DOSE:	repeated	oral	Morphine	(pill / tablet)
	repeated	insufflated	Morphine	(ground / crushed)
	repeated	oral	Hydrocodone	(pill / tablet)
	repeated	insufflated	Hydrocodone	(ground / crushed)
	repeated	IV	Morphine	(liquid)
	repeated	smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

145 lb

This is something that is very difficult for me to write. But I’ve learned that if I don’t put it out there and face the reality of it, I might never stop, and if I don’t stop, I’m going to die. I can’t describe in words how hard this is to write and look at in black and white right in front of me, and the hardest part is waking up in the morning to stare at my cold, pale face with my pupils the diameter of a petite gauge needle and look myself in the face and know, I’m a morphine addict.

It's something that had been building for the last little over a year. From the time I started feeling the initial pain of the medical condition that cost me my ovary before it had been diagnosed. I used to get vicodin here and there. A year or so before that I had injured my back falling in the shower right before opening night of the ballet I was in at the time, the doctors gave me vicodin and flexeril and I used to pop 4 of the 5mg and 2 of the however many mg flexeril, go to practice and dance anyway cus if I took those like that, I felt ok enough to dance and I was on vicodin every show after that. I just loved how I finally didn’t feel like my spine was out of place and being rung out like a sponge from the muscle hyperextension. And how it made my knees not hurt when they crack so loudly from the joint condition I have that I was diagnosed with at age 18. It made me feel normal again. Like I was healthy again.

That 'normal' feeling led me to abuse alcohol for about a year up until literally a week before I was first diagnosed with poly-cystic ovaries. I should have seen the warning signs then, but I was fully functioning. I had a job and everything. Little did people realize that I was constantly showing up either hung over or I hid it well. I did most of my drinking in and out of the bar when I turned 21 so everyone just dismissed it as me 'Just partying and being 21' and ok, I’ll admit, for the first 6 months after I turned 21, it was just partying too much, but after that the pains got worse and until I rediscovered opiates again did I realize I was drinking a less than stellar numbing agent than what I could be getting myself into, and did get myself into.

I was first introduced to morphine in the form of 60mg time release pills (i.e, MS Contin & Avinza both genuine pure morphine sulphate in time release capsules). I was told by the person I got it from, whom shall remain nameless to protect those who meant no harm to me, to be careful and take half at a time cuz it'll 'getcha'. So I did as I was told. To make a long story short I loved how I felt when I first came up. For once in MONTHS I couldn’t feel that stupid ovary throbbing inside my body and pushing against my spine. Oh my GOD the indescribable RELEASE I felt. No more hurt! But then the pain came back after a couple hours and unfortunately I used to be under the notion that when the pain stopped, just take more and that's how the whole spiral started.

I learned the ins and outs of taking it orally very quickly. If I’m going to take it, I better eat something hearty or I’m going to puke as violently as what's his ass off scary movie 2. I'm not kidding. Then after the puking finally subsides, I felt like a million bucks and passed out for a few hours, but after I woke up in a cold sweat with all my pains back and 10x worse than they were before I took the pill in the first place. Yah you see where this is going.

I could only get it once a month to start out with. In between then I’d manage to get random vicodins here and there, the occasional percocets, norcos, flexerils, methadones, basically everything short of actual heroine, and I’d be smoking my medical bud like crazy. Especially after I had to quit smoking cigarettes due to nicotine intensifying my condition. I just wanted to stop feeling the pain and stop feeling the hormones raging all the time from the constant pain and female organ inflamation.

I never once stole from anyone or got meds in a dishonest way, nor did I ever really even reguard it as recreation all that much, I just loved the feeling of what at the time I thought made me feel like I was healthy and normal again. I always some how by sheer dumb luck was able to find it for cheap if not free. The free part is what kept me going back for more. I wanted the pain gone and gone NOW and I couldn’t accept the fact that physical pain is just the way life was gonna have to be for a while. I never saw what I was doing as anything out of the ordinary cuz I was in so much pain I literally physically NEEDED it. I always thought I was pretty blatant about the fact that I was on it, but I guess I wasn’t. Apparently on the outside I’m a functional person. I try so hard to keep positive that I’ve accidentally taught myself, and have been taught through years of abuse as a child to ignore and tune out the negative things in my life. I got to a point where I refused to believe anything negative was going on in my life. I was convinced I was totally fine and nothing was wrong, as long as I had morphine or some form of opiate.

