In 1998 I was in a near fatal car accident and broke one hundred twenty-three bones in my body. By the looks of the vehicle, anyone who saw it guessed no one could have possibly survived. Somehow I did. I was awake when they finally pried me out and I remember saying something about being late to my brother’s soccer game now. I had no feeling in my legs.
A few days later I woke up in the hospital with a very limited range of movement. My head was cloudy and pumped full of morphine. From my waist down felt like the pins and needles of bumping your funnybone. My mother and father were sitting next to me. My mother wept quietly as she told me I would be confined to a wheelchair for a while because my spinal cord had been badly damaged. I knew that by, “a while” she meant the rest of my life. I told her not to cry, that it would be o.k. She kissed my forehead.
My father stood stoic in the corner of the room, with a sad look of fear that I had never seen on him. He sat down at the foot of the bed and told me how much he loved me and how relieved he was that I was alive. After an all too brief moment with my family, the nurse came in and told them to come back in the morning after I’d been through some tests.
The next few days were excruciating. The pain below my waist got worse and worse with each passing day. Morphine was my only hope.
I was released from the hospital 3 weeks later with a host of prescriptions. The pain would never go away. I went back to school in a wheelchair, but school soon dropped out of the picture because the drugs were too heavy on my mind. I collapsed into a deep depression and not long after, replaced my morphine prescription with heroin. Heroin, she was exactly what the name describes. She was my heroin. I no longer thought about life without legs. Or the things I could no longer do. The pain in my legs melted away with the mere sight of a spoon. I did a pretty good job of hiding my junk from my family. They were so used to seeing me depressed and on drugs that they barely noticed the imposter in my pain medicine.
Heroin became my new goal in life. For years after I first got my wings, I would wake up from a nod and call my “friends” to come pick me up and take me to the park. I would spend hours in the park panhandling, mainlining, and watching children play with youthful legs.
One morning around three a.m., I woke up on my parent’s laundry room floor covered in vomit and a needle in my leg. My mother was on the phone and my father was sitting on the couch with his head in his hands. They thought I was dead. When I groaned, my father looked at me with the most tired eyes I had ever seen. Heroin, my savior, the relief of all my pain and hopelessness, had become my death knell. The ambulance picked me up and I spent another two weeks in a hospital before being shipped off to a treatment center.
I have been off heroin for six months now, thanks to this place. If my mom and dad are reading this, I just want to say I’m sorry. I never wanted to cause you so much pain or cost you so much money. I have failed you. But Mom and Dad, if you can find it in your souls to forgive me, I will do everything in my power to repair all the damage and become the son you once had. I love you.
