Broken.

This world is hard and it will try to break you. Sometimes we find ourselves beatdown and broken, ready to give up. Most days we are strong enough to take the blows, one at a time and able to recover in between lashings. Everybody has good days and bad days, ups and downs. But for some of us, there are those times in life when everything seems to fall apart at once. When that happens, most people don’t survive.

This almost happened to me, but I was spared. I almost lost my own war on drugs again after years of peacetime. I was able to keep my life patched together just well enough to give the appearance of progress, but it only took a compilation of disasters to put me on my back, hopeless and helpless, close to certain death. Let me tell you the story…

On July 15, 2015, a big semi truck unknowingly ran me off the road while I was riding back to work on my bike. This bicycle accident resulted in three pelvic fractures on my right side that would prove to be the most pain I have ever endured in all my life. I didn’t get hit by the truck, thank God, as I would have most likely been killed on the spot if I had.

I was in the bike lane where I was supposed to be, but the truck was too big for the road and naturally took the entire bike lane to fit. It was one of the big sand and gravel dump trucks that stand about 20 feet tall. This happened on a horrible two-lane road that serves as a freeway onramp/offramp, a bridge over a river, and crosses a designated bike path, plus has two residential streets converging at the same point. In other words, for a bicycle commuter like myself, it’s a death trap! To make it worse, they were putting in a sidewalk next to the bike lane, so when the giant truck was coming at me head on, I had nowhere else to go but down.

For whatever reason, that truck could not see me! Even though I was right in front of him, and he was coming at me head on. Maybe the noonday sun was in his eyes? I don’t know, but I was forced to jump my bike up over the sidewalk construction to avoid getting hit. I actually managed the jump, but when I landed my tiny road tires didn’t have a chance of hanging on, and my bike went down. I estimate I was traveling somewhere between 20–25 mph as this is my fast cruising speed when I commute to work, and the truck was probably going a solid 40 mph, as it was a freeway offramp and he was just flying! It was so freakin’ scary to see that guy in that truck driving straight at me without breaking and realizing “He doesn’t see me!”

So I go down hard with the bike onto the fresh bed of concrete, but not as easily as I would have hoped. My shoes clip into my pedals and I could not get unclipped in time. It all just happened so fast! The way I got thrown into the concrete at that speed attached to my bike resulted in taking all the impact to my pelvic area, just made the injury ten times worse.

I got knocked out when I hit the ground, and when I woke up there were several cars around with the drivers out of their vehicles to see what happened. There was some guy in a red car who was talking to me but I could not understand him. I was in so much pain, I thought I was paralyzed! I begged the guy to take me home, just about a mile from where I was hit, and he agreed. There was a woman there trying to say I needed an ambulance and not to move, but I panicked, and convinced them to take me home. Somehow the guy loaded up my bike in his sedan, and dragged me into the back seat to get me home. I screamed bloody murder and cried out loud the whole way as every inch felt like I was being drawn and quartered.

When I arrived it was total chaos, but my mother-in-law jumped into action and got me loaded up and to the hospital. She has been through a lot the last few years and just knows how to handle emergencies. When most people panic, she remains calm, and whenever you need her she is there. This day was no different. My wife and my mother got me to the hospital somehow, even though I was protesting. I even called my doctor and tried to schedule an office visit, but the nurse who has become a friend over the years, lectured me and told me to “hang up the phone and call 911!” I honestly don’t know why, I am just terrified of the hospital and didn’t want to go.

The details here are blurry, but I am pretty sure it went down about like that. I had a good helmet, so the concussion was minor, but I still was really delirious during most of this day, and the next few days honestly. But I will do my best to recall at least a few events from the following week.

When I got to the hospital, they got me right into a room, and took excellent care of me. The way they gave me so much attention actually scared me a little because as a kid when I would go to the ER I would wait for hours upon hours in the waiting room filled with sick people. It turns out however, if you have an actual emergency, they tend to get you right in. Within a few moments of being admitted and taken to my room, I was given medicine for the pain, a heavy dose, that almost made me barf but I was able to hold it to extreme cold sweats and dizziness.

