Never Too Late

by Amber Portwood

  I don’t think anybody can understand the feeling of withdrawals if you haven’t had them. It’s not a fever. It’s not a sickness. It’s hell. It’s death. I literally felt like I was going to die. I started having these sort of seizures, and the nurses ran in and stuck something in my nose. I woke up shaking horrendously and sick to my stomach, feeling like my body was about to explode out of my skin. I felt like somebody might as well have poisoned me, tortured me, and buried me alive. I’ve never felt anything that bad in my life. I was puking my guts out, I had diarrhea, I couldn’t eat anything, and I couldn’t even get up to take a shower.

  A small bit of luck I had was that I got assigned to a block with two really sweet, kindhearted girls who took me under their wings. They took care of me for the first week I was detoxing, bringing me food and checking in on me all the time. It took about two to three weeks to get it all out of my system. In the middle of it, when I was detoxing really bad, I had a court appearance over a TV monitor where the judge dashed any hopes I had of rescue and told me I wasn’t going anywhere. I would have to stay in jail until they found out what the next trial date for me was. That absolutely killed me.

  I didn’t cry, though. I’m not a big crier under normal circumstances, and I didn’t shed a tear for a pretty long time in jail. But when I did, I really did. It was December when I went in, just in time for the holidays, and if you want to hear three of the most depressing words in the English language, I’ll offer you, “Christmas in jail.”

  When Christmas came around, these volunteers came in to visit us. They were older women from a church or a nursing home or something. They come around for the holidays and visit each block to pass out cookies and sing songs. It was something like eight women who came to my block,and they gave us the cookies and they were as sweet as they could possibly be. Then they started singing their song. They sang that we all had hope, that we all had a chance. I just started bawling.

  After about a month in there I started getting used to everybody and made a lot of friends. There were still some people talking smack. I knew some girls in there from growing up together, and some of them wouldn’t let go of the whole Teen Mom thing. A girl was kicked out of our room for stealing my stuff, and I had some close calls where I almost got into a few fights. But I had my allies in there, just enough really cool girls who stuck together and got each other through that horrible experience.

  After I was done detoxing, I was totally clean and sober for the first time in a long while. I hate to disappoint you, but there were no blue skies or angels singing that went along with it. Being sober in jail was hell. It sucked. It’s different to be clean and to be out in a good environment, when you’ve had time to make the right decisions for yourself and get in the mindset you need to be. But it wasn’t like I detoxed and woke up in a field of daisies, or even a comfortable bed. I repeat: being sober in jail sucked.

  This is what it’s like to be an addict, and this is why it’s so hard to force somebody to get off of drugs before they make that choice for themselves: I felt like it was the time when I needed those drugs the most, and I didn’t have them. That was the only way I looked at it, and it was a very helpless, very low feeling. I couldn’t see anything good about being clean. Nothing. The worst part of it, which is obviously a lot clearer to me now, is that I’d been mixing up the pills I really needed with the pills I was abusing for so long that I didn’t know how to take care of myself at all. Those doctors weren’t just prescribing me all of those pills for fun. It might have been too much, maybe—you think? But I do have anxiety. I do have depression. I do have scoliosis and back pain that literally stops me from moving sometimes. Basically, I did need to be on medication, and I probably still do. But I messed with it for so long that I became a drug addict, and I completely lost perspective on how much I needed the pills, and how much of them I needed, and which ones I needed. I had gone so extreme that I had no concept of the right middle ground. So when I went to jail and I didn’t have that ridiculous cocktail anymore, I felt totally overwhelmed by the feeling of having absolutely nothing to help me cope with the worst situation I had ever been in.

  I never wanted to be in jail! That wasn’t a plan I had for myself at any point in my life. It wasn’t something I ever even remotely considered happening to me. And yet there I was, sitting in jail, locked up and pissed off, hating sobriety, and having absolutely no sense of hope that my situation was going to get any better.

  What could have gotten through to me at that time? I spend a lot of time thinking about that now. Someone as stubborn as I was, who had pushed the limits so far and gotten away with so much and was so intent on doing what she was doing, how do you get through to a person like that and help them onto a better road?

  Usually the next step is a halfway house. I don’t know if that would have done anything for me or not, but I never got the chance to try it. Why? The halfway houses wouldn’t take me. That makes me angry to this day. I was locked up, I was sober, and to stay that way I needed every ounce of help I could get. But it came down through the grapevine that the halfway houses were refusing to take me because they thought my “celebrity status” was going to be bad for the other girls. There are no words for how upset that makes me, especially now that I am sober and educated enough to understand that you never deny someone their sobriety.

  I had no hope. And that whole saga kept me in jail for an extra week, by the way. Because I didn’t get into any halfway houses, I wound up on house arrest and in drug court. Please take this as my own personal opinion: drug court is dumb. Basically, you have to wake up every single morning at six-thirty to go to their designated place and pee. And if you can’t pee, you’re in big trouble. Which sucks for me, because like I said, I just can’t pee on command. I don’t know. Just never got the hang of it. It’s not one of my talents. I had to dip back into jail not once, but twice for not being able to pee. And not because I was afraid of the test results, but because there was some woman sitting there a foot away from me, staring at me. I’d get nervous and not pee, and then I’d get sanctioned and have to go into jail for a week.

