Part 3: The dad question

This is the follow on story about when I met my son's father and how my beautiful boy came to be. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.

Walking into the abyss

"He's been in prison."

I said it as casually as anything as I looked around the large dining room that was slowly filling with patients carrying trays of food, trying to find somewhere to sit. I had been back in rehab for about a week. Mum was visiting.

Averting my eyes from my mother, I took in the faces of the other patients and tried to size each one of them up, work out their story. It was easy to tell which wards people came from after you'd been an inpatient for so long and on so many occasions. The younger, louder group sitting by the window and closest to the exit were the drug and alcohol patients. They, or should I say we, ate quickly so we could escape to the garden to smoke. Smoking was the only real vice we had left. Oh and chocolate. I consumed both in abundance during my rehab stays.

This ashtray full of filthy cigs is basically what my life was like.
Photo borrowed from here.

The women quietly chatting on the other side of the room were obviously from the post natal depression unit. They pushed crying babies back and forth in their prams while trying to eat the tasteless cafeteria style food with their free hand. There was so much sadness in their tired eyes when they first came to the hospital. Sadness and desperation. I would later come to stay in that ward too, with Noo. The difference with the PND ward is a sense of hope, knowing that what we were suffering with our young bubs was temporary - it had to be. Not like the druggies and alcos. They - we - have to battle our addiction demons for life.

The other patients, chatting with each other or eating alone, were the chronically depressed or anxious or both; the self-harming borderline personality disorder girls, older patients with seemingly incurable melancholia, bipolar suffers admitted for ECT. They came from all walks of life. All ages, backgrounds, gender. Mental health issues are indiscriminate.

I looked back at mum. She didn't know what to say. I knew, she knew, I said what I said to hurt. To make them worry about me. To make them see what they'd pushed me away to.

"Oh, yeah and he's got five kids from three different women."

Ner, ner, so there! I'm really fucking up now, aren't I mum? Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

"What are you doing, Vanessa?" asked mum without emotion. She was trying not to show that my campaign of hurt was working.

"Nothing, mum. I really like him. He's coming to the family day and I want you and dad to come as well and meet him".

"Oh. Right. Ok, well I'll have to speak to your father", was mum's non committal reply. And she left.

I knew I'd been a bitch. I felt bad. But mostly I was angry. So fucking angry. Angry at them, my parents. I wanted to hurt them.

When I got kicked out of the previous psychiatric hospital and mum said I couldn't come home, I was so pissed off. I felt so abandoned, so lonely and vulnerable. My own parents couldn't deal with who I was: the damaged, drug addicted rape victim who'd fucked up her life. If the people who made me and nurtured me couldn't love me, how the fuck was I going to love myself? To give a shit? I wanted to wash my hands of myself just like I felt they were trying to wash their hands of me.

I couldn't get away from myself. Being in rehab they make you stop running. They make you take a good hard look at yourself so you can see who it is really there looking back at you in the mirror. I didn't like what I saw. Not one little bit.

The next morning, a Friday, actually Friday the 4th of April 2008, my dad called me in my room back in the D&A ward. He said in no uncertain terms that he wanted nothing to do with this person who I'd been spending my time with and that he and my mother wanted me to stop seeing him immediately. I was to not tell this person anything about our family - where we lived, what their names were, where my dad worked.

I lost it. Screaming and carrying on over the phone. I won't even write what I said. I no doubt sounded like a crazed teenager having a tantrum. It was horrible. I was so incredibly angry and hurt but wasn't what my dad said the reaction I was looking for?

After I hung up the phone I walked out of the ward and out of the hospital grounds and to the nearest place that sold alcohol and ordered a Toohey's Extra Dry and drank it. It tasted disgusting. I ordered another and drank it too. I had to have enough grog in my system so when I went back to the hospital and the nurses breathalysed me they would tell me to leave and not return for seven days.

I then called the man who my parents had expressly told me not to see and told him to come get me.

More to follow.

V.


Part 1: The dad question
Part 2: The dad question

Part 2: The dad question

This is the follow on story about when I met my son's father and how my beautiful boy came to be. For part 1 read here. 


