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August 26, 2006

18 years ago today...

... I entered an inpatient drug rehab program a cocaine and methamphetamine addict. It was a blistering hot spell of Oregon weather and nobody bothered to tell me that the blistering hot coffee I kept sucking down for the first three days in the sweltering heat was decaf! The bastards... LOL

I am pleased to report that by the grace of a loving God as I understand him that I have now gone 18 years without using cocaine or meth.

I'll share one story from rehab, just to illustrate the insidious nature of addiction.

Everyone quickly became accustomed to seeing the odd person slowly suffling down the hallways from time to time. We called it doing the "Lithium Shuffle" because they were invariably either extreme alcoholics or heroin addicts who for very real medical reasons had to go thru detox before they could enter the actual program. As they slowly got weaned off their drug of choice they were pumped full of alternate drugs such as lithium and once they were able to do so they were allowed to go pace the halls. Which was about all they were capable of doing in that state.

Anyway, I remember this huge Native American guy doing the Lithium Shuffle from time to time. Like everyone who did the Lithium Shuffle, he could look at you but it was immediately apparent that there was really only enough brain function to do that. So nobody ever talked to them because they never talked back...

Before the detox patients were released into the general population they were weaned off of the intermediate drugs. Usually the alcoholics didn't have much of a problem with this because alcohol was their drug of choice, not perscription pills. Heroin addicts on the other hand sometimes resisted being weaned off the drugs.

There was a recreation room in the rehab facility (which was located in the corner of a small local hospital) with TV and chairs and a ping-pong table which was very popular because one of the patients happened to be the son of a former Tiawanese female ping-pong champion and everyone wanted to try to best him. Off to the side was a closet with board games and some barbell weights and other assorted things with which patients could spend off time engaging themselves with.

One day we were all gathered around the ping-pong table and in walks this Native American guy, obviously much more lucid. He didn't say a word to anyone. He just walked in, went straight to the closet and grabbed the heaviest barbell weight he could find. He comes out of the closet with this weight in one hand and walks up to a lightstand table, lays one thumb on the table and proceeded to obliterate his thumb with the weight, knowing full well that they'd give him pain meds if he did enough damage.

We never saw him again. But several years later I was watching the local news and they ran a segment on some Christian-based drug and alcohol recovery group modeled along the lines of Alcoholics Anonymous but being much more explicitly centered on Biblical Christianity and the guy who had built it up. I was genuinely surprised when the camera footage panned over to this guy and it was that same Native American guy. But this time it was readily apparent that he was clean and had been clean for sometime. Truly a testament to the power of the 12-step program.

Posted by Kevin at August 26, 2006 12:07 PM