HAMSTERS & HEROIN: Not all junkies are purse-snatching grandmother-killing psychos. I'm keeping this blog to bear witness to that fact.

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DIARY OF A SLOWLY RECOVERING HEROIN ADDICT

I used to take heroin at every opportunity, for over 10 years, now I just take methadone which supposedly "stabilizes" me though I feel more destabilized than ever before despite having been relatively well behaved since late November/early December 2010... and VERY ANGRY about this when I let it get to me so I try not to.

I was told by a mental health nurse that my heroin addiction was "self medication" for a mood disorder that has recently become severe enough to cause psychotic episodes. As well as methadone I take antipsychotics daily. Despite my problems I consider myself a very sane person. My priority is to attain stability. I go to Narcotics Anonymous because I "want what they have" ~ Serenity.

My old blog used to say "candid confessions of a heroin and crack cocaine addict" how come that one comes up when I google "heroin blog" and not this one. THIS IS MY BLOG. I don't flatter myself that every reader knows everything about me and follows closely every single word every day which is why I repeat myself. Most of that is for your benefit not mine.

This is my own private diary, my journal. It is aimed at impressing no-one. It is kept for my own benefit to show where I have been and hopefully to put off somebody somewhere from ever getting into the awful mess I did and still cannot crawl out of. Despite no drugs. I still drink, I'm currently working on reducing my alcohol intake to zero.

If you have something to say you are welcome to comment. Frankness I can handle. Timewasters should try their own suggestions on themselves before wasting time thinking of ME.

PS After years of waxing and waning "mental" symptoms that made me think I had depression and possibly mild bipolar I now have found out I'm schizoaffective. My mood has been constantly "cycling" since December 2010. Mostly towards mania (an excited non-druggy "high"). For me, schizoaffective means bipolar with (sometimes severe)
mania and flashes of depression (occasionally severe) with bits of schizophrenia chucked on top. You could see it as bipolar manic-depression with sparkly knobs on ... I'm on antipsychotic pills but currently no mood stabilizer. I quite enjoy being a bit manic it gives the feelings of confidence and excitement people say they use cocaine for. But this is natural and it's free, so I don't see my "illness" as a downer. It does, however, make life exceedingly hard to engage with...

PPS The "elevated mood" is long gone. Now I'm depressed. Forget any ideas of "happiness" I have given up heroin and want OFF methadone as quick as humanly possible. I'm fed up of being a drug addict. Sick to death of it. I wanna be CLEAN!!!

Attack of the Furry Entertainers!

Attack of the Furry Entertainers!

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

My Vision


LAUNDRETTA INSISTS she has found a dead rat in her room. I don't believe this, but I don't like it. Because talk of rats is liable to mobilize Evilstein to put rodenticide everywhere. And having three baby gremlins (Itchy-Bashful-Spherical) and a furry freight train (Pingpong) under my auspices, I cannot have poisons left lying round my room. If I thought we really did have rats I'd be the first one to go mentalist. Rats eat smaller rodents - and that would especially include tubby Roborovskis who don't bite and, living Hannibal Lecter-style within four walls of glass, have nowhere to run... Not to worry: the proliferation of wild mice in here tells another story. Mice only thrive where rats are absent. And rats are most certainly absent from our midnight-scuttling, all-squeaking, all-shrilling mousery of a house!

FIVE MINUTES til appointed appointment time
and here I am in the junkies' waiting room. Full of fellow clients with snivels. Walls choc-full of posters warning us of injections, infections and crack burns. Table strewn with dated magazines. (Shockingly lower class selection: the private clinic I briefly attended had Time magazine, Vanity Fair and Tatler! And, along one wall, shelves upon shelves of "borrow for free but please return and do not sell on" (well it doesn't exactly say that but may as well do: everything's prominently branded in theft-deterring rubber stamp...) Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre... among a 1960s Encyclopedia of Photography, The Piano Teacher, a novel by Elfriede Jelinek and Queen Noor of Jordan's memoirs: Leap of Faith. I purloined the last of these, plus Jane Eyre.

VISION. I'VE GOT SOME of my vision back since the New Year and posting those Not Really Resolutions (that strangely I have since found myself working towards: strange what "no pressure" can do...)