  It was so stupid, because seriously, I was still out of reach of those pee tests. In fact, as soon as I got out of jail, I got into a new drug that they couldn’t detect. And this drug was trouble.

  When I was in jail, I became really good friends with a girl named Sally. She got out of there a week before I did, and she was in the same situation as me with house arrest and drug court. About a week after I got out, I ran into her at drug court. It was one of the days when I couldn’t make it happen, and I was sitting outside drinking water, which they served me in a clean pee cup, by the way—thanks. Sally walked in and we said hi and exchanged numbers, which is completely not allowed, for reasons that became clear pretty much immediately.

  Sally texted me to hang out later, and when she came by and picked me up, the first thing she said was, “Wanna get high?”

  I looked at her like she was crazy, like, “How is that even possible?”

  “Man,” she said, “Fentanyl patches. It doesn’t show up on the drug thing.”

  “Fuck yeah,” I said.

  Before I knew it, we were sitting in a park, and she was giving me this tiny little dot of paper. I looked at it and said, “What the hell is that?” I was thinking about the piles of pills I’d gotten used to before I went into jail. “That’s not gonna do anything for me.”

  She was like, “Trust me.”

  Fentanyl is serious business. It’s a serious, serious pain-killer. It comes in a patch, like a nicotine patch or something, that you’re supposed to put on your body and wear for days so your body gets the pain relief slow and steady, like an IV drip. Obviously it’s for people who have extreme pain to deal with, like cancer breakthrough pain, and it can even be used to keep people sedated. Fentanyl just does not fuck around. Dose for dose, it’s about fifty to a hundred times more powerful than morphine.

  Not many people know about it, I gues
s. I didn’t for a long time. I wish I hadn’t found out. But I put the little dot on my finger and put it in my mouth, and in forty-five minutes, I was gone.

  It was the worst thing that could have happened to me at that time. I fell in love with those things so hard I became an addict on a completely different level. Until then it seemed like I’d been racing to rock bottom as fast as I could. These things were like the turbo blast that took me there instantly. Sally would pick me up every morning and take me to drug court to go and do the pee tests, and everybody in there knew we were breaking the rules by hanging out. They’d smile and shake their heads when we walked in together. I’m guessing they probably wouldn’t have taken it so lightly if they’d known I was chewing on those patches while I was peeing.

  I got into those Fentanyl patches so bad. I just couldn’t get enough. I’d tear off those little pieces of the patches keep them in my cheek, and nobody had any idea. It’s very scary to think about that, that I could have something that strong, and that addictive, and that easy to get away with.

  Obviously I didn’t get away with it forever, and the day finally came when I did too much at the wrong time. Sally and I were on our way to IOP, or intensive outpatient class, which is a type of counseling program for new recovering addicts. She was driving us in her car. I was so high I was lying down in the seat, and at every turn I was going, “I’m too high. I’m too high.” She was laughing at me at first, but before long she was pulling over and I was puking on the side of the road. I mean, I know the difference between high and too high. And I was way too high to function. But you can’t miss IOP. That’s not how it works when they let you out of prison. You don’t just get to skip things when you don’t feel well. So we had no choice but to try and get through it.

  It did not work out well for me. Soon enough I was sitting there in IOP, nodding out, which means passing in and out of consciousness in a way that’s obviously caused by taking too much of something. In front of the teacher, with fifteen other people sitting in a circle so everybody sees everybody, I was drifting off and swaying in my chair, making it as obvious as possible that I had found myself some drugs to get messed up on.

  Nobody said anything that day, but they didn’t have to. I had gone too far. The show was winding down.

  I had fought like a motherfucker to keep doing what I was doing. I did not care what obstacles stood between me and the things I wanted to do, and so far I hadn’t run into one I couldn’t find a way to get around. Nothing in drug court worked for me. Jail didn’t work for me. Narcotics Anonymous didn’t work for me. The people involved in these programs and the people who were trying to force me into sobriety were relentless, but I was more relentless than they were. It had reached a point where every bit of strength I had, I put into my addiction. And anything that tried to stand in my way, I either knocked it down or found a way to tunnel underneath it.

  I didn’t care. Period. I did not care. It was like, “Put me on house arrest, put me in drug court, and I’ll show you what I can do. Tell me I can’t hang out with this girl from jail, and she’ll be at my house every day. Tell me I have to wake up every morning to take a pee test, and I’ll walk in with an even stronger drug hidden in my cheek.” Whenever I had to face some consequence or limit to my actions, it was like it became some twisted challenge to me. I was fighting a battle of my own making, and for what? To see how much more messed up I could get than I already was?

  Where was Leah, you ask? Good question. She was safe and sound. But she was not with me.

