Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict

by Joshua Lyon

  I had a date that night, my first since I had ended things with Joey. I had been really excited about getting back out there, because I knew my isolation was starting to become a real problem. I had little patience for anyone outside the office or for anything that didn’t have to do with the magazine. I felt totally isolated, even in rooms full of people.

  The pain was getting so bad that I texted my date and canceled. I crawled under the covers and fell asleep with my knees hugging my chest.

  I woke up two hours later, shaking, covered in a cold sweat. Something’s wrong, I thought to myself, then said it out loud, to Ollie, who was on the pillow next to my head. I sat up and turned on the bedside light, and the room swirled. The sharp pain in my belly made me double over, and I gasped. I knew I had to get to a hospital.

  I put on jeans, a T-shirt, and a hoodie, bent over the entire time. It was around 1:00 A.M., and I clung to the banister all the way downstairs and out into the street, where people were still spilling out of bars, screaming and laughing and stumbling. This is what it is like to be truly alone, I thought. I was invisible, in excruciating pain, in a crowd full of blind eyes.

  I hugged the sides of buildings and made it to the corner, and got a cab almost immediately.

  “Beth Israel, Emergency Room,” I said.

  The city was alive as we drove up First Avenue, huge groups of drunk people, screaming, wandering into the street against the light so that my driver kept having to slam on the brakes, tossing me forward. I groaned and clung to the door handle.

  We were there in under ten minutes. I limped into the ER, sitting down in the first chair I could find. I explained my symptoms to the admitting nurse, showed them my insurance card, and was told to wait, but was called in almost immediately.

  I was taken to a small plastic chair near the main nurse station inside the ER. A woman who looked absurdly like a weathered version of Daisy Duke but in a blue smock took my temperature and I explained how I was feeling. She pushed against the painful area under my belly button and I winced backward. Then she stuck her fingers lower down and to the right, and pain exploded throughout my entire body.

  “FUUUUUUUUUCKKKKKK!!!!!” I screamed. “Oh, god, sorry,” I said quickly.

  “Hon, it looks like you’ve got appendicitis,” she said, kneeling in front of me. “We’ve got to do some blood tests, but I’m betting that’s what it is. And we’ve got to get that thing out of you.”

  I hated myself for it, but I started to cry. Appendicitis is so lame—it’s about the most common ailment imaginable. But still, there was no one there to hold my hand.

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” she said. “We’re going to get you hooked up to some morphine so you won’t be in pain.”

  I stopped crying immediately. Sweet.

  The nurse took blood and another nurse wheeled over an IV drip and plugged it into my arm. She attached a bag of morphine. “You ready?” she asked. “You’re going to feel fine in a second.”

  I nodded and she released the valve that shot the morphine directly into my bloodstream.

  Nothing.

  I waited. After a minute or two the nurse came back and gave me a knowing smile. “You feeling better?” she asked.

  “Um, I don’t feel a thing,” I said. “My stomach is killing me.”

  “That’s weird,” she said, and fiddled with the tube. “It’s definitely in there.”

  “I, um, might have a kind of high tolerance for medication,” I said.

  “Well, we’ll give you another dose then,” she said. She attached a new bag to my IV and let it rip. This time I felt the morphine rush into my body. But it went straight into my head, causing everything to go white and hazy for a minute. I was instantly high. But the pain in my belly stabbed right through the morphine, and the feeling didn’t abate an ounce.

  I wasn’t an idiot. I knew what was going on. My tolerance for opiates was through the roof, and no amount of morphine was going to help.

  The nurse helped me up and led me down a hallway. I passed a bed with an old woman lying on it who looked like she had a fist bulging out of the inside of her neck, as if there was a person inside her trying to rip through her skin. She was alone, her head pushed back, eyes closed, mouth open. Tiny stick legs poked out from under her dressing gown.

  The nurse brought me to a bed near hers. There was no private room, just an open area with curtains you could pull around yourself. She tossed me a hospital gown and told me to put it on. I waved my arm catheter at her. “You’re gonna have to take this out first,” I slurred.

