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!

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Ill in an ill city


I WAS FEELING TERRIBLY ILL TODAY. I couldn't sleep until well past 6:30am. Woke in terror just after 7, thinking I'd overslept and eeked out my sleep until 9:45. Then I flew up the road, drank my methadone, which frankly doesn't seem to be holding me as I get up feeling like a block of ice every morning and got the bus to the drug clinic. I was dressed in full winter coat and my pajamas (which are a pair of jogging bottoms and a crusty old jumper). No way was I going in a shower the way I felt. I crawled up the road to the clinic with chills, nausea and fatigue. Of course as soon as I started talking my head was going quickly yet again and I was in an "elevated mood" (I'm starting to get sick of that phrase, but it's better than being depressed, hey). It's now 1814 hrs and part of me could sleep now but I don't want to sleep. Considering I didn't get a lot more than 2 hours last night I feel pretty good.

I called in on Valium Marilyn on the way back and was instantly struck with terrible wind. I ran to the toilet. Bullets of constipation came firing out, followed by a slithering serpent of diarrhoea that got sloppier and sloppier until eventually it was like melted chocolate ice cream spraying out of my arse. It got all over the round-the toilet rug, all down my leg. Then I tried to flush the toilet and it blocked nearly spilling my diarrhoea water all over the floor. Valium Marilyn said "aww don't worry about it we all get the shits sometimes" but it was like a scene from a Ben Stiller film. You know where the rodent prevents him flushing the loo or whatever it does.

Tomorrow I'm hitting my dr for sleeping pills. I desperately need some zopiclone 7.5mgs. They are the only sleeping pill I find truly effective ~ equivalent to over 40mg temazepam. Temazepam just makes me watch late night TV feeling relaxed and rubbery. Zopiclone actually makes me drop off just like natural sleep. Within an hour I'm usually out for the count. Even when severely manic I got to sleep within 2 hours of a single pill. I did only sleep 2.5 hours a night but would have stayed awake for days on end without it. That stuff about your body "getting the sleep it needs" is a damn lie. Yes it might be true as regards MILD insomnia, which isn't worth worrying about. But if you're sleeping less than a quarter of your normal ration with no end in sight it just hypes you up more and more and more and causes severe irritation. Actually I have FOUR separate issues for my GP, so I'd better write them down.

Duta my drugs worker laughed aloud when I ranted on about my farts but she said the chills and malaise were probably down to alcohol withdrawal. I haven't drunk anything since Saturday morning latest. Possibly Friday afternoon. (I don't want to know when my last drink was: frankly I don't care). It's true gastrointestinal distress, nausea and diarrhoea, sweating and malaise are symptoms of alcohol withdrawal but I thought you usually got the shakes and I haven't had any shakes... So I don't know. Also I feel worse today than any other day. Yet I'm not craving drink at all. Does this make any sense to anyone out there? Could it be drink withdrawal? I have been drinking fairly heavily for about ten years. Though the consumption was little above the government's recommended limit in the end, I did used to drink three litres of white cyder a day for a long while. At one point my consumption exceeded a bottle of Scotch a day ~ when converted into spirits. That's when I realized I had to stop. I literally could not remember what I had done for days on end. Tiny scraps of memory remained, like a blowtorched photo album.

RIOT NEWS: London's police cells are all FULL. There have been disturbances North, South, East, West and Central. Imagine riots in every borough of New York City, including Manhattan and that's how widespread this trouble has been. Most of it is mass looting but homes and businesses have been burned out. Many attempted carjackings have been reported. I've seen no rioters who looked North European or Asian but you're not allowed to state this obvious fact. Tonight the Met police promise 16,000 officers on the streets ~ most being busssed in from other forces. Though those other forces may soon be needing their personnel as there are copycat events in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool...

The government promise rioters and looters will "face the consequences of their actions". This probably means 50 hours community service each! Construct a mass pillory I say and let the populace get their own revenge with rotten eggs and dogshit!

I'm focusing my attention on learning to speak Chinese. Astonishingly my accent is pretty good ~ considering how different it is from English. I had it blaring through the telly at top volume last night ~ between Amy Winehouse and Yentl ~ and replicated vowels, consonants and tones pretty faithfully. Wow.

