Heroin Addiction & Recovery Support Group
Heroin is a highly addictive drug with severe withdrawal symptoms that can start as soon as hours after use of the drug stops. Withdrawal symptoms include extreme sweating and achiness, nausea, vomiting, cramping which causes "kicking," chills, and more. If you are struggling with a heroin addiction, there is help. Join the group and get support.
I work in a methadone maintenance clinic. We take care of 700 or more patients a day, dispensing methadone. I feel depressed when a client takes additional illicit substance without my knowledge and then i administer methadone to them. Sometimes they are seen on facility premises and I have to call an ambulance so they won't overdose. I know that rationally it is not my fault that they take these additional substances but I still blame myself when they are going out in an ambulance. It is irrational.
The desire and compulsion of an addict is summed up in one word. More.
It does not matter what or how much we use, only more is our focus. Even when we score, immediately following the excitement of having scored our brains are hardwired for more.
Ever get a treat for yourself and one for your puppy and figure that if you have them at the same time, that this will placate both the puppies greedy, wanting, begging eyes and your desire to have something for yourself without considering the latter ?
It doesn't work.
That is how I look at addiction. My focus is always the next one. A heroin addict on methadone does not see the threat. He/she sees the next, the more.
Your concern is beautiful. It is warming to know you are out there, willing to care for us when we are incapable of caring for ourselves. While the addiction is being fed, we can't care. The disease of addiction is a monster unlike anything Hollywood has ever come up with. It is cunning, baffling, insidious and quite patient.
I have been clean for more than 20 years. I still feel the presence of the disease. Today, it is not alive in the drugs themselves, it is alive in my coping skills, in my emotions, in my feelings. It is alive in my secondary illness, MS. It is patiently waiting for me to make a bad situation worse, make uninformed decisions, allow a rampage of directed emotion, or to magnify fear. To find me again in a weak moment and whisper "Go get one." And it has. Now, I just know that I don't have to. When I was active, I did not know I had a choice. Everything depended on one more.
What if you weren't out there for us ?
What if you didn't share words of compassion and hope- that recipe of love which can still be heard, even when we are high, which gives us something to hold onto, a tether when caring about death or life has no final answer. We have you, we have people like you that see something we have lost sight of. Even when we poke that needle, you are still there, buoyant in our sea of despair.
And for some-like me-the lifeline that gave the courage to stop. In the end that was what I clung to, others hope. The people that said I was better than what I was doing (to myself). So look up N.A.W.S. and find out how important you are, find out how many lives were spared the ending horrors of active addiction, for our families. Find out how many addicts are living clean, productive and meaningful lives.
Because you feel.