  I was so deep into my addiction that I wasn’t seeing my daughter at all. Her father and I didn’t have a good relationship, and that’s putting it lightly. We were about as far from co-parenting as it gets. Feeling better and fixing up my life had become the farthest thing from my mind. It was like everything got turned upside-down, and I was literally fighting to keep myself messed up—even if I didn’t exactly see it that way at the time.

  When you don’t want to be present anymore, when you don’t want to have any emotions and all you want to be is numb—if that’s the reason why you’re taking all of those pills—the fact is you just don’t care. It’s really hard for people on the outside to understand what that feels like. That’s a good thing, obviously, because you don’t want everybody to be walking around in a daze, not giving a shit about anything. But it’s frustrating to try and explain what the experience is like, because most normal people will never find themselves in that state of mind. It’s hard to look someone in the eye and convince them of your love and concern when you both know there was a time when you were able to completely shut them out of your mind and heart. It’s even hard to explain it to yourself, once it’s over. Even when you’re the one who went through it, it’s hard to make sense of that mindset once you’ve gotten better and learned how to care again.

  But the fact is, when you are that low, when you are that deep into addiction, you just don’t care. And that’s one of the most dangerous positions to be in in the world.

  Sally disappeared for a little while when she had to go back to jail for some sanction. All of a sudden, I was really fucking tired. Maybe something had been shifting inside of me for a while, but at that time I found myself feeling miserable in a whole new way. I had just gotten surgery to have my gall-bladder taken out, and it left me feeling completely wrecked. Physically I felt weak, and mentally I felt weak. All at once it was like I could actually feel myself deteriorating.

  When Sally got back out and came over to my house, it took me three minutes to get her to give me pills. She gave me a bunch of Suboxone, which was on a completely different level to anything I’d been doing. Over the next three days, I took thirty pills.

  I shouldn’t be alive right now. Nobody knows how I made it. I remember taking a handful of pills, nodding out, waking up, and taking more. Every time I’d nod out and wake up and take more, over and over, for three days.

  It sounds like I was trying to die. I wasn’t thinking about it explicitly, but I had definitely given up on myself. It was like, “If I wake up, cool. Maybe there’s a reason for it. If I don’t wake up, cool. It’s not gonna bother me.”

  I did wake up, and I was as shocked as anyone else would have been. I was dazed. I didn’t even know how I’d survived it. I was so close to death. And I have been there before, more times than I wish, and probably more times than I know about. But this time, it flipped a switch somewhere inside of me that nothing and no one else had been able to reach. Suddenly, I had had enough.

  I knew if I was going to change, something extreme needed to happen. At that point it didn’t even matter what that was. I barely had enough left in me to think straight, but I knew I couldn’t stand this situation anymore. It had gotten to the point where I could feel just enough of that deep fear I keep deep inside, the fear of looking back and regretting the choice I didn’t make.

  I had to take control. I had to change my life. I had to make a decision.

  That morning I had to go to court, and I called up Leah’s father and begged him to go with me. He didn’t understand why. Nobody had any idea what I was planning. It was almost weird that he agreed to go in with me, considering our relationship at the time. Maybe he sensed something was different.

  My behavior wasn’t a secret anymore. I might have gotten away with the patches for awhile, but I don’t think anybody gets away with nodding out in the middle of an IOP class. They were ready for me, and when I walked into court, I heard the full report on how bad I was doing. I just listened. It wasn’t news to me.

  And when it was my turn to speak, I told the judge I wanted to opt out of drug court. I said I wanted to take the alternative. I said I wanted to go to prison.

  I remember the sound in the room was a big long gasp. But all I had to say was, “I can’t do this anymore.” The judge asked me if I knew I was sentenced to five years in prison if I opted out of treatment, and I said yes, I did. You’re not usually allowed to have attorneys in drug court, but the judge
made an exception for me. My lawyer came in and tried to talk me out of it, but I had already made up my mind. I told him, “There’s not a program they can put me in that’s gonna do anything. Take me to prison.”

  The decision shocked everyone, especially my friends and family. They were extremely upset. I remember seeing a photo of my ex-fiancé online from that day, and just being so caught off. I know that guy like the back of my hand, and I could see the devastation on his face. He was very worried and very sad. Later he told me that when MTV came by to talk to him about it, he got so depressed he went into his room, lay down, and slept all day.

  At the time I wasn’t thinking about whether it was a selfish choice or not. My mind still wasn’t all there. It was almost like I was in shock that day. But to a lot of people it looked like I was turning my back on them and running away; from my family, from my daughter, from my responsibilities. They had a hard time understanding why I couldn’t just suck it up and deal with drug court and use the resources that were there to help me get sober. How could I explain it to them, though?

  It’s hard to live with yourself thinking about how you’ve let people down, and how bad you’ve hurt them. Especially when you know you will never really be able to explain to them why you did it, or why it was the only choice. I understand how they felt. It’s hard to accept that somebody you love will be going to prison for years.

  My ex-fiancé showed a lot of concern for me after I made that decision. When I talked to him afterward, he’d been calling up everyone he knew to find out what it all meant for me. He looked up all of these programs and ways to get my time cut. “Amber, you can do this, and you can do that, and you have to do this, and you can get out early, okay?”