You have to want it like you want air

I broke my ribs at a concert. There’s not really any therapy they can do for that. They just prescribe you medication and you kind of get over it. I was prescribed oxycodone, and I took it as directed.

Getting addicted is not something I aspired to do. I don’t think anybody says, “when I grow up I want to be a junkie.” But I really, really liked it. My ribs still hurt, but who cares. We’re high and enjoying life. That was my favorite thing to do: take a handful of pills and play video games all night.

I didn’t realize how addicting they were. I know some people struggle getting off them, but I’m a pretty resilient guy. And I never really wanted to quit.

When the reason changed

The prescription ran about three years. At some point the doctor was just like, “hey buddy, we know you’re better. Nobody takes three years to recover from a rib fracture,” and he cut me off. I thought, all right, I guess that chapter of my life is closed.

It wasn’t closed. Your body has pain receptors and dopamine, and those pills make those enzymes flourish. Without them, they shut off, and everything starts to hurt. Your bones, your stomach. Your body starts punishing you for it. Once they cut me off, I stopped doing it recreationally and just did it to not be sick.

I’m a blue collar worker. Physical labor is something I have to do, and when your body doesn’t work, you can’t work, and then you starve to death. I never got to the point of living on the streets, begging for money. I was pretty good about beating a drug test and getting back to work. That’s what I did for a very long time. Eventually the pills ran out, and we turned to heroin.

What I saw coming

You see the guys who’ve been doing it for way too long, and you think, is this going to be me? In three years, two years, four years—you don’t know, but it’s always going to end up there. And then I’d see videos of people doing fentanyl and tranq, their limbs literally rotting away. That’s a hundred percent the road I was on.

The math and the exhaustion

It was a combination of math and exhaustion. I don’t get high anymore. I take the drugs, I don’t get high, I get not sick, and I’ll do anything to not be sick.

Once you sit down and add up all the money you’re spending on it. I’m living in a crappy apartment I’m never going to own. I’m making somebody else rich. I was spending around four thousand dollars a month on drugs. That’s not sustainable, and I did it for way too long. I got to stop. I got to stop.

Four days without sleep

I quit cold turkey. I literally laid in bed for four days just begging to fall asleep. That’s the thing you don’t realize the drugs do for you—they help you sleep. Without them, you’re not going to sleep. I would lay in bed for days pretending to be asleep when I wasn’t.

It’s agony. It’s literally torture. It’s hell in your bedroom and you’re just sweating it out. I don’t say that lightly. It’s extremely difficult to just stop.

About a week in, I heard about QuickMD.

Trying Suboxone

I just thought, you know what, anything’s better than this. I have to try something. I set up an appointment, and that day we went to the pharmacy and picked it up. Took the Suboxone, and just like that. Boom. I’m not sick anymore. My body doesn’t hurt. I can actually get up. I can feed myself. I can eat. It really saved my life, because I don’t know how much longer I could have done that.

I didn’t care about trading one drug for another. I had to get better. There were bills to pay, a life to be had, and I’m literally wasting away.

My spouse and my clinician

I told her, we have to stop. We can do anything. I make good money and I’m throwing it away. I’m done. We can move anywhere. I will buy you a car, a house, anything you want. Just, you have to do this with me.

She wasn’t ready yet. I knew that day would come. When she hit rock bottom, she was the one who said, “have you heard of this QuickMD?”

I talk to my clinician pretty consistently. He’s got to talk to a hundred people a day, but he always remembers: “hey man, I know you were going to the lake, your son had a birthday.” I only talk to him once a month. Personal bonds are a very important thing for people. We always need to feel like we’re not alone.

Where I am now

Four years now. February 25th, 2022. I never once had any desire to go back to it. If I did, I would never quit again, because quitting is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.

I moved out of Texas to Oklahoma. My children don’t want for nothing. I always grew up really poor, so it was always important to me to have nice shoes, nice clothes. My kids do karate and jiu-jitsu. I’ve got a job where I get to drive, and nobody bothers me. I go all day and never speak to another person.

I think my story is a success story if there ever was one. And I’d like to share it with everybody.

What I’d tell someone else

You have to want it. You have to need it in your bones. It’s never going to be easy, but you have to fight it. Fight the illness, fight the desire. You don’t win fights you don’t want to win.