- Alcohol
- Drugs
It was a crisp October day in Connecticut. I woke up to goose bumps forming on my body as the air in the mattress drew the last bit of heat from me. The body next to me no longer kept me warm. My eyes adjusted to the sporadic light that shone through the roof of the crack-house attic I called home. Recollections of the night prior began to surface, recollections of heroin, a drug I said I would never touch.
The week leading up to this day was my beginning of the end. I had gotten really sick, spiking a fever and having hallucinations. I was brought to the emergency room where I was told that I could have meningitis or a tumor. After conducting a drug screen, they determined the cause was inflammation of the nerves in my brain due to excessive cocaine use. This seemed unlikely to me because I did cocaine all the time, and this had never happened before. A few days into my hospital stay, my mom came to visit. The doctor entered right after. He flipped some pages on his clipboard and looked at me and said, “So, Ms. B, your urine tested positive for cocaine.” He saved my life. I got out of the hospital and only needed a few more days of research to realize that my life was going downhill really fast. The morning I woke up from my heroin-filled haze was the morning I made a decision. I finally asked for help.
I am fortunate enough to have an aunt that is one of the greatest examples of recovery I know. I called her up and asked for help. She told me to go to a support group meeting. After that meeting I realized I needed to completely remove myself from where I was. I ended up calling a good friend of the family who got me into a treatment center.
One of the biggest lessons I have learned is that you can’t rush recovery. I wanted to get back to life as quickly as possible but what I needed was to focus on recovery. I ended up staying in treatment and assisted living for a year. It was the best decision I could have made. That year of a solid recovery foundation has given me a life I never dreamed I could have. My life is amazing. Recovery does not promise a perfect life, but recovery has changed my perspective on life. It has given me the ability to see the good in situations and people and therefore the ability to be happy. I learned that happiness is a choice, and if we aren’t happy with ourselves, we can never be happy with the people or situations around us. It all starts within. Once we have this figured out, the rest comes. Recovery has given me back everything I thought I lost and has done so threefold. I never imagined owning a house, having a great job and being able to take the trips and have the adventures that I do today. I have everything I need in life and most of what I want. I don’t think I would even be alive if it wasn’t for my recovery.