Never Too Late (16 page)

I don’t think anybody can understand the feeling of withdrawals if you haven’t had them. It’s not a fever. It’s not a sickness. It’s hell. It’s death. I literally felt like I was going to die. I started having these sort of seizures, and the nurses ran in and stuck something in my nose. I woke up shaking horrendously and sick to my stomach, feeling like my body was about to explode out of my skin. I felt like somebody might as well have poisoned me, tortured me, and buried me alive. I’ve never felt anything that bad in my life. I was puking my guts out, I had diarrhea, I couldn’t eat anything, and I couldn’t even get up to take a shower.

A small bit of luck I had was that I got assigned to a block with two really sweet, kindhearted girls who took me under their wings. They took care of me for the first week I was detoxing, bringing me food and checking in on me all the time. It took about two to three weeks to get it all out of my system. In the middle of it, when I was detoxing really bad, I had a court appearance over a TV monitor where the judge dashed any hopes I had of rescue and told me I wasn’t going anywhere. I would have to stay in jail until they found out what the next trial date for me was. That absolutely killed me.

I didn’t cry, though. I’m not a big crier under normal circumstances, and I didn’t shed a tear for a pretty long time in jail. But when I did, I really did. It was December when I went in, just in time for the holidays, and if you want to hear three of the most depressing words in the English language, I’ll offer you, “Christmas in jail.”

When Christmas came around, these volunteers came in to visit us. They were older women from a church or a nursing home or something. They come around for the holidays and visit each block to pass out cookies and sing songs. It was something like eight women who came to my block,and they gave us the cookies and they were as sweet as they could possibly be. Then they started singing their song. They sang that we all had hope, that we all had a chance. I just started bawling.

After about a month in there I started getting used to everybody and made a lot of friends. There were still some people talking smack. I knew some girls in there from growing up together, and some of them wouldn’t let go of the whole
Teen Mom
thing. A girl was kicked out of our room for stealing my stuff, and I had some close calls where I almost got into a few fights. But I had my allies in there, just enough really cool girls who stuck together and got each other through that horrible experience.

After I was done detoxing, I was totally clean and sober for the first time in a long while. I hate to disappoint you, but there were no blue skies or angels singing that went along with it. Being sober in jail was hell. It sucked. It’s different to be clean and to be out in a good environment, when you’ve had time to make the right decisions for yourself and get in the mindset you need to be. But it wasn’t like I detoxed and woke up in a field of daisies, or even a comfortable bed. I repeat: being sober in jail sucked.

This is what it’s like to be an addict, and this is why it’s so hard to force somebody to get off of drugs before they make that choice for themselves: I felt like it was the time when I needed those drugs the most, and I didn’t have them. That was the only way I looked at it, and it was a very helpless, very low feeling. I couldn’t see anything good about being clean. Nothing. The worst part of it, which is obviously a lot clearer to me now, is that I’d been mixing up the pills I really needed with the pills I was abusing for so long that I didn’t know how to take care of myself at all. Those doctors weren’t just prescribing me all of those pills for fun. It might have been too much, maybe—you think? But I
do
have anxiety. I
do
have depression. I
do
have scoliosis and back pain that literally stops me from moving sometimes. Basically, I did need to be on medication, and I probably still do. But I messed with it for so long that I became a drug addict, and I completely lost perspective on how much I needed the pills, and how much of them I needed, and which ones I needed. I had gone so extreme that I had no concept of the right middle ground. So when I went to jail and I didn’t have that ridiculous cocktail anymore, I felt totally overwhelmed by the feeling of having absolutely
nothing
to help me cope with the worst situation I had ever been in.

I never wanted to be in jail! That wasn’t a plan I had for myself at any point in my life. It wasn’t something I ever even remotely considered happening to me. And yet there I was, sitting in jail, locked up and pissed off, hating sobriety, and having absolutely no sense of hope that my situation was going to get any better.

What could have gotten through to me at that time? I spend a lot of time thinking about that now. Someone as stubborn as I was, who had pushed the limits so far and gotten away with so much and was so intent on doing what she was doing, how do you get through to a person like that and help them onto a better road?

Usually the next step is a halfway house. I don’t know if that would have done anything for me or not, but I never got the chance to try it. Why? The halfway houses wouldn’t take me. That makes me angry to this day. I was locked up, I was sober, and to stay that way I needed every ounce of help I could get. But it came down through the grapevine that the halfway houses were refusing to take me because they thought my “celebrity status” was going to be bad for the other girls. There are no words for how upset that makes me, especially now that I am sober and educated enough to understand that you
never
deny someone their sobriety.

I had no hope. And that whole saga kept me in jail for an extra week, by the way. Because I didn’t get into any halfway houses, I wound up on house arrest and in drug court. Please take this as my own personal opinion: drug court is dumb. Basically, you have to wake up every single morning at six-thirty to go to their designated place and pee. And if you can’t pee, you’re in big trouble. Which sucks for me, because like I said, I just can’t pee on command. I don’t know. Just never got the hang of it. It’s not one of my talents. I had to dip back into jail not once, but twice for not being able to pee. And not because I was afraid of the test results, but because there was some woman sitting there a foot away from me, staring at me. I’d get nervous and not pee, and then I’d get sanctioned and have to go into jail for a week.

It was so stupid, because seriously, I was still out of reach of those pee tests. In fact, as soon as I got out of jail, I got into a new drug that they couldn’t detect. And this drug was trouble.

