Hitting Rock Bottom
“I drank every day to the point that I was sick. It was hard to do my job… Two glasses of wine a day became a bottle of wine a day, which became two bottles of wine a day. It was insidious. I was well into substance abuse before I realized. It was hard to say oh my God, look at what I’ve done, look at where I am… Suddenly the ugly reality was I was drinking too much and didn’t seem to be able to put sensible boundaries on how much I was drinking.”
“I let depression take hold. I went through a bad breakup. I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care if I drank in the morning before work. I am the sort of person who takes things to the extreme. I went to a psychiatrist because I thought it was like free therapy. She was like, what do you want? Should I prescribe you something? I was like, can I get Ativan? So she prescribed me that. I thought she’s just going give me 30, but then there were like a year’s worth. I was so happy.”
“Then a year later, I asked her to double the dose. So I had two full Ativan tablets a day I was mixing with drinking – I could feel the dependency taking over. I felt like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz – Ativan and alcohol was my oil. When I went without it, I could feel the withdrawal setting in. I tried to quit over a Christmas holiday, but I had a seizure and ended up in the hospital.”
“I think it was around when I was about 18 or 19 that I started drinking on the weekends with friends. I had a boyfriend and every weekend, that’s what we did: we drank. It wasn’t a real problem then because I was always a responsible person… I got injured eight years ago, and I lost my mobility. I was a long-distance walker – so that’s when I started drinking every day… I drank every day with him basically. it was easier to drink with somebody… [but] I got to a place that I felt that I needed help.”
“I first arrived at Sophia Recovery when I was 19. I was barely old enough to legally drink, and I knew in my heart I was either gonna die, be in jail, or hurt somebody else. A really big wakeup call for me was there was this picture someone took of me – I was drunk, and one of my eyes was sort of closed, and it looked like how my dad looked. Every time I come home and seen him looking like that, I knew he was drinking. So that broke my heart every time I saw it. I saw that myself, and I was like, “oh my gosh, what am I doing with my life?” …I felt like there was a fork in the road: I could keep going or end up in jail or dead.”
“I did [fentanyl] by accident. I got really dizzy and I was like, “this is not crack.” I couldn’t walk in a straight line, the room was spinning, I got really tired. I was puking everywhere. I’m pretty sure I started to overdose but I didn’t get quite there. I was infinitely lucky.”
“I told my best friend that I was partaking [in substance use], and she got very concerned and told my mother. My mom drove me up here [to Sophia Recovery Centre] and I’ve been coming here by myself ever since.”
“The turning point was when I couldn’t pay my rent. [My boyfriend] was in a situation where I had to bail him out and he took my entire paycheck. I’d given the man since the beginning of March like four grand – an insane amount. And he still claimed that I wasn’t contributing to the drugs. He’s like “you can smoke all the drugs, but you can’t pay for them!” I talked to [my peer counsellor] about it. I was just so fed up, because he kept promising me that he was going to get on welfare, then he would sleep and miss appointments. I was like, “I’m completely fucked.”
“So I was talking to [my peer counsellor] and she suggested the rent bank and saved my ass. I haven’t missed a rent payment or been late for rent payment since. I was like, “as soon as I get my rent covered, I’m done with him. He’s been sucking me dry.”
“I was arrested for break and enter and theft, but thankfully it was dismissed. Getting arrested was a little bit of a wakeup call. It scared me enough not to pull that stunt again.”
“But really, it was facing death for the millionth time. Like legit death, that or I was in the hospital. I was in the hospital for a blood clot in my lung. That day, I was having trouble breathing. I had a very bad pain in my lung. I was smoking crack for a while, and I wasn’t taking care of myself. I was an untreated diabetic, and I was hospitalized, and they initially told me that it was endocarditis (heart disease), and then it turned out that it was a pulmonary embolism (blockage in the arteries of the lung).”
“I was hospitalized for two weeks with IV antibiotics. They sent me home with a PICC line in my arm. I ended up staying on IV antibiotics for three months afterwards, and I still struggle with my breathing. Every few months I was in the hospital with some sort of infection: pneumonia, insanity, overdoses, trying to off myself. I broke my hand because someone stole money from me and I punched a bus shelter. I kind of woke up and realized I had to stick around for my family.”
“I ended up falling asleep on the job – that’s when [substance use] became a big problem for me. I realized that was a problem once my credit card was maxed, and I had no money. I had to start borrowing money, and then I lost my job. That was just one of my rock bottoms. I dug myself out of it for a while. I ended up dating somebody who was selling [drugs]. That was fine for a while, and then I started hiding the fact that I was stealing from him. That became a problem, so we broke up.”
“I kind of stayed with my parents for a bit, and that summer I had another boyfriend who again was selling. Everything was fine – then all of a sudden, I was just mentally going crazy. I had no explanation as to why… except it turned out I was pregnant. So all these hormones. It was December when I found out I was pregnant, and then March I had my son. I think I was 25 at that point. [Getting pregnant] scared the shit out of me honestly. The first thing that I thought of was, “I just totally ruined this child already and he’s not even born.” Sidenote: he’s doing amazing.”
“I wasn’t ready to be sober then either. My mom – thankfully I had her – she was my big supporter. She never said anything, but like she would be there for me.I remember one of my stints with sobriety I just woke up in my dad’s recliner and she would be passing me freezies every time I woke up.”
“So that summer when I had my baby with me, everything was kind of OK. I was just using on weekends. But then one weekend turned into a week – and that was the week that I dropped my son off to my parents’ house, ‘cause I knew that he wasn’t safe with me. I wasn’t safe to be around him.”
“That summer I moved out to Sussex. I was isolated. I was in a bad situation. I didn’t like the person around me. I ended up getting kicked out of Canadian Tire in Sussex for no reason: they said I was stealing, and I was like begging them to check me and everything. And that was my final straw. I got sober after getting kicked out of Canadian Tire. Like, this is not the life I want to be living.”
“[My substance use] slowly evolved into this massive addiction to opiates and all the people at work were starting to catch on with the little things, my little lies. They were starting to put in reports, and thank God, because I could not stop on my own.”
“I remember being in my basement shooting up a drug that was non-injectable and seeing the veins turn red, my arm swell up, my throat swell up. I had 911 on the phone ready to go but I couldn’t press the number because I was so ashamed to ask for help. I would rather be found dead overdosed.”
“My colleagues did me the biggest service I could ever ask for in my life and reported me.”
“I had a young son. He was three, and he started really looking around at the fact that my life was falling apart. I had no money. I was starting to lose everything I owned. Family was pretty much turning their backs. It was just getting to the point where it was either gonna live alone and have nobody or straighten up.”
“I was really nervous of losing my son because it had been threatened to me several times from my mom. My mom was constantly telling me if I didn’t get over that, she would take him. One day I just had enough of being sick.”