[From the end of part 1] We weren't talking long before I asked him if he knew anywhere I could score. My benzo supply was running low and I knew if I didn't get something soon, I would start to feel the pain again. The flashbacks would come back with a vengeance...

A new addiction

So I moved from the table where I was sitting alone, across to where he was finishing his beer, and offered to shout him another one while he thought about my proposition.

How do you size up a fellow drug taker? A person that you know would be ok to ask such a question. I mean the kind of drugs I was looking for are illegal and although Australians are apparently the biggest illicit drug takers in the world, not everyone is getting on it. This guy could have been a cop for all I knew! I've asked dozens of people over my time if they know how I can hook up. It is a risky business but I've never got in trouble. Maybe I've just been lucky, or not, depending on which way you look at it I suppose. Maybe there is a look to a person that screams drug user, fellow lover of the high life. I don't know. Either way, I picked it because he said he did know a few people and he'd see what he could do to help me out.

As I sat opposite this stranger at a cheap stainless steel table out the front of the pub, I peered over my beer and took him in: He was rough looking, in that tradie hard worker sort of way. About 6 feet tall with an athletic build. Arms covered in old tatts and scars were wiry and muscular. His long beak-like nose had obviously been broken a few times and I noticed his hands were rough as old sandstone. His knuckles were bulbous and had clearly come to blows over the years - through work or violence - I couldn't tell. His thick hair was short and a sort of browny blonde. I bet it would curl if he allowed it to grow.

It was his eyes that took me in. Piercing blue eyes that looked directly into mine, past the broken soul, and saw me for what I was. Just a woman. No story. No baggage. No hurt. Just me. We drank and we talked. I don't remember exactly what about. I don't remember having any reservations about him, or any concern for myself for sitting there talking to a complete stranger. But I'd lost all concern for myself a long time ago.

Writing this now, I remember he said I had a nice smile. He was charming like that. Always so charming. So confident and cocky. He knew how to make me feel good, when I felt so bad, so alone. My weight had ballooned out to 95kg while I was in hospital and my hair was still short. I thought I was ugly but he made me feel beautiful.

I found this drawing in one of my notebooks I used in rehab early that February.
I think that is suppose to be me. My eyes look so anxious and frightened and my mouth so flat.
But at least there's so much colour. I don't remember feeling that much brightness.

It wasn't long before we were hunting down dealers at other pubs in the area. And this is when things get a little confusing in my memory. I think we may have scored some ecstasy and some acid. I remember drinking all night. And smoking. Ugh! I was smoking well on nearly two packs of menthols a day at the time.

By then I was living in a newly developed boarding house in the inner west. It was full of students mainly but some older singles and even some families in one room. It was massive, over two floors, I think, with maybe 20 rooms to a floor but only had one kitchen, one laundry and separate shower rooms for men and women. There were a couple of extra unisex toilet rooms on each floor which were always dirty. You had to bring your own dunny paper. It was disgusting.

In my room I had a double bed, a mini bar fridge full of Goon (aka cheap cask wine), some space for clothes and a TV. It was late February when I moved in, I think. And it was hot. Air couldn't move through the rooms through the tiny windows so they were stiflingly overheated. The rent was ridiculous for what it was but when I took it it was because I didn't want to go interviewing for share house accommodation. I didn't think I wanted anyone in my life let alone have anyone see too closely how I was living.

Nothing happened the first night were together. Nothing sexual anyway. We were too wasted. It was maybe on the second or third night that we became intimate. He just kept hanging around. I remember thinking I wanted him to go. Go back to his life, but he latched on. Except for the occasional trip home for clean clothes or to go use a public telephone. That is when I found out he had kids, a family.

Just like with alcohol when you're on lots of stimulants like Es or speed or trips they make you talk. We must have talked and talked. It would have been the first three weeks of March 2008 that we hung out - mostly at my place but sometimes at his share house in the next suburb. We just talked and shagged and got high. It was so fun, so intimate, so completely and utterly separate from my life and my problems. From my family and friends. From reality.

But even then, as out of it as I was, I knew I would have to get sober and go back to my job that was waiting for me.

After ringing around for weeks I finally got into another psychiatric facility. One which was a proper rehab (unlike the one I went to and scored a benzo addiction at) that made you go to AA meetings and lectured you hard on what your choices as a drug or alcohol abuser were: End up on the street, in jail or in a coffin.

