The Beginning of It All (A Very Long Introduction)

I was sitting here watching an old episode of "Flashpoint" when a craving to get high hit me with such intensity. This particular episode titled, "The Other Lane," had nothing to do with drugs. However, I had taken my dose of methadone shortly before the craving hit and decided that I wanted to write what was going on when the idea struck to start a blog.

MMA or MMT, which stand for Medication-Assisted Treatment or Methadone Maintenance Treatment, has a bad rep. Even I believed, years ago, that there was no point to it as it was just going from one drug to another. While the latter does ring true somewhat, there is a complete difference between getting high and taking methadone to keep yourself from not only the sickness that comes along with being in withdrawal, or being "dope sick," and preventing yourself from getting high if you do happen to relapse. I am getting ahead of myself already, as I tend to do a lot when I write. I should start from the beginning. The story may take a while...

My name is Kim and as of writing this entry, am 29 years old. I live in Philadelphia and, with the exception of 2 months, have lived here my entire life. I am a mother to three beautiful, amazing children, a 5 year old girl who is in kindergarten, a toddler girl who will be 2 next month, in November, and an 8 month old baby boy. They are my pride and joy.

My addiction began 2 weeks before my 14th birthday, when I smoked pot for the first time, though now that I know about the disease called addiction, I realize that it actually started a long time before then - I was born predisposed to addiction. By the time I was 16 years old, I had tried coke, wet (or angel dust), and just about any pill I could get my hands on - Percocet, Tylenol 3, Xanax, Ecstasy...anything. Around this time, OxyContin had begun to become popular in my neighborhood. I swore I would never touch it. By the end of this school year, 11th grade, and around the time I turned 17, I had stolen money from my parents bank account - close to, if not at least, $1000. It wasn't long after this that I just got bored with it all and stopped. I stopped everything but the weed, and every now and again, I would smoke wet.

I finished high school the next year, in 2003. After school was done, I found a job at a day care my cousin owned. I worked there in the summer then quit. I started working in December at a newly opened casual dining restaurant that had opened in my neighborhood and within a year, began my first long-term relationship with Dave, at age 19. One thing that he and I had in common was our love of marijuana. We spent all of our time high. A couple of years later, when I was around 21, I began having very bad menstrual periods. I would be in so much pain I couldn't even get out of bed; working as a cook, I had to do something about this pain. Doctors told me that nothing was wrong with me. I began to self-medicate with percocets on the first, and sometimes second, day of my cycle. Once in a while, after a few months, I would take the pills just for fun.

A few months before my 22nd birthday, I met Aaron, the guy who would give me the best thing in the world - my oldest daughter. He would help me find the pills I wanted if no one at work had them. Just days after my 22nd birthday, I broke up with Dave, after an almost 3-year relationship. I don't remember if I tried an OxyContin before or after I broke up with him. Aaron introduced me to them. He told me that they were the same thing as the percs, only they didn't have the Tylenol in them like percs do, they were pure oxycodone, and they cost only 50¢ per milligram, as opposed to the $1 per milligram cost of percocets. I was scared to death to take them because of how many kids in my neighborhood had died after overdosing on them. I would only take less than ¼ of an 80-milligram tablet. Within a month, maybe 2, I was taking at least 1-80mg pill per day. But instead of swallowing them, as I did when I first started to take them, my new friend showed me how to crush and snort them. He and I "officially" became a couple in August, 2007.

By the next year, after a huge fight I had with my brother during my niece's July baptism, in which I was named her Godmother, I realized how bad off I was. I was spending my entire $600-1000 biweekly paycheck in less than a week, supporting both my and Aaron's habit. I decided I wanted to get out of this place. I called a friend of mine, Rachel, and asked if I could come live with her in the county of West Palm Beach, Florida. I bought a one-way ticket with my next paycheck and prepared for my September 17th flight.

About a month before I was set to leave, I found out that Aaron was using heroin. That, along with crack, were two drugs I swore I would never touch. Finding out this news added something new to the reasons as to why I wanted to leave this place behind: to get away from the drugs, to have and save money, to start over, and to get away from him. I stopped seeing him before I left. After not seeing him for around 3 weeks, I decided to see him one last time before moving - the night before I left. After spending a very boring and worthless night together, he came home with me. When he realized that I had no pills to give him, he got mad, gave me a kiss, and left. I arrived at the PBI airport around 10AM, relieved, feeling new and fresh. The last Oxy I touched was that morning, in the airport, just before going through security. I started a new life...or so I thought.