I got to a point where I didn’t care what opiate it was, as long as it killed the pain. I began to hit up oxy connects, toyed with the notion of whether or not digging up old skeletons was worth finding real heroin, all the way to trying to get a hold of the actual poppy itself. None ever called back, so I just went back to what I knew best and could get the easiest at a certain time of month, morphine. I could do without. I’d go through about 2 weeks of withdrawls and joneses, then I’d just think about it and took vicodins (what I referred to as 'tic-tacs') and looked forward to and searched for that next morphine rush.

But ya know, orally just got to where it didn’t work fast enough for the pain I was feeling. Every time I spent a lot of time off morphine, nothing really worked for the pain nearly as good as morphine. I then started getting methadone. I thank a dear friend of mine for warning me about methadone staying in your system a long time and it being easy to overdose because within the first 30mg of methadone I took, I found it didn’t do a DAMN thing for me. I was at the pre-surgery stage where I basically woke up in the morning and as soon as I became fully conscious, I felt the most blinding hellfire of pain you can ever imagine in both my abdomen as well as my muscles feeling like they're going through a meat grinder and being rung out like a dish sponge. I needed something that was going to fuckin WORK not tease me.

So when I got morphine again, I went into the bathroom and took a razorblade and cut up the pills into coke-consistancy powder. I didn’t even bother with taking off the time release. I cut up the whole pill and had time release lines. I did this every half hour every day for about 2 weeks out of every month. Til I figured out I could start trading weed for pills. I quickly learned to pill id things before I go buying off the ghetto part of streets ever again though. I was sold green pills under the guise that they were 20 mg morphine tablets. I was jonesing so bad by the time I got those I believed they were morphine, any mg was better than no mg. Turned out, as pointed out to someone I sold a couple to, it was atarax, an anti-depressant. Fucked my world up for 2 days.

One day I had a pain attack so bad I couldn’t even move from 1 in the afternoon til almost 4. I was home alone and spent it slowly getting to the bathroom and lying in a hot bath in hopes that it helps cuz I wasn’t strong enough to go outside and smoke a bowl or even to get up and crush up more morphine. When the pain finally got to where I could muster up the strength, I cut and crushed up 120mg of morphine along with 1 big blue norco and snorted a fat line of blue and orange time release powder. This was the most I’d ever taken. After that burn in my nose, the most gaggingly pleasing drip in the back of my throat, I passed out for a few hours. I spent the hours after I was awake with a high fever and a BAD case of heroine style nods.

All I remember about the time after waking up was people kept asking if I was ok, Chris confronting me about my excessive morphine use (it wasn’t until the other day that I learned that he truly never knew I was even on it a good percent of the time and had no idea I was snorting it). And while he was trying to confront me I was kinda fading in and out of consciousness and zoning out really bad on some commercial for ihop or some stupid shit. To Chris I again extend my sincerest thank you and apology. I honestly thought you knew babe. I thought I was being really obvious. words cannot even begin to describe how sorry I am and how thankful at the same time that you STILL never left my side through all this.

The funny thing about all this is, I had no idea I was addicted. I just thought I was finding a faster way to get my morphine to work that I NEEDED. I then started putting the crushed up powder in food. I once made a solution of tea and morphine powder. I even sprinkled it over weed and smoked it once. Gave me a major headache tho.

I eventually ran out of morphine and stayed clean other than the occasional vicodin for at least a month up until the surgery. I watched something about old fashioned drugs and found myself GLUED to the opiate episode. They used to call morphine 'God's Own Medicine' and it was used on battle fields as well as in teething aides. When they described the side-effects, I was feeling every single one to the fullest extent. My mind was an emotional wreck except when I was all looped out on morphine. It scared me a little so I was pretty sure I had quit. I kept saying that I would stop when I was gonna get healthy again. Then the joyous surgery date came :) I was so happy. But with that also came when I discovered the joys of IV drugs.