I said goodbye to the man who was to become my son's father and told him I'd see him when I got out.

I knew from the few weeks we'd spent together that he was an alcoholic and a chronic pot smoker. Had been all his life and was unlikely to change any time soon, despite promises of joining me on the wagon. I knew he had a family that had left him because he had done something bad but I didn't know what. I knew he was bad news for me. Deep down I knew that if I was to take my getting sober seriously I should walk away from this person and never see him again. I had the perfect opportunity to do that: I had the safe haven of rehab. If you've got good health insurance and you're fucked up enough they let you stay for ages as long as you abide by the rules.

Plus I had a job, a so called life, I was supposed to be going back to. A corporate job. In an office in the city. With banker wankers and girls in tight skirts. Friday drinks and long lunches. Expectations and key performance indicators and responsibilities and 8.30am starts. My old life. The life I was so afraid of returning to. Still am afraid of returning to.

But he made feel good. When I felt so bad. He made me feel desirable, loveable, needed, wanted, powerful. In my fucked up, topsy turvy world he became the one.

On that sunny morning at the pub when I first met this man and enquired about drugs I had no idea that he would become the drug that I would acquire an addiction for to keep the painful memories and flashbacks at bay.



That is enough for now. I'm exhausted.

More to follow.

V.


Part 1: The dad question
Part 3: The dad question

The Xanax (and other benzos) dilemma: My story

There was a really good article in the Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend magazine liftout this Saturday just gone. Unfortunately I can't find a link for the article but it talked about the soaring use of Xanax in Australia as a go to drug to help people deal with the stress of modern life. I know the benefits of Xanax and other benzos. But I also know the downfalls. This is my story:

Anybody who has read my blog for a while (or even just a couple of weeks) would know that I am a sufferer of anxiety. That dreaded condition that makes the human reflex to fight, flight or freeze come on even though there is nothing to battle, nothing to run from and no real reason to be paralysed with fear. That feeling of dread that something bad is going to happen but you're not quite sure what. But it's there. It might even kill you. But it won't.

Anxiety has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I was a severely shy kid. It was horrible. I found most social interactions to be painful and I didn't make friends easily. I spent an enormous part of my preschool and primary school days alone in the playground. And I was at school from 8.30am to 6pm everyday because both my parents worked so they were very long days being isolated.

If they had the Kids Health Check system that the Federal Government is planning to use to test three year olds for mental health issues back in the late 70s/early 80s, I probably would have hit all the markers for childhood anxiety.

There was a child psychologist enlisted in my preschool years to help with my terrible sleep habits and another one when I was in year two to try and find out why I was behind in school. I remember another one in the early high school years, numerous meetings with school counsellors and then a careers counsellor/psychologist just after I finished year 12. None of them helped me but to reinforce the belief that I was defective.

I have always believed, and still do believe, that there is something intrinsically wrong with me, with who I am. It is at the base of my core beliefs. It is the foundation on which I have spent my whole life building layer upon layer of self hate. Paradoxically, I have spent my whole life fighting that belief. Trying to suppress it. Avoid it. Deny it. Kill it. Medicate it. (I know terribly sad, blah dee dah, but I deal with it. Kinda. And some days are better than others.)

This is why, when I got drunk for the first time at 15, I was sold. I found a cure, albeit a temporary one, for feeling like shit. Alcohol and drugs took away that horrible feeling of constant self doubt that lived within me. I created this new Vanessa who was cool and untouchable and did not give a fuck. You can't hurt me, big bad world, because I just don't fucking give a shit.

But I did give a shit. Because after every time I got drunk or high, or both, what I felt when I was hung over and coming down, was 100 times more disgusting than I would have felt without it. The anxiety and self loathing were back with a vengeance. And there began the vicious circle. Feel like crap, drink/do drugs to numb the pain/feel invincible/cool/able to speak to people, then feel like crap all over again. I went on this roundabout for 12 years, until I fell off with a massive thud and none of my old survival techniques worked any more. That is until I found benzodiazepines. 

