The post today is being published anonymously due to the sensitive nature of the story but will be tagged under my name as author purely for logistical reasons.

-Lane Severson

Who wouldn’t have to get high just to stand it?

What was unendurable was what his own head could make
of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and
ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen… He hadn’t
quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding
out cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the
head, it was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the
wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable
news you then somehow believed.

David FOSTER WALLACE, Infinite Jest

PROLOGUE

ESCHATOLOGY is a fancy word for the study of conclusions, the big kind. In the context of Christian theology, eschatology encompasses topics ranging from the end of an individual life to the conclusion of the world, the heavens, and time itself. Though eschatology is a contentious topic, all Christians believe that we will be resurrected at some point after we die. Every creed mentions the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. This gift comes from Christ who “will change our lowly body to be like His glorious body” (Phil 3.21). “The dead will be raised imperishable, for this mortal nature must put on immortality” (1 Cor 15.35-37).

SPONDYLOSYNDESIS is another fancy word, one which denotes an invasive surgical procedure wherein the vertebrae of the spine are immobilized by way of securing titanium or stainless steel rods to the pedicles of consecutive vertebrae with pins or screws. While the vertebral column adjusts to its new orientation, natural osteoblastic activity results in fusion of the joints. Though spondylosyndesis is not a conservative course of action, it is the preferred method of treating spinal deformities including scoliosis and Scheuermann’s disease.

I WAS BENEFICIARY of a spinal fusion operation when I was twenty-one because I was beneficiary of the aforementioned spinal deformities. The curvature of my thoracic spine was exaggerated beyond acceptable angles in two dimensions, anteriorly and laterally. I was often in pain but never knew why. High school orchestra concerts were especially painful, during which I was a sweaty mess from the misery of holding my crooked back in one uncomfortable position. I did not know why my life was like this. Finally, years later, my dermatologist of all people casually suggested that I should have my back examined. When the radiologist read my X-Rays he asked, with incredulity, how no one had ever noticed my crooked back before. I was angry. Understandably upset, don’t you think? Deeply enraged is more accurate, but it was internalized pretty securely. Enraged with my parents, with my primary care physician, enraged that I – a shy kid with braces, brilliant red hair, and bad acne – now had one more target on him. A consultation with a gruff orthopedic surgeon concluded by scheduling surgery. Beforehand, I donated blood to myself in case I lost too much during the surgery. The operation lasted nine hours. When my doctor finished he came to my parents in the waiting room with great pride showing them his hands: they were blistered and raw. Orthopedic surgeons are brilliant in an intellectual way, but they are also extremely talented carpenters working in the medium of bone instead of wood. My doctor used expensive drills, hammers, and screws to fix a crooked, weight bearing support beam in my body. The carpenter repaired my broken body. It’s a shame it’s so much harder to repair troubles in the head.

THE WEEK-LONG HOSPITALIZATION following the spondylosyndesis was agonizing. Excruciating pain, pneumonia, pyrexia. As I mentioned, the surgery lasted nine hours. I was on my stomach for the duration, anesthetized, not taking deep breaths, not expanding my lungs with air. This caused my lungs to become “stuck” together, kind of like a balloon that’s been unused for years. Without oxygen people die, obviously. Well, I was getting some oxygen but only so much that my heart had to beat 170 times a minute to transport the oxygen throughout my body. Sprint for ten minutes and then try to sleep. That’s what it was like. I thought I was going to die. I told my mother I was ready to die. She spent the entire week beside me. The worst night of the seven she repeated the twenty-third Psalm over and over. That was loving of her, wasn’t it? I think she believed it would heal me. And then one day I saw myself: I regarded my incarnate form. That is, I looked at myself from across the room. I observed my body in my hospital bed. I was standing in the corner of the room, but I was also somewhere else. I was in two places at once, it seemed. Warm, amber light filled the room. This perplexed me then, as it does now. I reminisce about this incident often. I suppose you could call what happened to me an out-of-body experience, as the phrase describes precisely what happened. Autoscopy is the technical term for it. But what does it mean? How can I account for the details of that moment? I’ve considered a few possibilities as to the cause of the phenomenon. The most likely explanation is that I hallucinated the event. As I mentioned before, I was running a high fever. Maybe my morphine epidural choreographed the bizarre scene. I’ve contemplated the possibility that I dreamt it, but it didn’t feel like one. What else? Perhaps I was truly dying. A near-death experience? Is that so improbable? Only days earlier my back was cut open and metal rods drilled into my spine with two-inch pedicle screws. Twenty-six of them. I don’t think it’s melodramatic to consider spine surgery a traumatic experience. Do you?