I’m not sure what it was at this point, just some kind of opiate in an IV, but after the drug set in, I began to melt. I was off street drugs and alcohol for seven years at that point, but the prescriptions were steadily stacking up. Sometime after the age of 30, my health started slowly deteriorating, and the last few years had gotten far worse. Doctors were trying to treat symptoms they believe to be caused by AS (Ankylosing Spondylitis). This is a disease they believe I was born with that causes severe chronic inflammation in the major joints. I was being prescribed all kinds of pills to cope with the pain but they all made me sick, so it had not really threatened my seven years of sobriety yet.

However, this was the first time in years that I felt that sweet numbness come across my forehead that only heavy opiates can give me. I knew I was in trouble, but the sensation was so strong, I just let go and slipped away.

The ER doctor gave me enough drugs to get me through a few days until I could be seen by my primary care doctor and sent me home. There was not much they could do for a fractured hip besides “make me comfortable” and they did that all right. The trip home however was a nightmare. Just transferring from the hospital bed, to the wheelchair, to the car, back to the wheelchair, back to the bed, was way too much pain. By the time I made it home, I was so overcome with pain, I was vomiting, which would tweak my hip and cause even more pain. I got trapped in this cycle off and on for what seemed like forever. This is when things got really bad and it happened fast.

The next couple days, I laid alone trapped in my own pain, both mental and physical. Every time my wife or children would try to come check on me, I would become violently angry and demand to be left alone. This was one of the darkest places I have ever been in my life. My wife and my four boys bring me so much love everyday and I depend on that love for my well being. When I cut off that source of love even for a split second, I immediately began to die. I started to think I didn’t deserve them and that I was bad for them. I found myself in a mental prison, and the lies in my head that used to only come as an occasional whisper now seemed to be given mega-phones! I began to question my own sanity and my own safety. This was within the first two days on the narcotics.

Then I realized I was about to run out of the hospital prescription, so I had to go see my primary care doctor to get more. Even though I could not leave my own bed without screaming in pain. And I had not been consciously aware since the first dose at the hospital. Somehow, I had to figure out how to act normal enough to get more pills before the weekend. There was no way I could make it through the weekend with this pain and my pills were running out fast.

Friday afternoon July 17, 2015 my wife managed to get me put together and to the doctors office and so began the next scene of my nightmare. I arrived at the doctor's office in excruciating pain. By the time I transferred in and out of the wheelchair a few times, my pain level went through the roof. Between that and the side effects of the pills, I looked absolutely horrible. I was clearly drugged out, and essentially I was only there for one reason; to get more drugs. At the time, I didn't even recognize how bad it looked and when I was denied drugs I went ballistic.

From the moment I started talking to the doctors it went downhill. I began to feel like I was under interrogation when they were asking me about the accident. They were questioning the details of my injury and telling me I would need to go to a specialist first to get pain pills. I explained I was going to the specialist the next week, but I needed pills to get me through until then. We went back and forth like this for a long while, and I became more and more agitated with every second. They actually told me they were not authorized to prescribe narcotics on Fridays because of the amount of people like me coming in for drugs with injuries right before the weekend. I almost totally lost my shit at this point, but to prevent things from getting worse, my wife took over.

Somehow she got me the prescription for the drugs and got me out of there without going to jail. I am afraid to think what would have happened if she hadn’t, I would have either gone to very hard alcohol to kill the pain, but that is unlikely. The only other way I knew to kill that kind of pain was to go get the strongest drugs I can find on the streets or on craigslist, and mix and match like the old days. I could have lost everything that day, but she got the pills and took me home instead.

She got me back into our room that I basically took over as my own and left me to my misery. We were both so ashamed of how things had gotten so bad so quickly and we both knew our family was in trouble if I didn’t get help soon. After I got settled, I opened the little white paper bag from the pharmacy and popped out a few pills from the fresh supply. I fell back into the state of unconsciousness I was in previously, somewhere between sleep and dreams, when you are nodding in and out, and you are comfortably numb all over.