I had been on Florida for just over 2 weeks. I was due for my period on September 29th. I had always had a very regular, 28-day cycle. On September 30th, I knew I was pregnant. My boobs were already sore. It was just one day after my missed period and I just KNEW I was pregnant. On October 2nd, after my 2nd day of training at my new job, I bought a pregnancy test on my bike ride to work. As soon as I got there, I went into the bathroom and peed on it. After a minute that really took about an hour, the result read positive. I knew I was pregnant even before the test but I didn't believe it. I took another test. Another positive. I scouted out the location of a Planned Parenthood. I went there, paid almost $40, and had another positive result. I decided to have an abortion. I began working as much as I could, barely spending any money unless it was for weed or cigarettes. Within two weeks, I had over $900 saved for the abortion. Around this time, I started to fight with my own head about having the abortion. It took a week or two but I decided that I could not bring myself to have it done. With a heavy heart, I decided to move back to Philly.

I moved back in November. It was devastated. I moved to Florida to get away from this place. I wanted to leave everything and everyone behind and start a new life, start everything over. Yet, here I was, back in the place I so desperately wanted to be away from. I decided not to try to get in touch with the father once I got home (I did call and tell him that I was pregnant while I was in Florida - I had left him with the impression that I wanted nothing to do with him and that I was going to have an abortion; I never told him that I changed my mind about doing it). I went the entire 9 months drug-free, except the very beginning before I knew (and about two weeks after I knew when I was planning to terminate the pregnancy), when I was smoking weed. I gave birth to a very beautiful, healthy, red-headed baby girl on May 30th, 2009. I named her Mollyanne Elizabeth.

When my daughter was about 2 months old, I started to smoke weed again. Very soon after, I decided to do an Oxy. I got a tax return in August and spent $400 on the pills. After that binge, I slowed down. I still took the pills here and there (and I smoked weed every day) but luckily for me, I didn't get bad with the pills again. I took them up until February. In January, my friend Sam that I got high with stopped talking to me. After that, I did them two or three more times before I got bored with them and stopped. Still, I never stopped smoking and actually started to drink...a lot. I had started college in January and by March, I was drinking 4-5 night out of the week. It didn't matter if I had class the next day or not. My friend and I started to talk again in April, about a week or so before my 25th birthday. The first night we hung out, guess what we did. Yep, you guessed it! We got oxies. My friend and I didn't hang out as much but just about every time we did, we got the pills. Finally, after getting high (by myself) one day in August, I had gotten the worst headache in the world and felt like I was going to throw all of my insides up. I decided I was done. August 21st, 2010 was the last time I touched one of those pills.

In September, I started to go to different bars a lot with Sam. I smoked every single day and started to do either Xans or klonopins. It felt great, taking them and being drunk! Sam and I had so much fun! One of our first nights out together, she told me that when she got money, she was going to get us a "big guy" to split, meaning an 80-mg OxyContin. I had lost all of my desire to do them and told her I was good (it's funny because when she and I first met, we would smoke weed together all the time and she always asked me if I wanted her to get me a perc or a xan and I always told her, "Nah, you know I don't fuck with that shit.").

In October, I fell extremely ill; I couldn't walk and was I'm an extreme amount of pain. My entire body blew up and I was covered with a purplish-red rash. My brother said I looked like a purple Incredible Hulk. I was given steroids and percocets for the pain. I was in school the next day and at 9AM, 2½ hours after taking one 5-mg pill, was sitting in the cafeteria nodding out. I couldn't stand the way I felt.

In November, I discovered that Sam was doing heroin. I never brought it up with her. I brought it up with her sister two months later and it ended our friendship. I was happy on the outside, because I didn't want to associate with and heroin addicts. But on the inside, I was so upset that I lost a friend over that horrible drug. Even though I lost a friend, I was at least glad that I didn't lose her permanently - she was alive, at least. After that, I continued to smoke weed and I drank here and there (but I toned it down a LOT) but I stopped taking the downers.

On March 19, 2011, I met a guy named Jim. I didn't want a relationship at that point in my life. Actually, I didn't want a relationship...ever again. I didn't want anymore kids either. I was 25 years old and too busy having fun, going out when I could, hooking up with people. I was living out the rest of my youth. He and I met at a St. Paddy's party that mutual friends had. He went to the party to meet me. I knew about him but had nothing in mind about meeting a man that I would meet again after that night. We wound up staying up all night talking and kissing and getting to know each other. We then spent the whole morning together (if that's what you want to call it - we didn't even go to bed until around 6AM). About 3 days after we met, we became nearly inseparable. It was the beginning of a new relationship for me.

However, it wasn't just a relationship with a man. For me, it began a long, hard relationship with drugs again. While at that point, and for a while afterwards, I didn't touch anything except an occasional drink and weed on most days. But it was the beginning of the end. I didn't know that in less than 2 months, methadone and heroin would enter my life.

And in less than a year later, I would begin the hardest battle I ever fought...