So I am working hard to not retreat into what I’ve called my ‘Dark Place’ – that is not so much a place but an attitude that I get stuck in when I start feeling sorry for myself. I want to run around with my dogs and the grandkids but the heart thing just wears me down.
My Family being there for me was both a surprise and a total relief and they are behind me all the way. I want so much to see my artwork be successful but art supplies are not cheap and neither are the Jane Davenport workshops I want to enroll in. So, I’m asking for help. I started both a PayPal Money Pool (fundraiser) and a Facebook fundraiser. Within a few moments my first donation came from James who says that if onky 100 people could spare $20…i could hit my goa lThank you in advance and thanks for reading!
The man is good, my scar is barely there, esp. with the help of snapchat filters lol
My Good Luck Chuck’s on my hospital bed
That’s some scarey numbers to see as far as blood pressures go
Two days post-op
So, yes…that’s really my chest when they took the bandages off for the first time after my valve replacement. It should make you cringe, it makes me cringe and I’m the one who went thru it. If all the other reasons fail to snap you out of the fog that drugs lets you live in, this one photo should at least make you stop and think. Because it’s not just a thing that happened and then I needed surgery. I’m not, never have been over weight or out of shape. I don’t drink and I don’t eat 3 greasy burgers a day. I actually eat healthy if that doesn’t hit you as ironic.
I’ll let THIS happen to me from using drugs but, by golly, I’ll watch my diet and have perfect cholesterol ! Let’s look at it from another direction. If the possibility of open heart surgery (and a myriad of other illnesses that love to land inside drug addict bodies) doesn’t scare you a little then the legal crap should. I have had one drug related conviction ten years ago and it’s still to this day keeping me in debt to the State of Kansas and able to toss me in jail on occasion – and possibly prison. The people I associated with were people who started the way I did, with a doctor. We (most of us) did not get up one morning in our normal lives and say ‘hey, after work I think I’m gonna go hit the streets and fins me some opiates and get high’.
As I explained a little in a previous post, most of us had an injury or a surgery around the time that Oxycontin hit the market and it’s so addictive for so many reasons, that after only a week – ten days on it, you are in full ‘omg I am in HELL’ withdraw if you try to stop taking it. But, honestly, if the doctor had said ‘no more, that’s all that’s required after a surgery/injury like yours.’ myself (and many others) would have spent a few sweaty, sleepless, vomiting nights and would have been finished. Most likely if another issue arose where you would need pain medicine, the majority of us would have said just give me something weaker, not that Oxy crap because DAMN, it made me so sick when I ran out of it. Instead, in my case and many, many others I know, it was actually difficult to get out of the dr. office back then without that script in your hand. As strong as those things are, the drawback is that your body becomes tolerant to them very fast. You need more and more to achieve the same pain relief. As for the other reasons that it is addictive one need look no further than history books.
So, no I don’t blame my doctor or any other totally, but I believe they are culpable and they know it. Now, it’s the patients who are left to pick up the pieces of some very shattered lives – if they are still breathing.
Such A Random Life 