HAVING ENDURED A BRUTAL surgery only to behold myself supine on a hospital bed in a glowing hospital room, you might expect that my outlook on life changed. This happens to some people, or at least some people profess it and they seem earnest enough. Like Saul on the road to Damascus, like a flipped switch, some who experience this kind of epiphany turn their lives around: they stop beating their wives, they donate a portion of their vast wealth to charity, they volunteer on the weekends. Others just wonder if there could be something more. If the afterlife is real, maybe bodily resurrection is real? Maybe, could Christianity have something to offer? I wish I could say I experienced a transcendent peace or even an increase in or buttressing of my faith because of the surgery and what happened after. I wish I could say that I became a better person and a better Christian. Instead I became a drug addict. What a wasted opportunity. What a terribly profound waste.

PART ONE

DRUG ADDICTIONS START SMALL. I spent the summer following my surgery recovering on a recliner in my family room watching the 2006 World Cup. That was the year Zinedine Zidane was red-carded for headbutting Marco Materazzi in the chest. I wore a brace and took pain killers when my mother brought them to me. I had no access to the drugs and was essentially immobilized – meaning I could not medicate myself – and I rarely requested it more frequently than the pharmacist recommended. The summer burned away slowly. I was isolated and terribly lonely. But I recovered physically, which doesn’t happen for a lot of spondylosyndesis patients. I went back to college for my senior year without opioids and was happy and had what I might consider the best year of my life. My back was straight, my posture excellent, the pain greatly reduced. I even got taller by nearly two inches. I graduated from Wheaton College. I wanted to forget about the horror of the surgery, the misery in the hospital, and the malaise of the summer. I wanted to get on with my life, but my mind remembered how the drugs worked. How they eliminated pain and induced euphoria. How swallowing an insidious white pill could make you feel happy, if only for a moment.

THIS IS THE TRICKY PART in the story because it requires me to explain why I started taking opioids after the surgery and you have to believe me because I’m the narrator, except that drug addicts are notorious liars. Well, so. Two story lines emerge and converge at this point, each of which, isolated from the other is non-combustible. The first story line involves the occasional physical discomfort I experience if I move the wrong way. For example, starting a lawn mower by pulling the cord is a rather violent motion, a motion that for someone with steel rods in his back – rods designed to prevent flexibility – can hurt me. Simple enough, right? Everyone has back pains now and then, except mine are complicated by all that metal stuff in there. The second story line involves my mother. Around the time I was having surgery, my mother’s own spine began causing her pain. Multiple MRIs revealed early onset lumbar spinal stenosis, a degenerative condition in which the spinal canal narrows and squeezes the spinal cord and nerves in the lower back. This causes pain in the legs and the lower back; in my mother’s case it caused severe pain. She, like her son, consulted an orthopedic surgeon who recommended surgery. I won’t describe hers except to say that it didn’t work. In fact, it made her worse. It was devastating to our family. For years my mother had been the luminary of our family: a kind, forgiving person, involved in the church and COO at a highly regarded medical center. The toll of the condition was noticeable. She lost weight, energy, sleep, and motivation. I don’t know if she lost faith. She began seeing a physician at the pain clinic who told her things probably were not going to improve, that she’d have to bear this burden the remainder of her life, that the best option was to treat the symptoms of her condition, id est, the pain. So, so so so. She was prescribed painkillers regularly, a new supply every month. Right in the house, just sitting on her bathroom vanity. I knew she had them and I knew how effective they were in treating pain. When I’d hurt myself, starting the mower or shoveling snow, I’d ask very meekly if I could have one, and she would acquiesce. Like I said, she is kind. I took advantage of her kindness. And that’s how it began.

