WEB PAGE SHUFFLE WHEN SHUT DONW DRIVER
It’s difficult to live here for long without hearing someone’s sad story: the Lyft driver who loved cocaine and still does, but from a distance now the anesthesiologist who studied at Johns Hopkins and shot up fentanyl before it was popular.įor the next few months, I moved between recovery and relapse, cycling through the Twelve Steps, then going off in search of drugs.
There are more treatment centers than public elementary schools. South Florida-the densely populated area comprising Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade counties-has four hundred and seventy-eight licensed facilities for drug treatment. The rest of us-those without jobs, school, or families calling us home-moved into sober homes in South Florida. I made a few friends there, but we soon dispersed, some to Baltimore, others to New Jersey, one to wake up in the morning to find that his girlfriend had died beside him in the night, high on heroin, having aspirated her vomit. When it was time to leave, I had become so comfortable that I walked the grounds barefoot, making laps around the Serenity Trail, feeding apples to the horses by the stables where we met for equine therapy, on Wednesdays. We had access to dietitians and personal trainers, yoga sessions and intravenous vitamin therapy pharmacogenetic testing determined which medications worked best with our DNA. I promised anyone who met me that I would die, simply die, of withdrawal when, on day twenty-three, I had a seizure, I thought, Yes, I am really dying, but then I lived. I was withdrawing from heroin and benzodiazepines at the time, and mornings were the worst: I woke in the dark at 6 A.M., the pain of withdrawal not yet mediated by the day’s first dose of Suboxone or Librium. River Oaks was on a gated campus, surrounded by a small forest with trails running through it. Now I was on my way to River Oaks, an addiction-treatment center, where I would spend the next forty-five days. I was twenty-four, and for the past eight years I had been shooting up heroin, cocaine, and all manner of pills: Dilaudid, Opana, Ox圜ontin, Desoxyn, Ritalin.
In February, 2017, I stepped off a plane in Tampa, drunk and dope-sick. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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