  She unhooked it and stood behind the curtain while I pulled my clothes off. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to leave my underwear on but it felt too tight against my skin, so I pulled it off and slipped into the robe, my bare ass hanging out behind. I sat on the bed and told the nurse I was done.

  She pulled the curtain and hooked my arm back up to the tube. I was doubled over in pain. “I’m gonna need more of that,” I said, pointing up toward the bag of morphine.

  “Wait until that bag is empty and we’ll give you a new one with a higher dosage,” she said. She frowned. “It should be working though.”

  “It’s not,” I said. She left and I pulled my cell phone out of the plastic bag they had given me to keep my clothes in. I curled up and stared at it. I had no idea who to call; no one was going to be awake. I tried calling Emily, Stephanie, even Joey. Nothing. I knew I couldn’t call my sister. Her boyfriend was out of town and there would be no one to watch the kids.

  Another stab of pain shot through my belly as a doctor told me I had to get x-rayed. I got out of bed, leaning on my IV pole for support. It had wheels, so I let it pull me forward as I followed the doctor down the hall, my ass still bare. A nurse rushed over to tie my robe for me. As I waited outside a door for the x-ray technician to finish up with another patient I saw someone being admitted, a guy my age covered with tattoos, unconscious on a stretcher. A girl dressed in a hoodie covering most of her face stood by him, holding his hand, talking urgently with a doctor. An overdose.

  Amateur, I thought.

  It took two separate x-rays to get my entire torso. Apparently I have abnormally long lungs. I found this new fact comforting. Since so many opiate overdoses are caused by respiratory failure I figured the extra room in there couldn’t hurt.

  By the time I got back to my bed my morphine bag was empty, so I buzzed the nurse and asked for more. I got a new bag and felt the delicious warmth surge through my veins, hitting every spot except the one it was supposed to hit inside my belly.

  My head was swimming as the overdose kid got rolled into the room across from me. I watched a nurse pull his clothes off and put a robe on him. They kept his underwear on. As I was watching them, I suddenly noticed a large, grinning clown sitting on a shelf above him, hiding in the middle of all the medical equipment.

  I made some sort of gagging noise and tried to sit up, terrified. The clown dissolved back into a mess of heart monitors and wires. I kept my eye on it, and every so often the equipment would shimmer and the clown would appear again. It looked just like the one from Poltergeist that hid under the kid’s bed. I knew he wasn’t real, but the hallucination was so vivid, so clear, that I felt like I had to keep an eye on him anyway, just in case he tried to climb down from the shelf and slither across the floor toward me.

  A doctor finally came and confirmed that it was definitely appendicitis, but I’d have to wait a few more hours for an operating room to free up.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll make sure you’re comfortable.” He patted the morphine bag and saw it was almost empty. “We’ll get that filled back up,” he promised.

  I couldn’t sleep, so I sat on the bed for hours, eating the pain while my head swam in frothy white waves. I’d curl up, move my head to the foot of the bed, try to half sit up with my head between my knees—anything to stop the stabbing pain. Nothing worked.

  At 7:00 A.M. I called Erica, knowing she would be up
and getting the kids ready for school. I explained what was going on, and she got a little hysterical and promised she would be there by the time I woke up from surgery. I felt a little better after that. Emily also called around 8:00 A.M. and promised she would be there as soon as possible.

  I was wheeled up to surgery around 11:00 A.M. A nurse shaved my pubic hair, since they were going to do a laparoscopic procedure. A doctor stood over her while she shaved me and explained that they would only make three small holes—one on my left side, one where my pubes used to be, and then they’d go in through my belly button to pull my poisoned appendix out.

  “Can I keep it?” I asked.

  “It’s considered hazardous material,” the doctor said.

  “When you seal up my belly button after, can you make it look a little nicer than it does now?” I asked. “There’s this weird bump in there.”

