lilgirllost
Admin
Number of posts : 863
Age : 51
Location : live in Louisiana but attend MMT clinic in Tx
Job/hobbies : COUPONING & GEOCACHING are my favorite past times but I also love reading and spending time with my husband and kids
Humor : I don't have a sense of humor.............
Registration date : 2009-05-25
 | | Subject: PRESCRIPTION FOR A BETTER LIFE....mother, drug addict finds new life at methadone clinic Thu Oct 22, 2009 1:32 pm | |
| Here again is another great success story about MMT. From the CONCORD MONITOR PAPER http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091021/FRONTPAGE/910210301
PRESCRIPTION FOR A BETTER LIFE by Ray Duckler Monitor Columnist
Angie Horn, a walking pharmacy all her life, says it's a lot like cough syrup.
Same consistency, same color. "The same yucky taste, too" the drug addict from Pembroke said.
Horn has replaced prescription medication with methadone, and she says it's made her a good mother. She says it's led to a better life.
Things, of course, could not have been any worse. Not when your addiction transformed you into the biggest con artist since Bernie Madoff. Not when your baby boy faced a parentless childhood, controlled by the state.
And not when your days were often spent huddled under a blanket, shivering like a wet Chihuahua.
"You can't even imagine the amount of pills we sucked down," said Horn, 35. "We lost everything."
She collects disability and is the single mother of 4-year-old Michael. She has retinitis pigmentosa; she says she sees as though she's looking through a roll of toilet paper. Her husband, also named Michael, died four years ago after two strokes, a heart attack and a drug-addicted life.
Horn sought help three years ago from a methadone clinic in Manchester. She swears by the results.
No more OxyContin. No more Vicodin. No more Percocet. Methadone and that's it.
"You're not going to find that narcotic high," Horn says. "It's going to keep you okay, like you're not sick and not high. It takes away that craving, but it doesn't get you high."
High once meant normalcy. High was the only way Horn knew how to live.
A rough start
Horn never knew her real father. She says her alcoholic mother, who died from breast cancer six years ago, and stepfather passed her joints when she was in grade school. She says her stepfather put alcohol in her baby bottle to help her sleep and allow him to party while her mother worked.
"I loved my mom," Horn said. "She did the best she could, but her best wasn't good enough. It wasn't very good."
She moved by herself to Arizona, where she became a crack addict at 15. Nobody in her home state missed her much.
She's been back for nearly 20 years, living mostly in Pembroke. She soon met Michael, a pipe fitter whose physically demanding job led to a need for prescription medication and, eventually, addiction.
For nearly 15 years, Horn and Michael were the Bonnie and Clyde of meds, an outlaw couple that used injuries to gain prescriptions and street smarts to infiltrate the black market. The problem, Horn says, is big. We, she added, are blind.
"People are very naïve," Horn said. "And I didn't realize how easy it is if you really want it. It was just as easy to score some pills at midnight as it was to score a 12-pack. In fact, it was easier."
Horn slipped while working at the Busy Bee restaurant in Allenstown. One torn rotator cuff later, she had two prescriptions for Vicodin and Percocet.
"It was legal," Horn says. "Now I'm seeing, wow, I can get these easier and faster through a doctor. Now I'm legitimately hurt, and I was making it more hurt than it was. I had pain, but I'm quite sure I could have gone without a handful of Percocet or a handful of Vicodin."
Horn says she fooled the medical community in the days before the internet, when the world wasn't quite so small. She calls it doctor shopping, and, for her, it became a regular errand, like getting her oil changed.
Her instincts evolved, allowing her to pull back if she sensed suspicion lurking around the corner.
Even when the computer age foiled her plan and hospitals caught on, there was always the black market, friends and coworkers who gladly sold and traded their prescriptions. The word milligrams became a big part of Horn's vocabulary.
And Horn still had her husband, whose back was a mess from the rigors of pipe fitting. He split his OxyContin, obtained legally, with Horn.
"That was my downfall," Horn said. "That made me go from being able to function at work and leave my house to be able to do nothing without the pills."
She and Michael spent more than $600 a month on drugs. They lost their house in Tilton and moved to an apartment in Pembroke, where Horn still lives.
"Everything that didn't go into rent we spent," Horn said. "Food? Forget food."
Jonesin'
When the prescriptions and the money and the back-alley deals dried up, withdrawal set in. Jonesin', Horn calls it. She was hot, she was cold, she was shaking, she was scared.
Horn's son was born in 2005, and Horn says he quickly showed symptoms of withdrawal. She noticed anxiety, stress.
"I don't know for a fact that's what it was," Horn said, "but how can you not think that?"
The elder Michael died in 2005, after 10 years of marriage. He collapsed in the kitchen, weak from a spinal infection, congestive heart problems and years of drug abuse. His son was 5½ months old.
Horn says the death of Michael, her husband, forced her to look at the life of Michael, her son. She says she was jonesin' when it became clear.
"He was in a swing, and I looked at him," Horn said. "Look at this kid. His father is gone, his grandmother is gone and I either end up in jail or I end up dead. He's got nothing. He's got the state, and we all know how great the state is."
She chose a methadone clinic in Manchester, not Concord, because she says counseling is part of the plan down there. She attends a closed women's meeting each week. The women relate to each other, recalling the days when pills and desperation ruled their lives.
Methadone, an addictive opiate, satisfies the craving for heroin. Users don't get high. And they can function.
And, hopefully, they decrease their dosage gradually, until they're drug free.
Using an addictive, controlled substance to break the grip of an addictive, controlled substance? Nonsense, many say.
"My answer to that is I'm not hospital shopping," Horn said. "I'm now a productive member of society. I participate at meetings at my son's school, and I'm healthy. I'm not thinking constantly about how to get drugs, how to do other drugs. If you're serious about your recovery, it's helped me."
She visited the clinic seven days a week at first, downing 180 milligrams from a clear plastic cup each morning as a staff member looked on.
Now she administers the drug herself, each morning at 7. It's stored in little bottles, in a metal lockbox, the key hidden. The clinic conducts random drug tests and checks on her supply to make sure she doesn't ingest more than 180 milligrams at a time.
Horn hopes to be completely drug free in two years. Her dosage will decrease, without her knowledge.
Meanwhile, she's raising Michael, who's got blond hair and the quickness of a water bug. She regrets fooling doctors through the 1990s, regrets wasting their time. She knows she's still immature emotionally after years of stagnant development.
So she drinks her shot of thick red liquid each morning, waiting for her supply to finally run dry. "It's supposed to be cherry-flavored," Horn said. "But it's not. I don't like the taste, but it helps." | |
|
Home 
Portal 
Gallery 
Register 
Log in