(PART TWO)
I barely slept last night. Restless legs, body aches, endless sweating, anxiety flutters – you name it. The nurses could only give me a Promethazine because the doctor hasn’t started to prescribe Zopiclone yet. I’m not in a bad enough state. What’s a girl got to do to be sedated in this joint?
Just like every day since I’ve been here, I get woken up around 6am so that the nurses can do my obs. I feel like shit. I want to leave. Get me the fuck out of this mental asylum. Bed 3 is sobbing and howling “no, no, no, NO”, louder and louder; she yells that she wants to die, she begs for someone to kill her.
There’s too much pain and suffering around me. I can barely feel sorry for myself.
Another script reduction today, the final thread holding me back. Nothing from tomorrow. Cold turkey. I want to scream, I want to be alone, I want him to call me and say he cares, although I haven’t heard from him in days, I want him to say that he’ll be there when I come out of this hell-hole. I know he won’t. It’s just another delusion I want to hold on to. I just so desperately need love since I don’t have any for myself.
Two newcomers arrived, one of them, Jo, has been allocated Bed 6, on my left, since the woman who got her stomach removed has been transferred elsewhere. I saw her when I got wheeled off for my chest X-rays, and she looked like death. Kind of like my grandma in her final moments, but I can’t remember much of that, considering I spent most of that time getting smacked up in the toilets. Anyway, that’s another story.
The other newbie is this guy Greg, who seems alright but he can’t really talk because he’s had several strokes, by the looks of it. He’s shipped off to one of the men’s bays, and I am now left with the Bible-thumper on my right, and Jo on the other side. She most definitely necked a bottle of vodka or two before coming here. She talks to herself, relentlessly, all the words jumbled together into one endless, incomprehensible sentence. She should be in a psych ward, not in detox.
I refuse breakfast and I’m told I am not allowed to go smoke if I don’t eat. I’m just not hungry. I have no willpower today, I just want to waste away. So I just lie in my bed and unwillingly listen to Jo’s drunken ramblings, which makes me want to either shoot her or myself.
The psychotherapist does the rounds this morning. Jo monopolises his time, going on about how she skipped the detox waiting list by threatening her key-worker to call King Charles if they didn’t find a bed for her. By the time she’s done, I am left with a five minute check-in before his round finishes. He asks how I’m feeling (shitty), how I find detox so far (shitty) and gives me a sheet of paper with (shitty) little relaxation exercises that are supposed to ease my anxiety and my existential dread while soothing his conscience that he did the bare minimum.
I feel adrift, disconnected, isolated. No one can do this for me, I am all by myself and I need to do it alone. Even if I don’t want to. I carry this grief, deep in my soul, this sense of profound injustice yet deserved comeuppance. I didn’t ask for this, yet I did it to myself. I am mad at my teenage self, who was just craving peace and quiet after a shitshow of a childhood, and who happened to have found it in Class A narcotics. Yet another traumatised child who became a junkie. And I can’t even say that the addiction genes were passed on to me; nope, I’m not even that much of a victim. I did this all by myself. How did I let myself become a statistic? Another voice in my brain reminds me how much I loved it, how that’s what I wanted.
How stupid was I to ever think I’d come back from this, I’d be able to live a normal life? How do you cope with not using without using?
For the first time since I’ve been here, we get a group session before lunch. The supposed theme today is Triggers and How We Manage Them. But instead, we get the Drunk Jo Show. She bangs on about how nurses are triggering her by asking her how she is doing, how everyone in the ward is looking at her weird, how she wants to write a gospel space opera, how groups and NA have never worked for her. Everyone looks irritated as fuck as she goes on, but no one says a word. So I tell Jo to shut the fuck up and advise the volunteer running the group that I’ll knock what’s left of Jo’s teeth out of her soft skull if they don’t let me out of the room. The volunteer calls a nurse on the intercom, who promptly escorts me back to my bed, and I spend the next hour mourning the demise of the NHS. The detox ward seems wholly unprepared to treat detoxing addicts.
The dinner bell goes off at 5:30pm. Soup and bread. Vegan options are incredibly limited. Not that I have any appetite anyway, but I guess I am amused at how they expect us to recover when we are underfed and underslept. So I pick at my food, I go smoke, I get back into bed and wait a couple hours until the nurses grace me with a Promethazine to help with my anxiety, and I slowly drift off to sleep.
1:40am. I’m going fucking crazy. Every twenty minutes now, since 11pm, I’ve been getting up to get a nurse to attend Bed 3’s beeping machine. It’s driving me insane. The nurses ignore it, they ignore the buzzer I ring, so I get out of bed and interrupt their conversation and beg them to reboot the machine and they give me sass instead, taking their sweet time to come in and mute the machine. And every time I get back under the covers and manage to calm my heart rate down and start to believe I could fall asleep, it starts again.
I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown – scratch that, I’m fully in one. Get me out of here. GET ME OUT. Or actually, please don’t. Because I’ll go right back to my old yard with a score in hand.
BASIC HUMAN WRITES 