  I was babbling. “We’ll see what we can do,” the doctor said. I was wheeled through corridor after corridor, and I watched the ceiling glide by, thinking This is what dying people see. And then I wondered how many other people had thought the exact same thing.

  Suddenly we were in the operating room. I was lifted onto a table. A new tube was put inside my arm catheter and I blacked out, just like Joey on a coke bender.

  Erica was standing beside me when I woke up.

  “They went like this!” I said, waving my arms around in the air in front of me, trying to show her how they had performed the surgery, and passed back out.

  When I opened my eyes again a fat nurse was standing at the foot of my bed. “Keep your eyes open!” she barked, but I passed back out again.

  The third time I came to, I tried to force my eyelids to stay open, but they were made of stone. Erica was wringing her hands. “I have to go, the kids are home alone,” she said.

  “S’fine,” I slurred. I looked around and saw I was in a recovery room, with about fifteen other people who were coming out of surgery too.

  “You have some friends waiting for you outside. I’ll send them in.”

  She left and was replaced by Emily and Stephanie, who stood on either side of me, fussing with the sheets and pillows. The fat nurse returned.

  “We need your bed, we’re moving you to a chair,” she said. Stephanie lifted me with one arm and Emily grabbed the other, and they slowly walked me over to a reclining armchair and eased me down. Every step was a knife wound in my torso.

  “I want to go home,” I said, but suddenly Joey was striding across the floor of the room, with a huge bouquet of flowers and a giant shopping bag.

  “Hey, Tiger,” he said softly and rubbed my head. “Here,” and he pulled out a new pair of pale blue American Apparel underwear and some knee socks. “I thought you might need some fresh underthings,” he said.

  The nurse came over and told me I just had to wait for a doctor to come check on me, and that I could go home after. I just had to pee for her first, because they’d put a tube up inside my penis while I was out and needed to make sure everything was working right again. That explained the stinging pain.

  “Want to try and go?” Joey asked. I nodded, and he half carried me over to the bathroom. I brought my IV stand in with me and leaned on it while I tried to pee. I felt like I had to, but nothing happened.

  I came back out and Joey walked me back to my chair.

  “I have to go, I’m deejaying tonight,” he said, “but call me if you need anything.”

  I watched him walk away, wishing he would stay, wishing that he would carry me home, put me to bed, stay with me all night.

  Emily nudged me. “Dude, you’re gonna get Vicodin!” she said.

  For some reason Erica had taken my cell phone home with her. She explained later that it made sense at the time because she thought that this way she could keep in touch with my friends if they called for me. I called her from Stephanie’s phone and asked her if she could bring it back to the city. I didn’t have a land line at home, and the thought of being alone post-surgery with no way to contact anyone just seemed like a bad idea. But I could hear in her voice that it was late and she didn’t want to leave the kids alone in the house. If they woke up and found her gone they would have freaked. So I told her just to bring it to me the next day.

  I was finally discharged around midnight, with my first-ever legal prescription for Vicodin. Stephanie filled the prescription for me at a CVS next to the hospital while I waited, doubled over on a chair inside a Chinese takeout joint. I’d tried to make it the one extra block to the drugstore but whatever heavy-duty pain drugs they had me on were wearing off and I could barely move. I watched people rush by the window. The smell of greasy noodles and duck sauce made me want to vomit.

  Stephanie finally came back. “I’m so sorry that took so long, there was a huge line. At midnight! So weird.” She handed me the bottle, and I asked her to get me some water so I could take them right then.

  She helped me into a cab, rode with me, brought me upstairs to my apartment. The Goth roommate wasn’t home and Steph was worried. “Do you want me to stay with you tonight?” she asked.

  I told her no, that I was fine. I just wanted to sleep. She tucked me in and I promised to call her in the morning as soon as I got my phone back from Erica.