I’VE READ REPORTS ABOUT SOLDIERS, men who used heroin while they were fighting in Vietnam, men who when they came back to the United States were able to stop, just like that. Similarly, I’ve read about studies performed on two populations of lab mice, one group of which was housed in a sparse, isolating environment, the other group in an environment where one mouse could eat and play and interact with other mice. Both populations had access to a pedal which when pushed released a euphoria-inducing, habit-forming drug. The researchers concluded that the environment and the overall happiness of the mice (whatever that means) influenced the rate of drug abuse. In other words, they argued that the addictive properties of the drug were not the only factor involved, but also the environment and its ability to provide a fulfilling experience to the inhabitant. Put simply, if you are in a good place – emotionally, physically, occupationally, et cetera, you are less likely to abuse addictive drugs. Sadly, the opposite is true. If you are in a bad place there’s gonna be trouble. That’s why people who abuse drugs often suffer from other psychological problems. Comorbidity, they call it. Remember I said my senior year at Wheaton was great? Well, the following few years were not. I couldn’t find a job in my field, so I ended up taking one that was stressful (people yelled at me all day) and lowered my self-esteem pretty significantly. Furthermore, I felt like a failure because I wasn’t applying my education to my work. Additionally, I was isolated from my friends, only by distance, but still I was unhappy. Now, this is not an uncommon experience. In fact, I’d wager that the majority of you reading this confession of sorts have felt those emotions at some time in your life, maybe right now. But most of you have not had a morphine epidural and a summer of pain killers and then open access to more, and, most importantly, the knowing, both the physical knowing and the emotional knowing, that drugs like tramadol, hydrocodone, oxycodone, and fentanyl make you feel good. They used to treat depression with opium, for Pete’s sake. I realize this may come off sounding like an excuse, like this isn’t really my fault but the inevitable consequence of a series of events over which I had no control. I don’t intend it to be at all. I only want to explain how things got to a certain point and then escalated. Here, my story with drugs moves from legitimate use to self-medication. At first it was only when I requested them, then I started stealing them. At first it was only on the weekends, then it was whenever I wanted a high. As cliched as it sounds, I used pain killers to fill a void. I used them to get high enough so I could stand my life as I perceived it.

PART TWO

THERE IS A LOT OF SCIENCE involved in addiction. Chemical aspects, biopsychosocial aspects, stuff I don’t understand and shouldn’t discuss because it could be misleading or patently wrong. What I can say with absolute certainty is that people who take opioids recreationally will develop a tolerance to their euphoria-inducing properties. Oxycodone, for example, is an μ-opioid agonist (or maybe a κ-opioid agonist) that acts on opioid receptors in the brain. The drug stimulates these receptors, resulting in euphoric feelings. When the drug is taken repeatedly, overstimulation decreases the number of receptors, and the remaining receptors become less sensitive. This process is called desensitization. Simply put, a person requires more of the drug each time to get high. It starts with 10 milligrams of oxycodone one day. Then 30 milligrams, 45 milligrams, 90 milligrams. I’ve read about people taking 200 milligrams over the course of a day. Essentially, the brain becomes accustomed to receiving the chemicals; the brain depends on the drugs to maintain homeostasis. I used to be able to take one pill to feel good. Now I have to take many more to feel good. This is called physical dependence.