After I woke up from surgery they started pumping me full of intraveinous morphine. That was the most amazing rush I’ve ever felt in my life. 10 minutes to the most heavenly place my body has ever been to. No pain. I even got lucky enough that the silly nurses at the hospital weren’t communicating as to who gave me morphine last and I was getting more morphine than I needed to be. I sure as shit wasn’t gonna say anything I was in heaven. Then they realized their mistake and all the sudden it was 10 minutes to heaven that only lasted 2 hrs accompanied by lots of nausea and pain for a good hour til they could give me more morphine. I meditated when I couldn’t get morphine. I couldn’t very well smoke a bowl in the middle of the hospital so I had to do something to get my mind off the pain. I did a lot of spiritual growing in the hospital and in that surgery. I was finally gonna be ok.

I was released from the hospital and there was some complication with my norco prescription they gave me for the post-op pain being filled. I was forced to either call for morphine, or go without even weed. I got my morphine. Being the chicken shit I am, I never did take up slamming outside the hospital. There's just something about syringes that have always scared me. Love tattoo needles, even the piercing needles that have been used on me in my piercings, hate syringes. I took the morphine orally again. Not realizing that those time release capsules, after having consistant daily every 4 hour IV morphine in you for the last few days, especially when broken in half, crushed, or basically taken any other way than whole, are easy to OD off of.

I found this out the hard way Wednesday night, November 7th. Ya know that picture I have under the post-surgery folder in all my my pics, especially the one that's captioned: 'Morphine's a hell of a drug' that was taken no more than 45 minutes before my body started to realize I’d just overdosed, yet my mind still had no idea I was overdosed cuz I could only remember what I took that day. I felt so nauseous I smoked bowl after bowl to counter act the nausea. Nothing worked. Things started to get blurry and tunnel-shaped. The tv was at 7 volume but it sounded so loud I just kept adjusting the volume. The screen was so bright my eyes felt like someone had lit them on fire so they would pop out of my sockets. I was having trouble breathing.

Meanwhile I had to curl up in a ball because my muscles started spazming and burning and feeling like my bones were sponges. my staples weren’t out yet. I clutched a blanket, a trash bucket and the pipe I was smoking in desperation to not rip out my staples and re-open my fresh incision wound. I felt it get harder and harder to breathe and I felt my lower-abdominal muscles pull hard at my staples. Poor Chris was tired from being up all hours of the night worrying about me and going to his lima lama class on maybe 2 hrs sleep. He literally could not wake up enough to realize what happened let alone take me to the hospital. I tried to get up off the bed, but I fell back down on the bed. I felt another agonizing pull at my staples. They started to ooze. I didn’t have enough strength to get up let alone yell for someone to take me to the hospital. Then after one last attempt to cry for help my body entered the threshold of hell.

I began to have the most painful case of nausea I’ve ever felt, but no matter how hard I tried to puke I couldn’t. I hadn’t eaten enough to puke anything back up I guess. The spazming came back and the nods came on with the most full force I’ve ever had. Every time I nodded off I kept seeing horrible violent images like something out of a horror movie. Except this time, I wasn’t laughing at it and saying 'Haha I love halloween' like I used to do when the morphine zombies would visit me in my previous deep morphine induced sleep days. It was something so much more frightening and indescribable. I kept seeing images of poppies being cut open for the opium followed by brief flashes of blood being puked up. I was starting to panic. I smoked another bowl in an attempt to snap myself out of it having still yet to realize I’ve overdosed. I was convinced I was just having a bad come down.

Breathing was getting so shallow it was near non existant. I began to hallucinate. There were some very dark figures near me and there were at least 2 times I distinctly remember blacking out all together. Just before the 2nd time I passed out I kept feeling like I had to do everything in my power, no matter how weak I felt, to stay awake. Every nod I got felt like my heart was going to sleep too. It would slow down to speeds I never knew a heart could slow to and not kill a person. I just kept thinking 'Please don’t let me die yet'. I felt the nods for the last time. Curling into the ball I made of myself with my head stuck in a trash bucket waiting and wanting so desperately to puke, terrified of tearing my staples open, I felt my heart stop just before I blacked out. Somehow I managed to wake up one last time, just enough to crawl with every last bit of strength I had into my bed next to Chris. The whole room suddenly got cold and things became very light and free. Last thought before blackout 3: ' I love you Chris'.