Each new day is a gift and a chance to effect changes. I used to really feel this. Actually, without getting too sobworthy, I finally grasped this fact some years ago in one of the most lost and forlorn times of my entire existence. I wasn't a junkie, and yet in my foolhardy quest for new experience, I had somehow got myself invited back home (to a nasty flat on an infamous estate or "project" as New Yorkers would put it). I had put £5 into a £20 bag, held out my arm and let myself be injected with this £5 hit of heroin in one...

All I remember was remarking how "good" the gear was... and dissolving into a dazzled protracted unconsciousness... surfacing time and again in near-amnesiac fuge to ask where I was. Finally breaking the surface of my dreams to find myself laid out under a clinical striplight. The metal handles of a trolley gleamed on either side of me. "What happened?" I had just asked (a strange snapshot of memory stretching into the shallowest layer of my personal haze). A nurse was telling me, not for the first time I was somehow sure, "You overdosed on heroin. You're in hospital." Bang! Suddenly I was back. And unable to digest these facts... I slipped slightly back into the warm dreams of my oceanic sleep...

There are ODs and there are ODs. I really had OD'd. For despite having been narcan'd to bring me round, I had somehow stayed unconscious or at least in white-out, for fifteen hours or longer: I had been given the heroin injection around midnight. Now it was late afternoon.

When a nurse informed me: "We want to keep you in overnight because we were worried about your breathing," I didn't argue. Merely lay in bed for hours longer. Repeatedly dunking back under warm bath-temperature water... In my alternative state I floated into an infinite haze of poppy-pollen gold. I was floating in the centre of the sun. Glowing yet not burning.

It was a pleasant place to be. The nearest place to "heaven" that drugs had got me thus far, in fact. For days afterwards I just wanted to return to this timeless, placeless place, realized that I couldn't; and cried.

Later on in the evening I got wheeled up to a ward, where, despite all that time spent flat out, I slept like a log all night.

Next day, when showering, I discovered multicoloured sensors stuck all over my torso. The same ones that feed into that machine we all know from Casualty and ER, the one that goes bleep-bleep and tells shocked relatives and associates how dangerously ill you really are.

I told no-one of my experience. Not family. Not friends.

Afterwards I was desperately upset and alone. So upset in fact, that I only wished for the issues this whole nightmare had stirred up to go away. To forget them, totally and utterly, for ever.

What irony: years of craving Death and now it had come so close without my willing it I was falling apart with the trauma of it all!

It was now that I learnt that life is precious. Life really is a gift. Not a chore, not an imposition. That each day is a wonder and a privilege. And that the meaning of life is appreciating the fact.

*

OK FOLKS, it's getting late and I've raw chicken fillet, a tub of black bean sauce, a red pepper (sweeter than a green one) and a boil-in-bag sachet of basmati rice (rather unadventurously I'm trying boiled maybe specked with peas if I've still got some...) as well as chili powder, monosodium glutamate ("MSG") and light soy sauce... wish me luck, for "learning to cook just like the Chinese takeaway" starts today. Wahey!!

If you're curious as I was, however, here's a recipe for Chinese egg fried rice.

*

Today's music:
The Prodigy: Everybody in the Place
...= my favourite piece of "commercial" rave ..!

13 comments:

Casdok said...

And unfortunatly we dont always appreciate it.
Happy new year!

Unknown said...

nice picture, happy new year

Tea said...

Love your babies! They are just sooooo cute. I want to squeeze their little whiskery cheeks.
Happy New Year Gleds

tea
xo

robkroese said...

Happy New Year, Gledwood!

Elma said...

hello--I am so tired. Lovely Hamsters.

butterfly said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
butterfly said...

happy new year gledwood :) thanks for the shoutout on your video blog from the morrissey video you snagged :)

cheers

Anonymous said...

They are real cute!
Once took care of some guineapigs. Loved them. They make sounds.

Anonymous said...

Happy New Year! Hope 2008 treats you well..don't forget to write!

Amazing Gracie said...

