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!

Thursday, September 22, 2011

On a moonless night

WHAT A LOAD OF BLAH BLAHS I posted yesterday. Those are the product of an unproductive brain. All I have done... ALL I HAVE DONE is skim through this one novel in French. I haven't a clue what happens because my concentration span is too fractured. Every single word I didn't know I looked up and wrote into a glossary notebook with the intention of reading back from page one, novel in one hand, notebook in the other now with a completely clear understanding of the text. O yeah and I took up Spanish, which is really easy. No more idiotic pictograms that all look the same. No more hong dong bing and bong words all nearly the same. I was looking for a project I could complete that had some usefulness. Chinese will never be useful to me at an intermediate level (ie after 2 or 3 years' daily study) unless I go hardcore backpacking. It won't be useful to in a career context unless I get past university level. That means 6 or 7 years' study at home. I can use Spanish just by flying to Spain for £50. Actually I'd like to go to Paris, Berlin and Madrid on the same trip. I love big cities. I once spent half an hour in Madrid. I looked out over this huge city, simmering on an endless plain, thinking "wow, I'm in the centre of Spain". British tourists hardly ever go anywhere but the coast and Madrid is about 200 miles from the sea.

The idiotic shitheads from the council are coming round tomorrow to criticize me for living like a pig. So I'm having a half-hearted effort at cleaning up. I'm just afraid of making a worse mess where I can't find "important" documents etc. I'm terrified of throwing something important away. Hence the hoarding. Anyway, least I can clean up to loud Spanish dialogues. I don't get why I can follow Spanish very easily, even when the words are just as unfamiliar as any other language. Eg an apple is una manzana. Yet Chinese words: hong dong shui dui lua I cannot remember. I think maybe it has to do with Spanish having grammar parallel to French. The little words are nothing like the French. A shop is una tienda; a street is una calle. When you get to posher vocabulary things are more similar to the English: libertad, igualdad, fraternidad and of course la electricidad.

I'm reluctantly agreeing (with myself) to go back on medication. Yet again.

I desperately need to see a doctor yet have no psychiatrist ie nobody willing to alter or tweak my meds.

When I went to this God-forsaken new methadone clinic I was promised continuity of care. This has not happened. The old clinic had a consultant psychiatrist who diagnosed me and prescribed the pills I'm on now. The new clinic's doctor said she could not prescribe medication so I lost my psychiatrist and appear to have no hope of getting a new one.

The bullshit on the clinic wall says you are to be involved in and allowed to make choices in your treatment. This has not happened. I am on 110mg methadone against my wishes. I want the dose lowered. And they force me to drink it in the pharmacy meaning I drag myself up there feeling crap each morning and have to wait 2 hours to feel OK. For years I drank my juice in bed meaning I got up feeling fine. I don't know whether the pharmacist is watering my dose but that is how it feels. I'm not using on top; haven't used any heroin in however many weeks I cannot remember, yet I go through spates of quasi-withdrawal symptoms in the mornings. Anyway my new worker, the third one I've had in 3 months, is getting me a clinical review so I can hopefully pick up my methadone like a normal adult and drink half of it before I sleep and the other half before I get up. The 2 times I really need it and it's not there now. He should also get my dose reduced. It was meant to stay at 110mg for 4 weeks (for no good reason). It's been on this ridiculous dose for 6 weeks. If they don't give what I want I'm making a detailed formal complaint as I feel totally let down by this clinic. The titration nurse was bullying, coercive and rude, forcing me into groups therapy I had no interest in. I went twice only so I could say I'd tried it and hated it. The second time I left within 4 minutes of it starting. Once you've been to one such group you've been to them all. They're set up as a punishment for people caught shoplifting so at least half the group announce at "check in" that they do not want to be there. I used more toned down language and said I was giving it a try.

The only week I stayed the entire session I was hypomanic enough to dominate the entire discussion. Then of course my mood crashed and I couldn't face the same group of people who I knew would have assumed only crack could make somebody that high. My experience and the life of the average junkie have diverged a lot over the last few years. I haven't been out begging or shoplifting since I can't remember when. I cut down my heroin use gradually with no help from any clinic or group. All these clinics do is put excessive pressure on you. I did a bit of crack ~ for the first time in ages I might add ~ about a week and a half ago. I used the stuff 3 or 4 days in a row. I gave up by buying a gigantic French dictionary, notebook and novel and forcing myself to look up every new word I found. It felt like Chinese torture in the beginning, then I couldn't stop it. I was up at 4am with 6 Feet Under playing and those dictionary pages whirring. I didn't "enjoy" this activity but I liked the brain-dead emptiness of it. As I say, I lost contact with the narrative flow nearly all the time so I was just looking up words words words and the same words cropped up over and over "mes larmes" means "my tears" I now know. But French isn't onomatapoeic. So a brush which is shush-ush-ushshshshshy, sweeping over the paper, is le pinceau. Which I looked up endless times yet still could not remember out of context.

So my mind is blank and my mood is low, despite all this talk.

I'm going to have to take risperidone, when I really want something else. Because I have been let down YET AGAIN by a network that seems deliberately to be constructed with man-shaped holes for people like me to fall down.

That's it for today. Don't be offended if I haven't visited your blog in an obscene length of time; I've visited nobody.


Illustrated: the book I'm reading by the Chinese immigrant Dai Sijie who, incidentally, had lived in France only 14 years when his French got good enough to write novels in the language. The title means "On A Moonless Night"

4 comments:

Syd said...

Gleds, I hope there is a solution that works for you. Cleaning up is a good start at getting busy to get your mind off yourself. How about the NA meeting? I find that going to meetings helps me feel better. Hope that your day goes well for you.

Gledwood said...

I think I'm going to have to go back to NA; couldn't bear it right after doing crack; decided to get out of that rut my own way via the French dictionary, which worked for me. But I'm ready for NA now. I just couldn't stand the helpful yet slightly missing the point vibe I sometimes get where they assume I'm more of a crackhead than I actually am yet in denial. I know what drugs I'm addicted to and how much and it's opiates that got me totally hooked for breakfast lunch dinner and bedtime. I even used to get up in the middle of the night to take it during the bad old days. Thank God those days are gone.

Baino said...

Hmm shame you lost your psych didn't they replace him/her? Not sure why they make you drink Methadone at the chemist I mean you wouldn't be taking it if you didn't want to at all . . then junkies are untrustworthy at best so you're probably being tarred with the same brush. Hope your mood improves. I haven't visited anyone for a while either. Cheers :)

Gledwood said...

It's ridiculous being at a clinic for 7 years and then because and purely because of an issue over a postcode being put on supervised consumption like a big fucking baby. It means I am taking twice as many sleeping pills as I ever did because I cannot take my own methadone when I want to at night and very early morning when I NEED it. Those clinics are SHIT we all know that. A heart clinic would never treat its "customers" that way would they? Making you take heart pills in front of a pharmacist??!! My mood is OK but still far FAR too flat.

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

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