levels, I am constantly baffled, every single day, at how much HIGHER of heights I have rocketed to living without drugs and alcohol. 

I took a shower this morning, and I shaved my face. I even brushed my teeth. And as the rivulets of condensation trickled down the mirror, slowly clearing the way for my reflection to come through, drop by drop, I had to smile, because for the first time in fourteen years, I knew the face looking back at me! And I had to continue smiling, because those seemingly insignificant chores, like bathing, and grooming, used to be monumental tasks that, for more than a decade, were a struggle for me to do. Days could pass without me cleaning my person. But today, and every day, I get myself together to face the world.

I had a one track mind, and that one track was for booze and drugs. My depression, coupled with addiction, made it grueling to even speak to people. I had to be high to go outside the house. I had to be drunk to answer the phone, or find the energy to dress myself. But not anymore.

I am so high on life, it’s crazy. 

Christopher's were meant to fly.

Drugs & Me: (Pt 4): Powerless...

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I was told by a doctor the next day that I had suffered alcohol poisoning, and I was lucky that it had not been fatal. My blood alcohol content had been 0.41; a 0.40 is typically when people slip into comas or, as the doctor had said, death.

                That night I went to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. It wasn’t my first time attending AA, but it was the first time I had entered the rooms with the realization that I might be, probably was, alcoholic. It’s funny, I’m able to remember that meeting now, even after five years and hundreds of subsequent meetings. I was slightly hungover, and the topic was something pertaining to “Life on Life’s Terms.” When it was my turn to share, I spouted off some nonsensical meanderings about my past trials & tribulations, but nothing really pertaining to the topic at hand. I wanted to rattle off all the bad shit that had happened to me. But I believe that’s a common happenstance among most newcomers: a kind of quasi- competition in the Top 10 Charts of Personal Suffering and Misery; who has the worst horror story involving drugs or alcohol; everyone trying to subtly one-up the last man’s sorrow. Well, that was me.

                It was when I got a sponsor and began working the 12 steps that I understood there were appropriate times to share my experience, and other times that were not so appropriate.

                I procured eight months of continuous abstinence from both drugs and alcohol, and it was a glorious eight months. I went to AA Conferences, I was the secretary for my home group, and I had a social life with sober people. Things at home were just as grand, too. I had slowly begun to regain the trust of my family. I actually had money in my pockets and in the bank. Though I was still living at my mom’s, she helped me to save for when I moved out again.

                I was in the middle of Step 4 when my balanced program began to falter. The fourth step is a searching and fearless, personal moral inventory. In layman’s terms, what that looks like is a person creates a list of people, institutions and principles they feel have wronged them, and record how and why they’re pissed off at said person or place, then those beliefs get flipped inside out, and put under a microscope and analyzed with a sponsor, to see where YOU were wrong in each of those situations. It’s not an especially jovial task, and it’s even more tedious to examine these instances and find out all the faults you have. Add to this my problem finishing things I start, and halfway through, I lost my steam. When it came to me sitting down and actually writing the damned thing, suddenly everything else needed taken care of first: the kitchen needed cleaned, the laundry needed done, the dogs needed bathed, etc. and so on.

                While I busied myself not busying myself working on my inventory, I was asked to be the chairperson for my home group meeting the next month. Before I could really think about it, I exclaimed, Yes! I’d chair it!

                I had the entire month to stew in my nerves over chairing that meeting. All my internal fears over my low self-esteem, my sense of inadequacy, came rushing back to me in torrents.

                The day I was to chair my first meeting, I was so pent up with dread I couldn’t stand it, and finally I asked a coworker if he had anything to help me. He went on a lunchbreak and brought me back two extra-strength Vicodin. So that night, right before I was to act as chairperson for not just any AA meeting, but my home group AA meeting, I threw eight months of sobriety down the proverbial tubes, and ate both of the Vicodin. Most people would say that was when my relapse happened, but in all actuality, my relapse started some time before the physical moment I took those pills. My program slipped when I stalled finishing my fourth step, and at the moment I was asked to lead the meeting a month prior, I had 30 days to lay the bricks for relapse.