IT MAY CLARIFY THE NARRATIVE to offer some kind of characterization of my drug abuse. Specifically, how I acquired the drugs. This is the part in which I confess some seriously rotten stuff. Here goes. I’ve been taking opioids on and off for about four years. I’ve almost never acquired them legally. On only three occasions has a physician prescribed painkillers for me, and all three times I lied to the doctors about my pain. I can lie very easily because I have intense X-Rays that resemble blueprints of the John Hancock Building. I will explain to the doctor that I hurt my back; I want to make sure nothing is wrong with the rods. Can I get an X-Ray to make sure nothing is damaged? Oh, and maybe something for the pain? I toss it in as an afterthought so it seems like my main concern is the structural integrity of the instrumentation and not the drugs. The first time I did this I concocted some story about a family vacation to Naples, Florida and wanting to be able to enjoy myself and not struggle with the pain. It was exciting and relieving, knowing I was going to get a prescription, an orange bottle of opioids all to myself, one that I didn’t have to share. No stealing for a while. But like I said, I only saw a physician three times. What about all the other times? Very simply now, I stole them from anyone I knew had them. I’ve stolen drugs from family members, friends, and complete strangers. I stole as many as I could without drawing suspicion to myself. I’ve done very deceitful things, designed complex plans to get my hands on opioids. I once sat for hours clicking through the combinations on a locked briefcase until I got it open. I’ve asked my mother to iron a shirt so I could sneak into her room upstairs while she starched my collar in the basement. I’ve switched an SSRI for a similar looking oxycodone pill in order to make it seem like I hadn’t taken a pill at all. This means someone who needed medicine for pain got something useless. It could have been dangerous. Do you recognize how obsessive this becomes? Can you imagine how intense the craving for drugs must be in order to compel behavior like that? That is what addiction is. An entire day devoted to figuring out how to get my hands on some drugs. I’ve dreamt about this. I dream about stealing drugs, getting caught, being chastised, apologizing, making deals with imaginary drug dealers. I’ve taken tramadol that was intended for my dog after his surgery. I’ve swallowed 100 2 milligram loperamide pills because I read on drug forums that loperamide (commonly known as Immodium) is a strong opioid, and that though most of the drug will not cross the blood-brain barrier, a little bit will, and a little bit will go a long way. I spent my entire winter break this year, five weeks in December and January, repeating that routine every three days. I vomited at work three times because of this. I once bought 30 10 milligram hydrocodone tablets on-line from some bullshit pharmacy in India. What the hell was I thinking? I was thinking that I had to have the drug in order to function. I came to believe that I could no longer enjoy my life without using. I couldn’t enjoy movies or church services or drives to Michigan or reading or sitting on the beach, or having dinner with friends unless I had the warm euphoria of some kind of opioid. Any kind would do. Anything. Anything, anything, because once you become a drug addict experiencing euphoria is important, sure, but what’s equally important is avoiding what happens if you run out.

WITHDRAWAL SYNDROME denotes the physical and psychological symptoms a person experiences when he or she stops taking drugs, either abruptly or by slowly tapering the dosage. I’ve gone through withdrawal from opioids many times. It can be unpleasant or it can be horrible, depending on the duration of use and the dosage involved. There are symptoms you experience in your body – things like chills, muscle aches, sweating, sneezing, diarrhea, yawning, and the sensation of an electric current running throughout your body. I’ve experienced all of these. The evenings are the worst: it is impossible to sleep. I’ve spent dark nights thrashing around under the covers, wishing for sleep, knowing I had to get up for work in six hours, four hours, twenty minutes. There are symptoms you experience in your mind as well. Maddening cravings for the substance, depression, anxiety, and dysphoria. I think these are just as bad if not worse than the physical symptoms. They can last for weeks and months after the physical symptoms of withdrawal have subsided. Many times I’ve wanted to stop using, but withdrawal or just the fear of withdrawal has caused me to relapse.

TRIGGERS SUCK. Triggers are everywhere. They can be a song, a movie, even an obscure memory. As the word suggests, a trigger is anything that initiates a craving for the drug. I’ve experienced this feeling often. It’s a horrible, oppressive feeling. You’ll hear a song and think of that time you were driving to Michigan and the song came on the radio and you were high and that was such a good memory. You felt good and happy and optimistic about your life. The deciduous trees were beautiful because it was autumn and the colors were glorious and the traffic was minimal and you could just glide down the interstate, high and content. So the trigger gets you, and you find the drug somehow, and the ritual takes over. Ritual is very important to drug addicts. There are certain things I must do when I use. For example, I swallow the pill and then start the stopwatch on my digital Casio wrist watch. The drug should kick in after 45 minutes. So I check my watch and wait and then the gentle, warm numbness takes over. I have several hiding places. I use the same pill case to store my drugs. If the timing is right, I’ll shave, which is a ritual in itself. I’ll take my time shaving and wait for the 45 minutes. I used to get high every Friday after work and watch Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited. The winter of 2010 I read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Fifty pages each night, accompanied by the calm euphoria. It’s a long book, Infinite Jest, a labyrinthian narrative. It’s about drug abuse. All kinds of drugs. I read it and slowly, uncomfortably realized that I was in big trouble.

