WRITING — ADDICTION, HOPE & HEALING
Just How Close Did I Come to Dying?
Too close… and the TRUE pain and cost of loving someone with an addiction
My hospital bed. Last day. Bags packed. Getting ready to go home.
Yessss!
Feeling very Rip Van Winkle right now… here I am, back from a long sleep… or that’s the way it seems. Amazing how mere weeks can feel like 20 years.
I do know it’s not the time of the American Revolution, but it is the time of my own personal life revolution.
May sound dramatic to you, but trust me, it’s a perfectly appropriate description.
Who knows how close I came to dying, for real. They told me when I got to the hospital, but it only truly sunk in when the needles started coming out, ya know — I mean the real needles, not the little ones. That was after the MRI.
Then, life slowly starts to return — drip by IV drip.
A terrible kidney infection and dangerously low white blood cell count masks something else — luckily not HIV or hepatitis. Clean bill of health there.
No, perhaps it was the culmination of years of draining myself dry. Years of bittersweet happiness slowly eating me hollow.