                I took Vicodin four times that month, each time being moments before I sat at the head table of Southside Club to chair my home group Big Book study. When my month of chairing was over, however, I continued buying painkillers. At the house, I was even pleased to find several bottles of Vicodin in drawers and medicine cabinets.

                For a couple months, I had the opiate use under control. But because at that point I still had a conscience, I eventually came clean about it all. I started back at Step One, with a different sponsor this go round, and went to a private, inpatient treatment facility for a few weeks. I had some success staying clean for a short while, but the call from opioids was a persistent one that I could not keep ignoring.

                Though I tried to avoid those cravings, I succumbed, and for quite some time, I secretly consumed hundreds and hundreds of painkillers a month. There I was, back at square one, hiding my usage behind a metaphorical smokescreen. I even kept a faux sober date to make the act all the more convincing.

                It came tumbling down, the smokescreen evaporating, on a Superbowl Sunday. For breakfast that morning before church, I had downed a handful of Klonopin, after church for lunch I enjoyed a large handful of Vicodin. I told my mom I was going to a meeting, and she asked me if I’d stop at the market to pick up items for the game that night. I replied that I would of course do that for her. Instead of going to a meeting, though, I went to a buddy’s condo, where I smoked lots and lots of marijuana.

                When I arrived back at home, my mom gave me an odd look and asked where the cookie cake and other snacks were. I remember feeling slightly confused at the question; cookie cake? What the hell was she talking about? Then it came rushing back to me: the food for the Superbowl! I was told to pick some up, but all the benzos had made me forget 100-percent about going to the store. I made to spat out some quick excuse to try and assuage the words that I just knew were going to come from my mother, but I was not fast enough. My thoughts were panicky and felt caught in the muck & mire of my Klonopin-sloshed brain. Four words crept out of my mom’s mouth:

                “You’re high, aren’t you?” All I could do was nod in agreement.

                She had told me myriad times that if I messed up again, after the many, many times she had given me second chances, that if I came home again under the influence, I would have to leave. I didn’t even wait for her to say as much. I told her I would leave the next day.

*****

For a short time I lived with my father. He and I have a history that could fill encyclopedia’s A-Z, with special influence on volumes “B” (for betrayal), “G” (for grudge), and back to “A” (for asshole). But we looked past our past. He had his own personal demons, and I mine, and we didn’t allow them to clash. I didn’t stay with him long, and soon moved in with a friend from high school, and her boyfriend.

                Because I had no one to hide my drug usage from (in fact, my roommates, Janis & Larry, were quite the burnouts themselves), my addiction flourished under the watchful eyes of no one but myself. I didn’t have to sneak around or hide anything from anybody, and if my mom asked how I was doing, I would lie and say I was just peachy.

                The truth, however, was far grimmer. A depression more bleak and cancerous than I had ever dealt with before, swept over, and obliterated me. There is no exaggeration when I say I would cry myself to sleep every single night. I made a nightly ritual of getting drunk and putting on headphones to listen to a playlist on my iPod I had titled, “The Sads,” (consisting mostly of Cat Power songs (thanks Monte, ha)). Lyrics about broken hearts, drugs and sadness shot through the earbuds and echoed around my head while I would convulse in bed from weeping so deeply. I would piss in empty booze bottles because I didn’t want to leave my bedroom. I would continue to go out with Janis and Larry every so often, so they wouldn’t think anything was wrong, but I’d go to the bathrooms of the bars we frequented, and just break down. I would think of my family, of my mom mostly, I would think of past relationships. I’d think of everything I lost.

                But then an old coworker from a previous job opened up a whole new world to me, and I was sorely, sorely mistaken if I believed I had lost everything already, because I was about to learn what it truly meant, to lose it all...

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Drugs & Me: (Pt 3): My Own, Personal Friday the 13th...