  I passed out quickly, the anesthesia still working its way out of my system. I woke back up a few hours later though, and couldn’t move. My entire body was on fire with pain and if I tried to move even an inch, every single nerve ending in my body would explode. I tried to reach for the bottle of Vicodin on the nightstand but couldn’t grasp it. I called out for my roommate a few times, but there was no answer. As I lay there, unable to move and alone in my bed, I finally felt the full weight of my mistakes and my addiction. I’d fucked everything up and I was alone because of it. I deserved to be lying there in the dark in agony. I’d abused the safety bubble and it was nowhere to be found now. I’d never experienced loneliness that deep before, in the dark, unable to move, no one to hear me or help me. There was no sleep anymore. So I focused on the pain. I experienced it, embracing it for what it was for the first time ever in my life, as a warning system that my own body was using to tell me that something was very, very wrong.

  And suddenly it felt good. It made me feel alive. Maybe my emotional pain that the pills erased was no different from this reaction to surgery; it was just my brain telling me that everything was wrong. And I needed to listen to it, to fix it, instead of hiding from it. If my body was capable of producing those nociceptors in my fingertips that told me when I was touching something hot, then why wouldn’t my depression, my anxiety, my fear of the world be just another symptom that my brain was touching its own hot stove somewhere up in there? I now knew I needed to get my fingers off the burner.

  After an hour or two I was finally able to shift myself closer to the nightstand and turn on the light. I tried to sit up a little, but that was too much. I reached for the Vicodon bottle and the glass of water I’d heard Ollie lapping from a little earlier. I studied it, looked at my name spelled out near the name of the substance I’d spent countless hours chasing. After this bottle, I thought, no more.

  CHAPTER 15

  “All of This Foam Came Out of My Son’s Mouth”

  JARED, CALEB, HEATHER, ME—All of our collective experiences had hit us physically, spiritually, economically, and emotionally. But so far we had all been lucky—none of us had overdosed and not come back. According the Drug Abuse Warning Network, which collects emergency room visit data for SAMHSA, the number of opiate-related visits leapt 24 percent in just one year, from 2004 to 2005. And according to the DEA, opioid painkillers are now a factor in more drug overdose deaths than cocaine and heroin combined.

  One of those deaths took on almost Shakespearean qualities. The case involved a handsome forty-nine-year-old man named James Dean, and his son, James Dean Jr. Yes, those are their real names.

  I first met James Dean face-to-face in a cinder-block room at the Warren Correctional Institut
ion in Lebanon, Ohio. We’d been exchanging letters back and forth for several months about his case. Of course I had a very particular image in my mind about what he would look like, but nothing prepared me for either his height or his row of razor sharp teeth. They’re so pronounced that I had to ask him if he’d had them filed.

  “Nope, they’re all mine,” he said, but he wasn’t smiling.

  James grew up with two brothers in a white, middle-class family. From the get-go his life was pretty tragic. His father was shot and killed when James was five. James is unsure of the exact details, but he was always told that his father was the innocent victim of a stray bullet during a shoot-out.

  He smoked pot with his cousin for the first time when he was thirteen. “I was, like, ‘Sure, I’ll try it,’” he says. “I guess that was pretty much my attitude toward life, even when I was young. It might have something to do with my name, I don’t know.”

  He graduated high school with a certificate in electronics and joined the navy immediately after, along with his brother. Right after boot camp, his brother got leukemia; he died eighteen months later. James himself was honorably discharged in 1981, and went to college at the University of Cincinnati for electrical engineering. But he started using cocaine and drinking heavily, and eventually dropped out of college. He had a series of rocky relationships, one of which produced a son, James Dean Jr., with a woman named Laurie Bender. They called James Jr. Jimmy. A few years later he had another son, Jason Dean, with another woman. His continued partying destroyed his relationships with both of the kids’ mothers.

  By 1992, James was sick of the misery his drug and alcohol addiction had caused him. He wanted to get clean. He decided that the best way to do that was to go to prison to detox, so he walked into a gas station in broad daylight, punched the clerk in the face, and stole all the money out of the cash register.