Fighting Heroin Addiction With My Mother on My Side

When I was a young teenager, my mother would watch tales of addiction on her nightly TV programs. “Love the addict, hate the addiction,” she would say as she sipped her diet sodas. Little did she know that I would become just like the characters in the stories that played out on her screen. 

While other parents would boast of children graduating from college or having grandchildren, my mother had no photos of me to hang in her cubicle at work. All she had was my high school senior photograph in a dusty frame. 

That senior picture gave no indication of the turmoil that was coming. Just a few short months after it was taken, I got my first taste of prescription opioids in the late ‘80s. They had been casually prescribed for me after the extraction of my wisdom teeth. The event was unremarkable, but those pills changed the trajectory of my life. An instant feeling of warmth came over me. It not only helped me forget my pain, it helped me forget my problems. 
​
I bookmarked that feeling, coming back to it a few years later, just after I extracted myself from the abuse of my first serious boyfriend. I craved the warmth. A friend of mine got pills from someone’s medicine cabinet, and I wanted the relief they promised. I got it when I swallowed them. It wasn’t long before my college classes and work were replaced by the search for more pills, which eventually led to my heroin addiction.

Tap here to cont.