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I grew out of crystal meth like a toddler grows out of his Oshkosh. “Uppers” were substances I found I could walk away from semi-easily. I didn’t like the comedown, the strabismus that seemed to plague me each time (I’d nearly always have to cover, or keep one eye closed whenever I would try to read anything while on tina), and I plainly grew tired of it.

                I went back to getting stoned off weed and drinking alcohol every night. At 22, I had still not had major run-ins with the law, or participated in criminal activities besides illicit drug use, but what was about to happen to me, set me up for the introduction to the love of my life: opioids. 
                I had finally moved out of my mom’s house into an apartment with a roommate named Vaughn. It was a fantastic setup, and I enjoyed being on my own. Vaughn worked as a bartender at a very, very classy joint, making more in one night shift than I would make in an entire week at my regular, full time retail job. We lived behind the Greene, going to happy hours often, and because Vaughn made so much more than me, he typically footed the bill.
                I had a routine schedule for how I drank. I worked first shift, and when I would come home to the apartment, and if Vaughn & I had no happy hour plans, I timed how much I drank, or I would make sure I had consumed X amount of beer in X amount of time, to ensure I had the proper buzz I wanted to feel. Usually this was one beer every 15 minutes for the first 60 minutes, and then two beers every 15 minutes for the next hour. By doing this, I steered clear of any hangovers, but maintained just the right level of inebriation. My taste was not discriminatory, and I savored quantity over quality: Milwaukee’s Best was my beer of choice; cheap and effective. After I finished with the beer every night, I’d retire to my bedroom and smoke pot until I passed out. I did this every single week night, and most certainly was always alone.
                Weekends, that ritual went out the window, and normally I’d be with friends. And on Thursday, March 12, 2009, my friend Lillian & I went out drinking at a local bar in Kettering called the Shroyer Inn. I gravitated towards low-key bars instead of the fancy lights and throbbing dance music of the clubs I went to as a teenager. I traded Top 40 Pop played by a DJ, for Guns & Ruses from a jukebox; places where moonshiners lurked in the shadows, and your friends were liquor bottles on the shelves behind the bar. 
                My drink was Long Island Iced Tea, and the Shroyer Inn made them strong. I was well on my way to double digits when I came up with the brilliant idea to buy some heroin. The twisted thinking I had told me, Hey! It’s not meth, so it’s cool!
                Lillian knew somebody, who knew somebody, who knew someone else, and I had syringes from my meth days, and a short while later, I was back at the apartment, alone in my bedroom, the syringe full of dope in my palm.
                I was incredibly, incredibly drunk, and I am unaware how I was even able to take the shot, and in fact it would have been so much better if I would have missed, or flat passed out first. But I didn’t miss, and while I did go unconscious, it was not because of the Long Islands.
                When I next opened my eyes, it was morning, and I could not move my body. My heart beat an allegro in my ears, and while I was thoroughly confused, I knew something was definitely wrong. I could barely breathe. It was labored, and it felt like trying to suck in oxygen from a tiny straw. And the only way I can describe how my body felt, was that it felt like the circulation was cut off everywhere. Imagine laying on your arm and it “falls asleep,” and you have to shake it to get the blood flowing again. Now apply that to every appendage, down to the tips of your phalanges, except when I tried to “wake” my body up, it was not working.
                Vaughn came into my room. He had heard my strained breathing and was concerned. I’ll never forget the look on his face; he was in shock because I was laying there in a mangled mess of limbs, contorted into a pile that human beings should now be contorted into. 
                He came over and helped me untangle my body, but I still had yet to gather the strength to lift my arms or legs on my own. Vaughn asked me what happened, but all I could muster between gasps of air was that I desperately needed water, and when he brought a red Solo cup to my lips, I almost couldn’t drink it. I saw his eyes look to the ground beside the bed, and then he asked me, “What drugs did you do last night?”
                I traced his line of sight, and saw what he had seen, what made him ask that question of me, and that cloudy confusion parted to let in a brief moment of clarity. It came rushing back to me as I looked at the syringe on the floor, a touch of blood at the base of the point. I had shot up heroin.
                I was taken by ambulance to the hospital on Friday, March 13. I remember telling the nurse when I first arrived that I needed to get well in a couple days, that I had to work on Sunday and I could not miss. Her answer was simple enough, and I quote her verbatim. Her words are ingrained in my memory: “You are very sick, Christopher. You are going to be here awhile.”
                I stayed in the hospital until I was discharged on April 10. I had never done heroin before, and because I was opiate naive, when I shot the dope, with all that alcohol in my system, it caused me to pass out. I had fallen onto my bed, with one of my legs tucked up and bent underneath my body. This cut off blood flow, causing my muscles to break down and release toxins into my blood stream. These toxins were too much for my kidneys, and they had shut down. The official diagnosis was Acute renal failure due to rhabdomyolysis.
                I was put through medical tests every single day. I was so swollen that I could barely even bend my arm to feed myself; my mother or a nurse often had to spoon-feed me like an infant. I felt like a sausage casing injected with too much meat. I was put on a liquid restriction, and only allowed a very small amount of water to drink per day. I don’t know if I can accurately convey how wretched it is to be thirsty, and denied anything to quench that impregnable thirst. My dreams were filled with images of waterfalls and swimming pools.