Hey, Happy New Year, just a tad late...the computer and I have been at odds so haven't posted in a bit.
Wishing you bright skies and tons of food in your fridge and no poison from the vile landlord!
~~~Blessings~~~

eric1313 said...

The hammy pics are excellent!

And I hope you don;t have rats, either. What a horrible fate that would be. I had no idea they ate smaller rodents.

Arjan said...

I don't know if you should really be happy that the rats are no where to be seen because you have mice. I'd chase both away.
The roborovski's should rule alone.

I just saw Monty Python's: the meaning of life. again this week..had a good laugh. But yeah be careful with your life, you only got one.

Gledwood said...

Thank you everyone... there are definitely NO rats here I am sure. Stupid people implying otherwise...

erm...

o yeah about the mice: they are easier got rid of than said. hang on. what?? other way round

hoo.oo.

I WANT OFF METHADONE AS QUICK AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE!

METHADONE ~ A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH







Heroin Shortage: News

If you are looking for the British Heroin Drought post, click here; the latest word is in the comments.







Christiane F

"Wir, Kinder vom Bahnhoff Zoo" by "Christiane F", memoir of a teenage heroin addict and prostitute, was a massive bestseller in Europe and is now a set text in German schools. Bahnhoff Zoo was, until recently, Berlin's central railway station. A kind of equivalent (in more ways than one) to London's King's Cross... Of course my local library doesn't have it. So I'm going to have to order it through a bookshop and plough through the text in German. I asked my druggieworker Maple Syrup, who is Italiana how she learned English and she said reading books is the best way. CHRISTIANE F: TRAILER You can watch the entire 120-min movie in 12 parts at my Random blog. Every section EXCEPT part one is subtitled in English (sorry: but if you skip past you still get the gist) ~ to watch it all click HERE.

To See Gledwood's Entire Blog...

DID you find my blog via a Google or other search? Are you stuck on a post dated some time ago? Do you want to read Gledwood Volume 2 right from "the top" ~ ie from today?
If so click here and you'll get to the most recent post immediately!

Drugs Videos

Most of these come from my Random blog, which is an electronic scrapbook of stuff I thought I might like to view at some time or other. For those who want to view stuff on drugs I've collected the very best links here. Unless otherwise stated these are full-length features, usually an hour or more.

If you have a slow connexion and are unused to viewing multiscreen films on Youtube here's what to do: click the first one and play on mute, stopping and starting as it does. Then, when it's done, click on Repeat Play and you get the full entertainment without interruption. While you watch screen one, do the same to screens 2, 3 and so on. So as each bit finishes, the next part's ready and waiting.

Mexican Black Tar Heroin: "Dark End"

Khun Sa, whose name meant Prince Prosperous, had been, before his death in the mid 2000s, the world's biggest dealer in China White Heroin: "Lord of the Golden Triangle"

In-depth portrait of the Afghan heroin trade at its very height. Includes heroin-lab bust. "Afghanistan's Fateful Harvest"

Classic miniseries whose title became a catchphrase for the misery of life in East Asian prison. Nicole Kidman plays a privileged middle-class girl set up to mule heroin through Thai customs with the inevitable consequences. This is so long it had to be posted in two parts. "Bangkok Hilton 1" (first 2 hours or so); "Bangkok Hilton 2" (last couple of hours).

Short film: from tapwater-clear H4 in the USA to murky black Afghan brown in Norway: "Heroin Addicts Speak"

Before his untimely death this guy kept a video diary. Here's the hour-long highlights as broadcast on BBC TV: "Ben: Diary of a Heroin Addict". Thanks to Noah for the original link.

Some of the most entertaining scenes from Britain's top soap (as much for the poor research as anything else). Not even Phil Mitchell would go from nought to multi-hundred pound binges this fast: "Phil Mitchell on Crack" (just over 5 minutes).

Scientist lady shows us how to cook up gear: "How Much Citric?" Lucky cow: her brown is 70% purity! Oddly we never see her actually do her hit... maybe she got camera shy...

And lastly:

German documentary following a life from teenage addiction to untimely death before the age of 30. The decline in this girl's appearance is truly shocking. "Süchtig: Protokoll einer Hilflosigkeit". Sorry no subtitles; this is here for anyone learning German who's after practice material a little more gripping than Lindenstraße!































Nosey Quiz! Have you ever heard voices when you weren't high on drugs?

Manic Magic

Manic Magic

Gledwood Volume 2: A Heroin Addict's Blog

Copyright 2011 by Gledwood