“First off,” the counselor began, her lips pursed in disdain, “it’s important you understand that I don’t have a nickel in the dime” — an addiction therapist’s way of saying this was my fight, not hers.
It was my first day at the Peachford rehab clinic for addiction to the prescription painkiller tramadol. I wound up spending 72 hours detoxing in a sparse room where everything but a Bible was bolted to the floor. The blinds were drawn tight against the sun — which, along with just about everything else, inexplicably offended me to the point of tears.
Every nerve ending in my body felt electrified. When I broke the clinic rules by trying to shave my legs on a Monday instead of a Tuesday, I was treated like a criminal, so irresponsible I couldn’t be trusted alone with shoestrings or sharp objects.
In truth, I had been acting foolishly. Seven years after successfully undergoing two liver transplants and bowel surgery for ulcerative colitis, I found myself furtively buying more than 400 pills a month online. Soon, I was pilfering my dog’s pain medicine. None of my friends and family knew of my addiction.
The shame and guilt, coupled with the fear of having to withstand the pain of withdrawal, sapped what little resolve I had left to reach out for help. It took two years before I realized I was out of step with real time, in debt and in danger of damaging the organs that had been graciously given to me.
After I admitted the reason for the constant stream of deliveries to our house, my fiancé accompanied me, resigned and repentant, to rehab. I knew it was my fight.
It’s also a fight millions of Americans are waging. According to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the number of people seeking care for abuse of prescription painkillers rose 400 percent from 1998 to 2008.
Fortunately it’s a fight I didn’t have to carry on alone. For three days last summer I withstood residential care, followed by a month of intensive outpatient care. I remain committed to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, all matter of self-help classes, antidepressants and the anti-opioid-abuse drug Suboxone.
And then there was my beloved father.
Imagine Billy Dee Williams in his Colt 45 days and you’ll get a clear picture of him. I remember all the neighborhood mothers desperate to laugh loudest at his Al Green impersonations while they waited for our school bus to turn the corner.
I’ve always admired him. But I hoped I’d never become an addict like him — ruining my mother’s dinner parties, passing out on the lawn drunk while mumbling apologies under the glare of our guests’ curiosity. I recall him being carted off to rehab for the umpteenth time; I was unable to appreciate how elusive sobriety could be. Where was the father who walked all the neighborhood kids to the convenience store to buy candy cigarettes?
Now, as an adult addict, I know how difficult it was for him to right himself even as my sisters and I begged him to stop drinking, yelling our pleas into the back of his ambulance. It was during our phone calls when I was in rehab that my father taught me that recovery “is a process, not an event.” From a sober addict to a fledgling one, he taught me how the prospect of death gave him the tools to face life’s complexities.
While he’s usually reticent, he continued to offer his support in fits of candor, detailing his 30-, 60- and 90-day stints in rehab, and how vital it was for me to set healthy boundaries and face my cravings and triggers — sans pills.
Of course, these weren’t typical father-daughter talks. But they were vital to my eventual recovery. Never would I have imagined that my father — who had taught me how to swing a golf club and bought me my first pair of ruby earrings — would once again face his own addiction in order to help his daughter, his firstborn, overcome hers.