                And the dialysis was the worst of it. As silly as it may seem, all I knew of dialysis was that the character Shelby from Steel Magnolias was put on it, and her arms looked like hell. My catheter was not put in my arm, however, but ran directly into my heart. Three times per week, for four hours per session, my blood was siphoned out of me like a gas tank, and filtered through a machine to be cleansed, then pumped back into my chest. It was a nightmare.

                When I left the hospital, and my kidneys had—thank God—started back up again, I had to return multiple times a week to participate in physical therapy, to basically learn how to walk again. The foot I had passed out and was laying on had severe nerve damage.
                I was on so many medications, it looked like I was eating a handful of PEZ each morning, afternoon and night. I had my first taste of narcotic painkillers those few months, as I was prescribed 120 Percocet per month.
                When I was taken off the Percocet, I reverted back to drinking alcohol, but this time around, I did it in secret. I had moved back home with my family after my stint in the hospital, and even though my kidneys had restarted and I was off dialysis, I knew it was stupid to put another drop of booze in my system. The key idea here is that I knew it was insane to drink again. I had nearly died, had to file bankruptcy due to $188,000 in medical bills, and I was now drinking alone, and in clandestine. I had every reason and then some NOT to drink, but knowledge alone will not keep me sober.
                I drank at work, gulping wine from a thermos starting after my lunch hour, and chewing dozens of pieces of gum to cover up the smell. I drank at home alone in my bedroom. And one time, when my sister & I went to the movie theater to see The Lovely Bones, I had been drinking during the day as was usual, but then kept sneaking off “to the bathroom,” instead going to the bar to order double shots of vodka. I remember thinking, I don’t know who had the bright idea to put a bar in a movie theater, but praise Jesus they did!
                At that point I blacked out, and the events that followed are snapshots of what I can recall. I was belligerent in the theater; I scared my sister out of her wits. She didn’t know what was wrong with me, and after calling 911, I was carried kicking & screaming out of the theater to a waiting ambulance. In the ER I regained partial coherence. Surrounding me on all sides were doctors and nurses. The bright examination light above me shone like a beacon and stung my eyes. I had to squint to make out my mother standing beside me as well.
                Streams of salty tears ran down her cheeks from the islands of her eyes, and I thought of the song “Islands in the Stream.” She mouthed words I could not hear; the wetness on her face spoke enough.
                I shouted over and over that they should just “let me die,” that I “didn’t want to live!” My mom muttered more silent words. My hearing was closed off to all but my own sobs.
                And then... I vomited everywhere...


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