Wish me luck at the doctor's tomorrow. If it's not a lack of alcohol I have some weird disease... whatever could it be??

By the way, the BBC are calling the riots "the worst in British history"... ooer!

A CHILD IS BORN
a beautiful song... the visuals are from The Little Mermaid ~ no connexion with the song, which comes from the album Color Me Barbra




This is stuff I keyed in last night:~~~~~~~

ps that Classical Barbra cover (Japanese version) says in katakana: Kurashikaru Baabura ~ that's the nearest the Japanese language comes to it! And her name in Japanese is Baabura Sutoraisando! (the syllables are run very quickly together so it sounds more like Baabra Storaisando. You learn something new every day doncha know!

0352 hrs I cannot sleep. Haven't tried. I feel too hyper. I just did an online entertainment test "are you manic?"; it's supposedly a clinical evaluation. I scored 15 "you are severely manic, see a doctor immediately!" I'm not "severely" anything I'm just a bit manic that's all. Severely manic is when the stairs talk to you as you run down them and nobody can follow what you're saying. That's severe. I'm mild. Bloody internet drs. Get a life!!

RIOT ALERT: the civil unrest has spread to Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol. London is burning North, South, East, West and Central. Nothing like this has ever happened here before. Previous riots were confined to small areas: Brixon (where I used to go clubbing; it also happens to be a notorious centre for hard drugs, which I wasn't into at that time) and Broadwater Farm (very dodgy housing estate where I nearly died ODing on heroin (I was in hospital for 2 or 3 days afterwards). I've been back once since then and it makes my blood run cold...)

Here's some Chinese:
妈骂麻马吗 (ma1 ma4 ma2 ma3 ma) "is mother scolding the hempen horse?"
you just say ma ma ma ma ma ma that is ma with a high tone, ma with a falling tone, ma with a high rising tone, ma with a dipping tone, then ma with no tone ~ it's a kind of Chinese pun. Note every single ma except ma3 (which means "hemp") is written with the horse radical
马. A woman and a horse 妈 means mother (ie sounds like horse, means woman); two mouths over a horse means "to scold" and a mouth next to a horse means it's the ma particle, which just means "innit"! See: Chinese is easy. Easier than French or German BY A LONG WAY. And none of that irritating "English with spelling mistakes" phenomenon of European languages. No grammatical info that can only be expressed in tabular form (I loathe that). No verb endings. No plurals as such. The Mandarin accent sounds most peculiar (much more foreign than the Cantonese most people know from Chinese restaurants) with retroflex r (like the American r) and even a retroflex shhh sound. Retroflex means you turn your tongue backwards to pronounce it. I'm getting the accent pretty good now. Having practised via the DVD player and TV at top volume. My housemates already think I'm crazy so I'd rather be thought of as crazy and industrious than plain nuts. Wouldn't you??!?

6 comments:

Z said...

Blimey, that sounded horrible, the shits I mean, I hope you're over it now. Marilyn was really kind, what a friend.

Gledwood said...

Yeah it was awful. Had to put the carpet through the washing machine, it had staining on it that no amount of scrubbing under a tap would remove. If I hadn't gone round hers I'd probably just about have made it home before the intermittent explosive disorder kicked in!

Anonymous said...

I had a curry once and thought I was going to lose it on the way home in the car. Lucky I made it home, just! But I had to break the speed limit.
Kiwigirl

Janice Seagraves said...

Gled,

You poor thing. That sounds so rough.

I'm with your case worker, I think your illness is withdraw too.

You have been on drugs and alcohol for a very long time, and it does some nasty things to you when you go off of it.

I did some research on my book Windswept Shores, my hero Seth is an alcoholic and went through withdrawals when the beer ran out. Unfortunately, a lot of what I wrote about his withdrawals got cut. Apparently, it's not romantic when the hero gets to vomiting and shaking like his has the flu.

Keep fighting the good fight. I'm proud of you coming this far in your sobriety.

Janice~

Akelamalu said...

I hope you intestinal problems are down to you giving up alcohol and not anything more sinister. Well done for not drinking. x

daffy said...

Withdrawals really does different things in different ways. You must be a tough person to go through those nasty things. And thanks to the pills that helped you too. Did your doctor prescribed the Temazepam? don't you think the effects can be different from one person to the other?

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