When I was in jail, I became really good friends with a girl named Sally. She got out of there a week before I did, and she was in the same situation as me with house arrest and drug court. About a week after I got out, I ran into her at drug court. It was one of the days when I couldn’t make it happen, and I was sitting outside drinking water, which they served me in a clean pee cup, by the way—thanks. Sally walked in and we said hi and exchanged numbers, which is completely not allowed, for reasons that became clear pretty much immediately.

Sally texted me to hang out later, and when she came by and picked me up, the first thing she said was, “Wanna get high?”

I looked at her like she was crazy, like, “How is that even possible?”

“Man,” she said, “Fentanyl patches. It doesn’t show up on the drug thing.”

“Fuck yeah,” I said.

Before I knew it, we were sitting in a park, and she was giving me this tiny little dot of paper. I looked at it and said, “What the hell is that?” I was thinking about the piles of pills I’d gotten used to before I went into jail. “That’s not gonna do anything for me.”

She was like, “Trust me.”

Fentanyl is serious business. It’s a serious, serious pain-killer. It comes in a patch, like a nicotine patch or something, that you’re supposed to put on your body and wear for days so your body gets the pain relief slow and steady, like an IV drip. Obviously it’s for people who have extreme pain to deal with, like cancer breakthrough pain, and it can even be used to keep people sedated. Fentanyl just does not fuck around. Dose for dose, it’s about fifty to a hundred times more powerful than morphine.

Not many people know about it, I guess. I didn’t for a long time. I wish I hadn’t found out. But I put the little dot on my finger and put it in my mouth, and in forty-five minutes, I was gone.

It was the worst thing that could have happened to me at that time. I fell in love with those things so hard I became an addict on a completely different level. Until then it seemed like I’d been racing to rock bottom as fast as I could. These things were like the turbo blast that took me there instantly. Sally would pick me up every morning and take me to drug court to go and do the pee tests, and everybody in there knew we were breaking the rules by hanging out. They’d smile and shake their heads when we walked in together. I’m guessing they probably wouldn’t have taken it so lightly if they’d known I was chewing on those patches while I was peeing.

I got into those Fentanyl patches so bad. I just couldn’t get enough. I’d tear off those little pieces of the patches keep them in my cheek, and nobody had any idea. It’s very scary to think about that, that I could have something that strong, and that addictive, and that easy to get away with.

Obviously I didn’t get away with it forever, and the day finally came when I did too much at the wrong time. Sally and I were on our way to IOP, or intensive outpatient class, which is a type of counseling program for new recovering addicts. She was driving us in her car. I was so high I was lying down in the seat, and at every turn I was going, “I’m too high. I’m too high.” She was laughing at me at first, but before long she was pulling over and I was puking on the side of the road. I mean, I know the difference between high and too high. And I was
way
too high to function. But you can’t miss IOP. That’s not how it works when they let you out of prison. You don’t just get to skip things when you don’t feel well. So we had no choice but to try and get through it.

It did not work out well for me. Soon enough I was sitting there in IOP, nodding out, which means passing in and out of consciousness in a way that’s obviously caused by taking too much of something. In front of the teacher, with fifteen other people sitting in a circle so everybody sees everybody, I was drifting off and swaying in my chair, making it as obvious as possible that I had found myself some drugs to get messed up on.

Nobody said anything that day, but they didn’t have to. I had gone too far. The show was winding down.

I had fought like a motherfucker to keep doing what I was doing. I did not care what obstacles stood between me and the things I wanted to do, and so far I hadn’t run into one I couldn’t find a way to get around. Nothing in drug court worked for me. Jail didn’t work for me. Narcotics Anonymous didn’t work for me. The people involved in these programs and the people who were trying to force me into sobriety were relentless, but I was more relentless than they were. It had reached a point where every bit of strength I had, I put into my addiction. And anything that tried to stand in my way, I either knocked it down or found a way to tunnel underneath it.

I didn’t care. Period. I did not care. It was like, “Put me on house arrest, put me in drug court, and I’ll show you what I can do. Tell me I can’t hang out with this girl from jail, and she’ll be at my house every day. Tell me I have to wake up every morning to take a pee test, and I’ll walk in with an even stronger drug hidden in my cheek.” Whenever I had to face some consequence or limit to my actions, it was like it became some twisted challenge to me. I was fighting a battle of my own making, and for what? To see how much more messed up I could get than I already was?

Where was Leah, you ask? Good question. She was safe and sound. But she was not with me.

I was so deep into my addiction that I wasn’t seeing my daughter at all. Her father and I didn’t have a good relationship, and that’s putting it lightly. We were about as far from co-parenting as it gets. Feeling better and fixing up my life had become the farthest thing from my mind. It was like everything got turned upside-down, and I was literally fighting to keep myself messed up—even if I didn’t exactly see it that way at the time.

When you don’t want to be present anymore, when you don’t want to have any emotions and all you want to be is numb—if that’s the reason why you’re taking all of those pills—the fact is you just don’t care. It’s really hard for people on the outside to understand what that feels like. That’s a good thing, obviously, because you don’t want everybody to be walking around in a daze, not giving a shit about anything. But it’s frustrating to try and explain what the experience is like, because most normal people will never find themselves in that state of mind. It’s hard to look someone in the eye and convince them of your love and concern when you both know there was a time when you were able to completely shut them out of your mind and heart. It’s even hard to explain it to yourself, once it’s over. Even when you’re the one who went through it, it’s hard to make sense of that mindset once you’ve gotten better and learned how to care again.