the detox diaries

(PART ONE)

Here I am again, lying on a hospital bed, wondering how many people have pissed themselves in it and how many have died on the plastic-covered mattress. 

Cannulae in both hands, and I fucking hate it. For a heroin user, I still have this incomprehensible discomfort around needles, although I know they bring good things. No pain no gain, you know.

Machines beep and moans echo in my bay. Or sometimes, worse: when the other patients receive visitors. I don’t want visitors. Not that I’d have anyone coming to visit anyway, or that I’d be allowed. But hearing them laugh and bring the patient gifts and showering them with platitudes and affection, that’s a fucking ordeal. Almost as bad as the Jesus-freak in the bed next to mine, who keeps on trying to lend me her Bible and screams for morphine at night.

I find it fucking weird that the detox ward is mixed with a regular ward when we don’t have the same privileges. They can go for a smoke whenever they want, the bastards. I have to wait for a nurse to take me and the cohort of other addicts on five-minutes supervised cigarette breaks, with a maximum of four a day. Three post-meal smokes, and an extra one in the morning if we go out to “exercise” – that is, pretend to cycle on the stationary bike in the outdoor gym for a couple minutes and spend the rest of that time on a bench chain-smoking until it’s time to go back up. But I’ve found the secret to maximising my nicotine intake. I’ve made myself sick that way actually, and it was grand. Combined a nicotine patch to a few squirts of nicotine spray and as many cigarettes I can smoke, all in a short amount of time. I almost fainted, my world was spinning, I puked and lied in the foetal position in my bed, feeling the blood drain from my face. Too weak to move, overpowered by the substance.

That’s what I’m always looking for.

It’s 6:30am and I just got woken up by the nurses doing their morning rounds and checking my vitals. When they take my blood pressure, I can feel the needle of the cannula digging into my swelling vein. I wish I could go back to sleep, but that’s a foreign concept when detoxing. Plus I have been having extremely vivid, disturbing dreams, since I can’t even have my usual narcotics regimen, but the nurses can’t give me benzos to knock me out. However, they promised that I’d be getting some Zopiclone once my withdrawals are in full swing.

This is the last time I put myself through this, I keep telling myself. Just like I had told myself last time, too.

The elderly woman in the bed opposite mine is whimpering in agony. The zealot next to me is in a lot of pain too, by the sounds of it; she can’t get up to go to the toilet since she has several broken vertebrae, so every so often, the smell of shit wafts around the bay, a nurse comes and changes her and then sprays some odour-neutraliser to try to cover it. It doesn’t work – it just makes the air smell of sweet, chemically-loaded diarrhoea. I cover the bottom half of my face with the sheet and try not to gag.

The worst is yet to come. I know this. I’m still in the early days of detox. The alkies look like ghosts, but I’m still somewhat mobile, albeit feeling raw and sweaty. My withdrawals have not fully kicked in yet. I got a visit from the medical team on my first day to discuss my script reduction plan, so I’ll still only feel slightly uncomfortable for the next couple days before the weaning comes to an end and I am left with nothing. 

The nurses open the curtains to let the morning light in, and they also pull back the ones around my bed, so now I have a full view of the other patients around me. Jesus fucking Christ.

“Hello?”

That’s coming from my right – it’s the zealot. She can’t sit up, so she calls out from her bed to get my attention. I turn the volume up on my little TV screen. I’ve already spoken to her yesterday. When she learned why I was here, she immediately asked if I had been influenced to start using. As if I hadn’t been able to make my own decisions, all by myself. She said I seemed like a clever girl, but she said it in a tone that fucking irked me. Like I was some poor, pretty little thing who got caught up with the wrong crowd, like I was too good to ever become a silly little addict. That’s when she tried to force her Bible on me. 

“Hello? Can you help me?”

I’m not your carer, leave me alone. Pray to your God for help, don’t put that load on me. I turn the volume up to maximum and although it’s frying my eardrums, at least I can barely hear her anymore.

