open heart surgery – Such A Random Life

April 17th, two days after surgery
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.

Doctors cannot claim ignorance for over prescribing opiates and what it would lead to

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.

All for now, Missy

These zentangles can be anything you can dream up, make a mistake and easily fill it in to make it look like you meant to do it. They are very relaxing. — Fun Zentangle-ish that I do for relaxing

So, my first post. How exciting! I want to let you know a little about myself and what I hope this blog will be and become. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the morbid right now but it has to be brought up for you to understand who your blogger is.

Two years ago I was a raging drug addict. It began with two surgeries in quick succession right around the time that the medical community introduced the ‘wonder drug’ Oxycontin. No one explained that it was really for people in terrible, end of life pain. If they got addicted (and they would) it really didn’t matter, they were dying anyway. It quickly started being prescribed for sprained ankles, unexplained back pain, any discomfort “here, we got something for that”. Doctors must have been given buckets of money to push this stuff because if you had insurance, it was near impossible to get out of a doctor visit without a script for it.

I became addicted immediately. I have an addictive personality and I have low self esteem – a powder keg for addiction when you throw Oxy at me. The pain stopped, but it also made me feel better mentally. For now, let’s make a long story short…when young patients began overdosing and dying the medical people shit their pants and then started to tell the docs to cut people off. The consequences were disastrous. When, in terrible withdraw, no doctor would help anymore, some went to methadone clinics (I did)…but they are few and far between (mine was 45 min away) and in order to be ‘dosed’ every day, you had to show up and drink it in front of a nurse. This went on until they decided you could move up to taking home a Saturday and Sunday dose. It took months and many people could not get there every day (and pay $10 per dose) especially if they had to pay someone to drive them 45 min one way each day.

$10 may not seem like much but by the time you need a methadone clinic, you are pretty much penniless, friendless and forget family help. So the easier thing to do and what most of us did was to start buying the pills (which we were shooting up by then because out tolerance was so great that we got nothing from swallowing). The people selling those were making around $80 per pill. These people were not crazy drug street people, they were older women with real diseases, veterans who got them free but they decided the money was too good to pass up and they’d take tylenol and roll around in their drug money instead.

When practically no one could get a script and pills became too hard to find, heroin poked it’s head out from under a rock and said ‘hey guys…i’m the same thing and i’m cheaper. You can find me all day long – all night long. Easy. Come gimmie a try’

Jumping ahead but I promise I will go into more details in later posts (it’s very hard for me to even write about this) in 2017 I was found on my bathroom floor, basically dead.

I woke up 32 days later in a hospital not able to move due to muscle atrophy and couldn’t speak because of the tracheotomy tube coming out of my neck. In my case, I was lucky because my family had been there every day and were there to love me when I woke up. I found out that I had totally destroyed the tricuspid valve in my heart and would need open heart surgery if I were to live. After finally getting insurance in January this year I began the tests and appointments needed to get ready for that surgery. On April 15th I had open heart surgery and God willing, I woke up to see my husband and my dad with tears in their eyes. It had went beautifully.

That’s all I can manage right now. My family and my love of art and reading, things I had forgotten how important to me they were have kept me clean and kept me going.

So this blog is for a kind of purging this dark stuff that is still stuck inside me and to have a reason to keep drawing and painting, showing others what I do and hopefully help someone else get excited about art, or remember something that they once loved and that it’s worth sticking around for. Lastly, the impact on my family…I thought no one cared, they were so distant and pissed at me I just let it go. Now, I see that I was breaking their hearts and I will never do that again.

So…here’s a few things I’m working on now and much happier of a subject than what I’ve just written.

More later, Missy

pages in my art journal
in progress
one of my first

Tag: open heart surgery

Sorry, But It Should Shock You

Welcome