The next memory I have is going to the specialist the next week to see what needed to be done to fix my hip, and to see about a big bottle of pills to last me a while. At least three or four days had passed since my last doctor visit, I just don’t remember anything. I was out of it for days with no memory of what happened, good or bad. My wife tells me there was far more bad than good, and that it was mainly more of the dark depressed mental prison I spoke of previously.

I hate losing chunks of my life like this and even more I despise losing control of myself. When I am in a blackout like this, anything is possible, and I mean anything. I am not in control and I don’t know what happens and that is scary. This is how people ruin their life by making a mistake they will regret forever. By giving up control of their mental capacity to use logic and reason, they become dangerous to everyone around them. Back to the doctor’s office.

I arrived at the hip doctor in high spirits having healed surprisingly well in the five or six days since my accident. I got all the necessary x-rays done so the doctor could see my injury. The appointment continued to go well, and the doctor assured me my injury was minor in comparison to what he had dealt with regularly. I only had fractures in my pelvic, no breaks, and that meant no surgery and a lot faster recovery. I did have three separate pelvic fractures and that complicated things a bit, but he said I could expect a full recovery in six months, with some conditions, and could expect to go back to work in two months. Best of all, he prescribed me a huge bottle of painkillers and even a special bottle for severe pain that broke through.

I was quite pleased with myself as I pulled it off. I was able to keep up the act of having it together for long enough to get the drugs I needed. I would be doing far more than the prescribed amount however, because these drugs don’t kill my pain, they only lead me into the dark and cold mental prison where I’m left to face it alone. I would be going back there now, as soon as my wife got me back home into my self-made dungeon.

Thank God this agony only lasted a total of seven days. Finally, I realized I had to quit the pills or I would not make it through my recovery without ruining my life or worse, lose my life altogether. I found this on Facebook as my public declaration shortly after I took my last pill posted on Thursday July 23, 2015, a week after my accident:

“But I am afflicted and in pain; let your salvation, O God, set me on high!” (Psa 69:29) Praising God this morning for pain. Good to know I can still feel something… I decided to go cold turkey Tuesday night from the oxy and this morning I finally feel like myself again, the screwed up version of myself in pain is way better than the junky version of myself. Thank God for my pain.``

This post only tells half the story, and so I am ashamed to say it was altogether misleading. The real story was not facebook appropriate. In other words, it was tabu. What I didn’t put in this post is that I was able to quit these pills only because I was a member of the OMMP (Oregon Medical Marijuana Program). I had already received my medical marijuana card six months prior to treat my severe pain in my back, legs, and feet.

In the early stages of my condition, I was able to manage the pain for the most part with traditional high grade cannabis flower grown organically and vaporized in a quality vaporizer. This works well for moderate levels of pain, but to treat the severe pain, I needed a new system set up for concentrates.

After I researched and purchased the new equipment, I was able to customize my dosage and actually manage my pain without vomiting. I think this was the first day in over a week I went without puking when I woke up from the night of stored pain and toxins. I was able to treat my pain with cannabis instead of opiates.

With higher doses of this medicine in my system, I began to heal rapidly. Almost immediately, I felt a full mental recovery and I was even able to get back to work after only two weeks! I was on crutches by the time I went to see the hip specialist after only two weeks and he was astonished. He expected me to be in the wheelchair for six weeks and not get back to work for at least two months. My job would have never been able to accommodate this anyway so it is a good thing I recovered in the time I did.

Even my work knew cannabis was what got me back on my feet, and just kind of looked the other way on the matter since there was no other option. The narcotics made me an unstable junky version of myself that was hostile and psychotic at times. Cannabis helps with my pain without changing who I am. The worst that may happen is I get lost playing in the ink a little more often and tend to be far more light hearted and maybe less ambitious to do grunt work, but so what.

The reality is, cannabis is a better choice of medicine to treat many symptoms from many illnesses. But it is not being taken seriously because society has decided cannabis is tabu. I’m done. No more hiding. I am going to continue to write about how cannabis has helped me get my health back the last few years. I could not be where I am today if it were not for cannabis and it's about time I give credit to this amazing medicine.

I am confident that had I continued with narcotics, they would have killed me. It’s that simple, cannabis treats your pain without the risk of killing you. While narcotics are taking lives, cannabis is saving lives.

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