ONE YEAR LATER I admitted myself to the psyche unit at Good Samaritan Hospital. Suicidal thoughts had become a big part of my life. I weighed the advantages and disadvantages of various means of killing myself. For example, a gun shot to the head was very likely going to kill me, but what if my aim was slightly off or I survived somehow, only to sit in a hospital bed as a vegetable? I thought about starting my car in the garage and letting the exhaust slowly asphyxiate me, but then I read that car exhaust wasn’t as toxic as it used to be. Cutting the blood vessels in my wrists and forearms seemed to be my best option. If I got it right, I would die slowly, quietly, peacefully in the bathroom. If I survived I would have scars, but no serious physical or mental damage (relative to the alternatives I mentioned, that is). So I told the nurses and doctors in the emergency department at Good Sam that I was suicidal and depressed and anxious. They put me on the psyche floor. I was there for five days. I told everyone – the counselors, the nurses, the psychiatrist, the other patients – that I was depressed because I didn’t have the job I wanted, I was single and 28, and still living at home. I never said anything about drug abuse. I even asked my parents not mention it to the staff. But I know now, or at least I highly suspect, that the depression I was suffering, and I was honestly depressed, was a result of a serious withdrawal. I never said a word to the people trained to help me. I did everything I could to get out of there as soon as possible. I pretended to have revelations, to accept that certain things were out of my control, I acknowledged and promised that I would take SSRIs and see a counselor and a psychiatrist periodically. At any time, I could have confessed. I should have said wait, let me start over because I haven’t been completely honest. There is no point in seeing a counselor or a psychiatrist or any kind of doctor if you lie. As I said, drug addicts lie a lot. When I was discharged, I briefly followed a better routine. I took my anti-depressants, went to therapy, and stopped abusing opioids. But it didn’t last. In fact it got worse. I started abusing alcohol and benzodiazepines, prescribed to me for anxiety. The low point of this story begins six months after I was released from the hospital, sixth months ago, the summer of 2012. My parents found me nearly unconscious in the basement. I had taken more of my anti-depressants than recommended and consumed half a bottle of whiskey. I wasn’t trying to kill myself, but I almost did. In September, my grandmother was diagnosed with brain cancer. I stole some of her painkillers. I stole pain medicine from a kind, caring woman who had helped raise me, a woman dying of cancer who needed relief from pain, the woman who came with me when I donated blood for myself before my spine surgery. She died on December 7, the day my time off from work began. I started swallowing 100 pills of loperamide to try to get a high. I repeated this ritual every three days. I sat in my room and watched old episodes of Doctor Who. I isolated myself, saw none of my friends. The drugs were everything to me. Nothing was sacred.

TODAY IS JANUARY 27. It has been two weeks since I stopped taking opioids. Well, that’s not true. I took some on Monday, January 21 and Friday, January 25. Not so much a relapse as a lapse. I am cutting back and trying to stop because I can’t go to work high or miserable because I’m withdrawing. That’s the practical reason, of course. The more urgent reason is that I am terrified of addiction. It is horrifying to feel that you have no control over yourself. That you will do almost anything to find drugs. That people are just objects you have to manipulate in order to find those pills. That when you wake up, the first thing you will think about is how you’ll get through the day without drugs and how that idea is completely intolerable. How trapped, how trapped, how lonely and completely unable to say anything, to confess or say I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I lied, I stole. I destroyed what we had.

EPILOGUE

I KNOW THE PARABLE OF THE LOST SON. For most of my life I empathized with the older brother. The kind of Christian who was raised in the church: a supportive family, a solid education, and never any major problems. My devotional was boring, reflecting what was then probably only a life of conformity instead of earnest devotion. Then, like the younger son who decides his father’s wealth is more important than his father, I decided (tough word to use here) that drugs were more important than everything in my life. “We always considered you the pure one,” my mother said to me when I woke up from my drunken stupor in the basement. Can you imagine how devastating that was?

ESCHATOLOGY is a fancy word for the study of conclusions. So how will this story of mine end? I don’t know. C.S. Lewis discusses endings in The Great Divorce. The narrator’s guide, George MacDonald – the Virgil to Lewis’s Dante – says this about sin and salvation: “Son,” he said, “ye cannot in your present state understand eternity. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.” Of course, this backwards redemption is contingent upon a repentance or turning from the sin. But consider this idea in the context of what I have related to you in the past seven pages. Is it possible that what I saw in the hospital room was exactly what I was supposed to see? Not proof necessarily that Christ raised Lazarus, but only that something bad can be turned into something good. I realize I need to take practical steps to fix this problem. I need to connect with a church, go to NA meetings, see a professional counselor, maybe. But in the larger sense, in the eschatological sense, can a lowly body be made like Christ’s glorious body? This morning I stood in the bathroom, in front of the mirror, and looked at my back. It is straight now. It has been healed, and though I see it often, I am still amazed that something so deformed could be made upright once again.