Apparently when Chris woke up around 5 (I had last blacked out between 3 or 4) he touched my body and thought I was a corpse. It took a sec to get me to wake up I guess. I must have some higher purpose. I had barely the strength to wake anyone to take me to the hospital even though I needed to go so I wouldn’t tear something. I woke up with scabs and puss all over my wound. When they went to take the staples out they said it 'Didn’t look too bad' thank GOD. I have experienced a true honest to goodness miracle cuz in all technicality, I should have died Wednesday night.

I haven’t taken any opiates since that night. It wasn’t til after staying with the friends of ours in Ventura we've been staying with before and the night of and after the show that I learned of or began to even face the severity of what I was doing. I guess pure IV morphine and time release morphine withdrawals like what I have are equivalent to if not worse than heroine. According to what Chris and I found on the internet, it’s true and morphine is basically the closest thing you can get to smoking the actual opium poppy.

I can honestly say right now I’m jonesin so bad I’m itching and hallucinating. Tall dark figures keep appearing and telepathically reminding me how wonderful morphine is and how much I want some for the pain right now. I now have to drink nothing but water, take hot baths and eat lots of prunes and fiber to go pee or poop like a little old lady til all the opiates leave my system. This is not a joke. This has never been a joke. I’m sick all day and all night. I barely sleep through the night without weed or at least some chamomile tea. Every symptom of morphine use, withdrawal, addiction, and side effect listed on pharmaceutical sites I have with the exception of seizures that I know of.

The reality of how serious this is and how much of a dangerous thing I was doing has only barely set in. From brushing with death, to seeing my boyfriend literally break down because he thought I was dead. To being granted another day of life and not missing out on things I had been looking forward to so badly like seeing the show of a lifetime. I’m so lucky I was even alive to make it to that show. I should have died 2 days before, but by some miracle I didn’t. I thank my lucky stars, my spirits, and everyone who has been helping me through this agonizing de-tox. I technically should go to rehab, but I don’t wanna go through getting addicted to methadone and then having to be weaned off that. I’ve had enough hospitals for one month thank you very much. Much like with cigarettes the most effective way to quit something is cold turkey.

I'm gonna start going to NA and find some sort of drug addiction counseling. I can’t ever do this again. If I don’t stop this time I might not wake up next time. There's a saying that morphine is god's own medicine. If he made anything finer, it would be for the angels. That saying is closer to the truth than you'd like to imagine. I’ve learned that if you've never done drugs and been addicted to them, you aren’t going to know the fullest extent of how it feels to be a junkie. It’s just something one must experience oneself. I know 3 years ago I used to get frustrated at junkies cuz they were so hard to deal with, then I became one. And the fact that it happened so easily and that I honest to god and all my being I had no idea I even had an addiction, let alone that it was out of control. People like me used to say 'I’d never do that. I’d never even think of it' never say never. The drug grabbed a hold of me. No matter how much control I THOUGHT I had, it grabbed me.

I'm going to stay clean. I'm doing everything in my power to de-tox and try not to think about it, but it’s hard when that damn shadow thing keeps appearing and that itch, oh god the itching that feels so good yet drives me nuts. I have to stay clean. There can not be a next-time. Cuz next time I wont stop and next time I’ll die. I don’t wanna die. Think what you will of me after reading this. After going to hell and back and living to tell about it, I don’t give a FUCK what anyone thinks anymore, I’m just glad to still be here to write this. I don’t really know where to turn or who to go to so I’m just coming right out and saying it. I need help. I don’t ever and WON’T ever ask for help unless I absolutely need it.

Exp Year: 2007	ExpID: 67047
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jul 9, 2008	Views: 38,217
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Opiates (207), Morphine (211) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Multi-Day Experience (13), Addiction & Habituation (10), Not Applicable (38)