They bring breakfast just before 8am. I cannot get used to that schedule. I haven’t eaten meals at regular hours in what feels like years, never mind having food in the morning altogether. So I drink my lukewarm instant coffee and start pre-rolling my cigarettes for our next venture outside. If we’re lucky, the nurse will take us around the back of the hospital, where you can feel the wind unfurling across the river and where you can raise middle fingers to the Parliament on the other bank, hoping that some fascist MPs are looking in your direction. 

I don’t speak to anyone on the smoke break. The alkies don’t have the strength to string a sentence together, and the only other heroin user is halfway through his detox so he can barely hold his fag between his lips.

We are led back up to our beds, since there is no communal space for us, where we will wait until the doctors do their rounds. I think it’s the dentist today, actually. Or the psychotherapist. I can’t remember. Either way, there’s no privacy in this ward, so it’s unlikely I’ll be pouring my heart out to a stranger when only a cubicle curtain is separating me from other patients. So there’s nothing to do but wait and kill time and hate it. Not so dissimilar from waiting for a dealer who’s never “five minutes away”, or waiting for your drugs in the special queue at the pharmacy, aka my other, socially-accepted, legal dealer. 

Two hours later and my mouth has been inspected, cavities accounted for, and weak, brittle enamel noted. Tell me something I don’t fucking know. I’m very aware of what years of smoking crack did to my teeth, but I want to know, is there salvation? Can it be fixed? Or have I eroded my teeth to fuck, in the same way that I have my insides?

The lunch bell goes off, and everyone in my bay gets their food except me. That really upsets me. Why am I always the one who gets forgotten? The afterthought?

I think that’s why he broke up with me before I was admitted into hospital. I’m just that easily forgotten about. He couldn’t handle my shit, and to be honest, neither could I.

Half an hour passes and still no food. I’m getting agitated now. Everyone’s done eating and the detox crew is getting ready for the smoke break, I can hear them shuffling about in the corridor. If I miss the smoke break, I’ll make a goddamn scene until someone takes me down. So I ring the buzzer next to my bed, over and over and over and eventually a nurse comes. She’s sweet, and I feel bad shouting and crying at her, hoping she doesn’t take it personally. I make the cigarette chaperone promise that he’d wait for me to finish my lunch before taking us downstairs. Eventually, my microwaved curry comes and I force myself to eat at least a bit of rice before rushing out to meet the others waiting outside my bay. Everyone looks weak and pale, in a different way than the other, regular patients in the ward. Like they know they’re here and feel like this because of their own fault. This is our self-inflicted punishment. We’re herded downstairs, head-counted, paired up, infantilised. We smoke in silence. We get brought back upstairs for our afternoon group session.

Today’s theme is Values, although this is to be interpreted as a loose concept: in typical addict fashion, the discussion will be all over the place. But this is all we have, and there’s fuckall else to do, so I might as well go. We sit in a cold, empty room, with a few chairs gathered in a small circle. The Addiction Care Unit staff leading the group doesn’t have much of a clue on how to run the session – think of a soporific NA meeting for five year-olds. Cue cards with rhetorical nonsense, trying to tap into deeply buried emotions. Words written and misspelled on the whiteboard: apparently, there are no wrong answers, so terms like happiness and family and self-love make it onto there. Do people not know what a fucking value is? Honesty? Loyalty? Courage? Like with any recovery groups I’ve ever attended, I get annoyed with the completely off-topic digressions. A rambling alcoholic is going off on a tangent, totally irrelevant to what we were trying to talk about, and the staff is just letting him go on, as if the rest of us don’t have anything to share. The session finishes early, and we are taken back to our respective bays, where the normie patients are chatting away with their visiting relatives. I can hear at least five different conversations, even with earplugs shoved in my ears as deeply as I can.

I cannot listen to the Jesus-praising chats going on next to me. “Hospitality from women is a big part of the Lord’s message. I had ovarian cancer and I put my faith in Jesus. That faith is enough to heal you – He can restore your body. He made you, amen”, one of the nurses professes. Fuck me.

Sometimes, I get envious of people with blind faith. I wish there were something greater than myself who could save me from me. But I’m my biggest enemy, and any godly entity can suck it. I cannot be rescued. I can always do worse.