The thing with benzos is that you don't need to meet up with some questionable character in a back ally to score them. You make an appointment with your GP, get a script, toddle off to the pharmacy and hand over about $15-20 for a bottle of Valium, Halcion, Normason, Mogadon, or...  for Xanax. 

Think before you pop. And always use as directed.

I am not sure about ordering drugs without a prescription on the internet and getting them delivered to Australia, but in the UK it was easy. I paid a shitload once for Valium and Mogadon from some dodgy American site claiming to issue prescriptions from the Czech Republic. And a miracle occurred. These little wonder pills made me feel better. Until they didn't. 

After I was r**** (you know the word I'm censoring here, I just hate seeing it, and I wrote it in my last post and now probably need about three months before I can get the guts to write it again) I was a mess. As you can imagine. (I plan to write about the whole event one day soon. It is important to me that I do. One day. Today I am just talking benzos!) I was living in London at the time and the day after I'd spent 13 hours being grilled and photographed and prodded and humiliated all over again by the Metropolitan Police, I had an appointment to see a GP. I was injured, both physically and psychologically. I still am. Those wounds will never heal. But I digress, like I always do!

So the GP gives me a script for Valium. I went to Boots The Chemist, picked up my little bottle and then dropped by the off license for half a dozen bottles of beer. Half litre bottles, that is. I was numb and floating through my worst nightmare. But the thing with benzos is that they are really addictive. You need more and more of them to get that same zoned out feeling the first one gave you. 

From my experience, prescriptions for benzos are actually pretty hard to come by in the UK. When you pick up your pills from Boots they hand you a leaflet with a very stern face and point out the risks of addiction and the dangers of combining the drug with alcohol. Not that it stopped me using both to stop my mind from going over and over that horrible scene. The story is very different here in Australia. Shall I write about it here, on my blog? Ah, fuck it, I've come this far.

When I came back from England I was here two days before my parents admitted me to a rehabilitation centre for drug and alcohol addiction and chronic major depression and anxiety as well as post traumatic stress disorder. See I'd been very unwell for a lot longer before the assault. It was what sent me over the edge. I was put on suicide watch and stripped of everything I knew: my home, my friends, my job, my drugs, my booze, my mobile phone, my sanity (what was left of it). Thrown into this world of the ever revolving door of rehab. With serious addicts. Serious psychiatric patients. One on one appointments with shrinks, group therapy, urine tests and a strict daily routine of when to get up, when to eat, when to talk and when to get your meds.

Morning and night we all lined up to the little nurses' window to collect our little cocktail of antidepressants, anti psychotics, mood stabilisers, sleeping tablets and anti anxiety medication - whatever your individual file said you were taking. And then there was the PRN (Prescribed by Registered Nurse) Valium for between times when you felt the withdrawal process was too hard to deal with and the anxiety got too much. That first time in hospital, every time actually, I felt like a dirty little drug seeker begging the nurse for another tablet. Anything to take away the reality of where I was and how I got there, and who I was suppose to be.

Once I'd done my three weeks, I was out the door clutching a script for antidepressants and mood stabilisers but the Valium was stopped. They don't send drug addicts out into the real world with benzos. I was raw. Just a shell of a person. My soul was broken. I had no idea who I was any more. I had nothing to use to mask the feelings of loss and despair and fear. Nothing was left but anxiety and the deepest, blackest hole of depression. And that little girl of 15 who hated herself.

I lasted five months before I was back again, at another psychiatric facility, and unfortunately one that wasn't really equipped for addicts. All the other rehabs in Sydney were full. This place didn't have the same security as the other place. They didn't check your bags and other personal items and they didn't routinely drug test you after every trip outside the hospital. I knew one elderly alcoholic who was in there to dry out but had a bagload of methadone tabs in her cupboard. Um, hello?! Methadone? I swapped her one for an oxycodone.

I was sharing a room with an alcoholic/benzo addict/self harmer. Not fun. But she introduced me to doctor shopping and we were using all our 'spare time' to go to doctor's appointments around Sydney asking for all of the above mentioned benzos. Xanax was actually the hardest to come by, but it was possible. With the right story. My story.

