i got food poisoning yesterday.....i was awoken yesterday morning by a violent blood boiling ice chill that ran through my body like i had just swallowed a glass of blended razor blades, immediately followed by uncontrollable projectiles from every hole in my body for the next 15 hours or so.....
it was a feeling i had experienced many times before while kicking opiates, but had never experienced it from anything else. at first i thought it was a nightmare, or that i had waken up from a long beautiful dream and it was the early months of 2007 again....i couldn't control it and it wasn't going away. if i made any sort of movement wether it was to roll over onto my side or blink my eyes, i was right back in the bathroom. the feeling is so similar to being dopesick i had to really lay there convincing myself that that wasn't the case, and that it would eventually pass...
the cold hardwood floor being the friend of any junky violently shaking and sweating uncontrollably is the first place i felt comfortable. and my first thought was that now would be a good time to chug some nyquil or find some tylenol pm....anything to take away the feeling i was having.....
it brought me back to the time i was kicking dope at my moms house in rockland county in the late 90's.....it was around 3am and i was laying on the couch listening to all the normal people in my family sleep like babies. the worst thing for a heroin addict when they are withdrawing is to hear someone being comfortable. i had slowly crawled to the upstairs bathroom and started looking for any kind of jar with a skull and crossbones on it. i had found some of my great grandmothers sleeping medication, next to that was a perscription for haledol. i had no idea what it was but the bottle said "slows down heart rate....take one pill every 8 hours or as needed.
one pill was surely not what this heroin addict in dyer need of sleep needed, so i took 6 of them..as the taste of the screen filtering the water in the bathroom sink hit my lips and i felt all those pills massaging the inside of my throat, i knew this was a bad idea. but my brain doesn't work properly and i couldn't feel what i was feeling for one more second.....i crawled back downstairs and layed back down on the sofabed. i felt every spring in the thin mattress that barely separated me from the long black bar in the middle of it that was paining my back even more. i put the tv on to maybe numb my brain a little but didnt have the energy to change the channel so i sat there and watched blues clues until the pills kicked in. all i could do was sit there and think about how that weird creepy dude in the striped shirt talking to a blue dog had it better than me, because he wasn't dopesick......
about 30 minutes had passed and the pills weren't kicking in, i kinda felt the sleep meds but my brain was going way to fast for them to knock me out and my body was way to out of sync with any normality that the only thing taking me down was more heroin. about 45 minutes after i had ingested the strange little pills i started feeling something, but it wasn't good....my arm started moving by itself and i couldn't control it, shortly after that my legs started torquing. i was overdosing on the heart medication..my jaw was moving uncontrollably to the point where i thought it was going to snap. my fingers and toes were spread as far as they could open and i was laying there trying not to scream. i literally layed there for hours in the worst pain of my life wishing my heart would just stop so it could all be over.
i managed to lay there still enough while everyone woke up at dawn and left for school and work, and i had made it to my sisters bedroom to hide from the nurse that came to watch my grandmother during the day. i made a few calls to have some friends come pick me up and bring me drugs to end this pain, i knew that all i needed was one little bag of heroin for this all to be gone. but i couldnt talk, my jaw was pressed against my cheekbone and all i could do was slur, i had to pick up the phone with my face and my neck because i couldnt move my arms or close my hands. my mom had called and the nurse came down to tell me she wanted to talk to me, i couldnt talk, i couldnt move.....20 minutes later the ambulance showed up and carried me out of the sweet suburban set up for all the neighbors peering out there windows to see.....my mom freaked when she heard my voice and called the paramedics. chalk up one more for mom saving my life.....
i remember being in the hospital bed in the emergency room and crawling to the phone on the wall when the nurse left. frantically calling my friends to tell them to come to the hospital instead of my house, but this was before the age of cell phones and they had already left. it had been about 15 hours since i had taken those pills and nothing had changed, i was in the most excruciating pain of my life jerking uncontrollably.....finally this indian doctor came in with a team on interns, half of them extremely hot young med students.....laying there in embarrasment trying to talk out of the side of my drool filled mouth he says to his interns "now this man is overdosing from haledol....." and injects me with about 500 milligrams of liquid benadryl. which starts working before he pulls the needle out. that had sparked about 20 good ideas after that day to try and shoot benadryl when i was sick, trying to break up nyquil gelcaps and force them into the back of the syringe, only to clog it or break the needle from pushing so hard......
before i was laying on the hardwood floor wishing to god this feeling would pass......and after thinking about that time in my life i found myself laying on the floor thanking god it did....and how grateful i am for food poisoning.....
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