Been awhile since I wrote anything here. I have not attended another AA meeting, not that I was particularly turned off by the one I attended, I just don't have much time and between brain injury group and rehab group I am kinda grouped out. I do want to attend a SMART meeting (a sort of secular form of AA), but the only meet on Monday night, and the past two Mondays I've been too tired to go. It will happen, maybe next week.
Some good news and some bad news on the whole rehab thing. The good news: While cleaning out my endtable this weekend I happened upon an old bottle of morphine. I was really hurting, as I have been ever since leaving the hospital, so a brief bit of pain relief would have been welcome. But the consequences would have been substantial: not only the guilt associated with failure, but the prospect of being kicked out of the rehab program at Fairfax Hospital. I shared the incident with the IOP group tonight; the substitute facilitator (Patricia was out sick) said a failed urine test would probably have resulted in me being sent to the 4-day program, meaning inpatient care, screwing up my schedule with Marielle, not to mention higher cost, etc. All for a pill that probably wouldn't have done much for my pain anyway.
The bad news: I yielded to temptation and bought a pack of cigarettes yesterday, rationalizing that smoking helps with my headaches. They do to some extent, but the real reason, I suspect, is that smoking is substituting for more immediately harmful addictive behaviors. I really don't know. I didn't really have the kind of craving for opiates that the addicts in my rehab group describe. Nor for that matter did it even occur to me to stop by the liquor store, which is right next to the pharmacy where I picked up a prescription (and the pack of smokes).
I have smoked on and off for about 30 years, mostly off. The first time I was 20, and it was almost divine intervention. I was working construction one summer in Richmond, Va., an environment where the "smoke break" is practically mandated. Plus, my roommate at the time, and Indian named Pradeep, had a friend working at Phillip Morris, then as now one of the largest tobacco companies in the world. As a weekly perq, PM gave every employee a carton of cigarettes whether they smoked or not. Pradeep's friend did not, so he gave the carton to us. Soon we were drowning in Merit 100s! Whether by force of will, or by lack of free cigs, I gradually quit the habit after leaving Richmond, although looking back I don't think I quit altogether for several years. In any case, I was not a pack-a-day type.
Most recently, around 2006, I found a pack of Marlboro Lights in my daughter Krista's room. For some stupid reason, I thought it would be interesting to see what it felt like to have a cigarette again, even though by that time I hadn't smoked a cigarette for at least a decade. Stupid decision. Still, it did seem to make my headaches more bearable. I began to smoke maybe 8 to 10 cigarettes a day within a few months, and continued until about 6 months ago. That's when I began to notice a burning sensation in my throat, which I feared was cancer ... or something. I quit cold turkey and went to my doctor who told me it was probably acid reflux (I didn't tell him I had smoked, like the genius I am), and he told me to take Previcid. The problem went gradually went away. As I had done a number of times by that point, I stopped smoking, on the assumption that this would be it.
For now I will focus on the positive. I haven't had any interest in drinking since crashing and burning last month, and I'm pretty sure I never was truly addicted to pain killers in the first place. But hearing the alcoholics in my rehab group talk about relapsing after many years of sobriety, I know better than to get cocky about this kind of thing. One month is nothing. I went five years without drinking after my accident, and look what happened.
No comments:
Post a Comment