So I spent two months in a psych ward on approximately the same cocktail of drugs that killed the awesome Aussie actor Heath Ledger, while chugging back energy drinks to stay awake through the fugue. Not once do I remember there being any talk about the dangers of benzos or of other prescription drugs while I was there. No one told us about withdrawing off them. And to be honest, I didn't really think about it.

My room mate and I eventually got found out and kicked out of the hospital. My parents had had it with me and kicked me out of home. The cheapest accommodation I could find was a room above a pub in a seedier area of Sydney. I had my stash of pharmies from the doctors that I knew around the hospital but that was it. The seedier area doctors knew about drug seeking benzo addicts and did not prescribe them willy nilly. I waited for up to three hours once, in an unknown doctor's surgery, only to be told they couldn't give me anything. And then I began to come down.

I had no idea what was happening to me. I had diarrhea and vomiting, cold sweats, headaches, cramps. I felt dreadful. For days. I had no idea why. I didn't put two and two together. I found out much later that withdrawing off the huge amount of drugs in my system is what did it.

I could have died.

But I didn't and my tail of woe doesn't end there but my abuse of Xanax and the like did.

Obviously I wasn't a normal everyday case of Xanax dependence like the article in the weekend's SMH talks about. It was a little bit more extreme than that. And I take full responsibility for what happened to me because of my doctor shopping. But I truly think that there needs to be better controls on how these drugs are prescribed and managed. Because while on one hand benzos can take away that feeling like you're going to die from anxiety, on the other it can kill you with kindness.

Please, if you suffer from anxiety and have an addictive nature, avoid benzodiazepines. There are other medications now that can help that are not addictive. And of course there is therapy which has since helped me so much more than that little purple pill ever did.

V.

If you do need assistance these sites maybe helpful:

reachout.com
Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia
Beyond Blue
Black Dog Institute

On the night before surgery...

Well, this is my "night before" blog. I've been thinking about what to write all day, as well as reading loads of other blogs, but I haven't been able to come up with any profound last words before I go under the knife, so I'm just going to type and see what comes out...

I've been quite consumed with anxiety about it all but not because I'm fearful of the surgery or the anesthetic. Quite the contrary, I don't mind being sedated and having that lovely dreamy feeling when you wake up. I'm not too scared about the pain either, I figure I endured a 39 hour labour when Noo was born, I can endure any pain that I might be inflicted with. What I'm really scared about is what losing weight means to me.

I am at the tail end of what has been a very long, very hard journey that started in 2007 when I had a massive breakdown.  One minute I was living and working in London, the next being admitted to a psychiatric and rehabilitation hospital in Sydney's eastern suburbs. Its been an incredibly hard and bumpy road that has found me here, typing this blog getting ready to be banded to help me shed the fat I've been hiding behind while I heal what have been some pretty heavy emotional scars.

Before 2007 I was a bubbly, funny and energetic party girl. I lived to party and have fun. Then something very bad happened and all that came crashing down. The year that followed was a living hell. I started to self medicate with drugs and alcohol and when I finally came back to Sydney it was to detox to save my life.

Getting sober at first was like being striped clean with bleach. I had nothing to help me hide from the thoughts in my mind and was forced to face what my life had become. I was 32 and I had nothing but a massive UK credit card debt and a serious drug and alcohol problem. I was not the cool party girl/rock chick, in control of her habits, as I had somehow managed to convince myself I was. In those three weeks in the hospital I began to realise I had no idea who I was. Since I was a shy teenager who discovered drinking alcohol gave me the confidence I could never have alone, I had made drinking and partying the central part of my personality. Now that it was gone I was left open like a raw weeping wound without a band aid. 

In the hospital I was put on various medications to help with detoxing and with the deep depression I now found myself in. Over the last three years I have tried eight different anti-depressants and about five different anti-psychotic/mood stabilisers (which I don't need any more). Some of these medications really affect your appetite and by not being able to drink, I was seriously drawn to food - particularly chocolate and any other sweet food.

Chocolate is addictive and affects the same neuro pathways as drugs and alcohol do. With my increased appetite thanks to whatever meds the psychiatrists had me on I became obsessed with chocolate - it was my new cocaine! 

Finally, after four admissions and almost a year to the day of that terrible thing that happened, I found out I was pregnant with my son. It was make or break time. Get sober and live and raise a little baby out the ashes that was my old life or, well, the or just doesn't bear thinking about.

