It was a little corner wing of a hospital where I stayed in my last and final detox. The walls painted in a creamy peach brown mix. Clean, sanitized, and locked away from the rest of the hospital.
Safe from the world and safe from ourselves … for at least a few moments in time.
The windows were screwed shut and all we could do was to look down at the world. Watching as the people below rushed back and forth to the heres and theres of their lives, while we each went through our own individual hellish nightmares of the detox process.
After twelve years of constant abuse, this would be was my last and final trip into the train wreck of kicking heroin and one of the more painful ones. The methadone they provided to curb the withdrawal symptoms just could not match the appetite and tolerance my body had developed for its own fix of medicine.
Heroin.
I stayed in the hospital bed for the first few days, dragging myself to the bathroom as each dose of methadone wore off, convulsing and dry heaving draped over the toilet bowl. Shots of anti-nausea medicine in my ass helped to an extent, but for the most part I was just sick.
I felt as if I was dying … the old part of me anyway.
Half awake dreams filled with sweat, blended into the cold shivers of the night. With the passing of each new day I felt a little bit more alive, even a bit more human. Finally after the worst of the withdrawal symptoms had passed, I got out of my bed, dressed in a hospital gown and I made my way into the community room.
These were my first steps into a new life I had yet to understand I was living. I attended a few “group” therapy sessions, met some of the other patients in the detox and felt fully and completely for the first time in a very long time, the grim reality of what my life had become … again.
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