Piggysnoot

My husband is a drug addict. I’m telling you this for two reasons. One, in hopes that our story will help someone else who has a loved one suffering from addiction or alcoholism. Secondly, writing this blog has become somewhat therapeutic and I feel strange eliminating a part of my life when writing. This should also help explain this post where I referenced an ongoing personal situation and then never elaborated.

Larry has had trouble with an addiction to prescription pain killers since he was a teenager. When we met he was completely honest with me about his situation…in fact he told me about his addiction problems within the first two weeks of our dating. At that time he had been clean for a year and a half. A few years into our marriage he had some back trouble and was given pain medicine that caused him to relapse. I was unaware of his renewed struggle with the medicines he was prescribed. At the time of his relapse he had been clean for six years.

He began to have blackouts from taking too many pills. The way he acted during those blackouts was the complete opposite of how I had ever seen him. Things in our life were a little more stressful than usual when he began using again. Because of this, I thought he was not sleeping well from the stress and that he was suffering from severe sleep deprivation. I took him to several doctors during this time including a psychiatrist and a sleep doctor. One aspect of addiction is the addict’s tendency to lie…so while he knew he was having blackouts, this was not information I was privy to.

There was a point where he was “acting strange” (a blackout) that I reached the end of my rope. He was uncontrollable, rude, and incapable of making rational decisions. He thought he was able to drive…which he was not. He would leave the house and end up somewhere and not remember getting there. At one point he drove the car until it ran out of gas an hour away from home at 10 o’clock at night…all because he was high on pain medicines and unable to think clearly. This is the night that he received a $90 speeding ticket…that he has no recollection of getting. This is also the night that I took him to the hospital and had him admitted to the psychiatric ward. Keep in mind that I had no idea what was causing him to act this way. It was unsafe for him to drive. He was a danger to himself and others. He would not listen to reason. All I knew was that he was acting very strange.

Leaving him at the hospital that night is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I got the papers filled out all the while he sat in a chair not even knowing what day of the week it was or where we were at. When it was time for me to leave he began to figure out that they wanted to keep him there. That is not something he wanted to do because he thought he was fine. He had to be restrained and given sedatives while I literally snuck out the locked door. I left the hospital in tears. I didn’t want to leave him there. I didn’t want him to be mad when he woke up and figured out what I had done. It had just become too much for me to handle and I felt like I had no choice but to take him somewhere where I knew he couldn’t accidentally hurt himself or someone else.

Shortly after his stay in the psychiatric ward things calmed down. These “sleep episodes” became more spaced out. Instead of once a week it would happen every other week. There came another time that I had him admitted to the hospital again…about two months after the first time. Once again he was discharged from the hospital with no diagnosis. It seemed that his situation was unexplainable. The doctors did every test under the sun including checking for brain tumors. If he slept for a few hours he would wake up feeling fine…it seemed like sleeping fixed the problem…when in reality sleeping for a few hours at the hospital cured him because the drugs would leave his system and he had no way of getting more while he was there.

After the second hospital discharge things seemed to return to normal. There were no more strange episodes. He started acting like himself again. We purchased a home. We got a dog. I got pregnant. Things were apparently getting better…or so it seemed to me. I later found out that he was trying to quit on his own and was using less frequently…that he felt he couldn’t ask for help…that he had messed up his one chance at sobriety and that this was it for him. Throughout the times he was acting abnormal I questioned whether he was using again. I was, of course, told that he was not…that things were fine.

About three months after we purchased our home he began having problems again. His depression was getting out of hand. He had anxiety attacks. He started blacking out again. He was missing work. I was stressing about how we were going to afford to keep the house and how he would keep his job with all the work he was missing. I’m sure the stress of that made what he was going through even worse. We were fighting much of the time…I was pissed that he wasn’t going to work…that he had withdrawn from our marriage…that he seemed uninterested in things relating to my pregnancy…that he couldn’t stay awake and would spend almost every evening after work and the entire weekend in bed. It was a terrible time. It was a time that I often wondered how we were going to make it. I’ve heard the saying that God never gives you more than you can handle…daily I was wondering why the hell he trusted me to handle so much because I just didn’t see how I could.

This whole situation came to a head when Larry entered two homes in search of prescription medicines. It was daylight and no one was home at either residence. At the second home, however, the owner came home to find Larry inside. He called the police and Larry was later arrested. At this point I was six months pregnant with Nora and unable to wrap my mind around what was going on. My husband was in jail. I had to list and sell our home. I had to move back in with my parents. We were having a baby in three short months. To say it was overwhelming is an understatement. This takes you up to when he was arrested in September of 06. I will post Part 2 of the story in the near future…Part 2 will be less dark and dreary than Part 1 has been…believe it or not things actually got better after the arrest…