So I was preggers. The first 14 weeks I had horrific morning sickness and couldn't eat so actually lost 13 kg.  I got down to my lowest weight since giving up the booze, etc, and was 83 kg as I headed into the second trimester. By the end of my pregnancy I was completely infatuated with lollies and chocolates and fruit and ice cream and anything sweet I could get my hands on! Most importantly though, I found a new hope and could finally see a future for myself as I fell deeply in love with the little baby that was growing inside me.

By the time Noo was born I was 104kg. In the few weeks and months following his birth my weight never really dropped below 95 kg.  I was hungry all the time. Seriously starving 24 hours a day. I would eat whenever he needed a feed, even throughout the night. My appetite was bigger than it had even been on those horrible mood stabilisers! I complained about it to my doctor and it was just put down to the fact I was breast feeding. I also started to get other symptoms - profusive sweating, sleeplessness, and extreme anxiety. I began to feel like the world was going to end. I had this overwhelming feeling all time of impending doom.

Once again I went back to my GP and I was seeing a psychiatrist weekly but still my symptoms were put down to being a new mother who was breastfeeding. I was also on a massive dose of an anti-depressant which was giving me a strange side effect that my head would experience a buzzing sensation whenever I moved. Both my GP and the psych put it down to anxiety and kept increasing my dose.

By the time Noo was just over 3 months old, I was losing it and finally I was admitted to a psych hospital again to come off my meds to try another type of anti-depressant. As is routine when you get admitted to these places, the hospital's GP ordered a stack of blood tests. I was later called in to see the doctor and told that my thyroid was malfunctioning and was extremely hyperactive, to the point where he thought I might have Graves Disease. I had my laptop with me so was straight on to Google when I got back to my room. Symptoms included, anxiety, fast metabolism causing increased appetite, profusive sweating... I could not believe it! Here I was thinking I had regressed back to the depressed state I was in back in 2007 and what really was the issue was that I had a thyroid problem! 

I was furious to say the least.  I'm still not over it really, will never be, that my doctors did not test my thyroid function given my extreme symptoms. I suffered for about 4 months with a newborn who I was struggling to care for because I was losing my mind. When I finally got to see an endocrinologist I was diagnosed with postpartum thyroiditis. Phew! That was well over a year ago and my recent appointment with the specialist confirmed that the thyroid disease has righted itself and is functioning at normal levels now.

Wow, this has become a much longer entry than I expected but I suppose it goes to how I find myself here, on the eve of my gastric band surgery.

I tried many diets in an attempt to lose the weight I had gained including Weight Watchers (x2), Jenny Craig and two sessions a week with a personal trainer. Still nothing was working, or it would work for a couple of weeks to a month and next thing I knew I was falling into bad habits again.

In one of my stints in rehab I met an alcoholic girl around my age who would eat very little food. I must have asked her about it and when she told me she had a gastric band I was completely intrigued. When my Jenny Craig diet failed last year, I started thinking more about that young woman and began researching all about laproscopic gastric band surgery. I have read everything, I think, there is to read about it, and I knew it was the thing for me.  I know I have a lower BMI than most people who have the procedure but for someone who has been in the overweight/obese category for most of my adult life, I really think its the right thing for me.

So I've been sober two and a bit years and I am the mother of the most wonderful little boy. Getting pregnant got me sober and being a parent keeps me sober.  I don't know if anyone would understand this but being obese also keeps me sober. I hardly ever go out at night and I haven't even thought about another relationship or men in general, since this whole saga began. At the beginning, I was too broken for a relationship, now I'm just too fat. But a healthy relationship is something that I want but it frightens me so much at the same time.

Will losing weight and feeling good about my body be enough to make me want to go out and meet people but also tempt me to drink again? Its a frightening thought but honestly, I don't think so (the drink party I mean, not the meeting people!). Writing this blog has made me realise that. I am so far away from that shell shocked girl that came back from London in June 2007. I am a strong and resilient woman who has come back from the brink of oblivion and I'm ready to let go of this mask, this armour, and let the new and fabulous me come out and shine!

Next time I post I will be banded! It is midnight so I must go to bed.

Vanessa