Jabberwocky
Frumious Bandersnatch
‘I’m not an addict’
Chaos, denial, rock bottom. Addiction is a hell of a disease.
Secrets and lies.
Life used to be awash with them.
There were the lies Amanda French told her husband. That she wasn’t drinking. The waiting for Monday morning when he went to work before she started, trying to stop before he got home. Though he pretty much always did know. He knew.
There were the lies she told at the bottle shop. Oh, I’m making red wine casserole, I just need a cheap bottle. When really you’ve scrounged coins because you told your husband to take away your cards, take your cash. Hide your car keys so you can’t get to the store.
And then there were the lies she told herself. I’m not an alcoholic. Why can’t I drink? Everybody drinks.
“I was pretending to be normal but every day I was drinking. I’d get up at four o’clock, have a drink, go to sleep for a bit, then I’d be up at eight o’clock, have a drink. I’d cook all this food and wouldn’t eat it.”
The 50-year-old would run away to the beach. Sit in the sand dunes where no-one could find her. Disappear. Her family not knowing if she was alive or dead.
One night — a couple of nights — she jumped in her car at two in the morning, drink-driving. Went to Kmart, stayed all night.
“I lied and I lied and I lied. I can walk to two bottle shops five minutes from my house in Launceston. But I could go to a different bottle shop every day for a month and they wouldn’t see who you are.
“It’s just like being sneaky and cunning and I don’t want to be that person anymore. No. I just want to be myself. A good person. A good friend, wife, mother, daughter, sister.”
The spiral
Mandy always had a glass in her hand, as far back as she can remember.
When she was younger it was always wine or bubbly. You’d have a few drinks before a party to get a boost. To feel more confident, more attractive.
I’ll just have one more, you’d tell yourself. And then just one more. And then, by the time you looked, you’d have downed a whole bottle.
“I might not have any more that day but I always liked to have a reserve bottle just in case I needed it. I mean, it got to the stage where there was no wine in the fridge, my husband tipped out all his rum. I never drank scotch or bourbon because it made me sick, but five-dollar bottles of red wine, yeah. It’s like you’ll do anything to have a drink.
“For me, it really spiralled from being a social drinker to being a heavy drinker to being unable to stop drinking. I was just totally out of control.”
Why can’t you just stop? Her daughter, her son, her husband must have asked her a thousand times. Why do you do this? You make the choice to go buy a bottle of vodka. Make a different choice.
“I now realise it’s a disease. I cannot stop drinking on my own will.”
She’s ridden that merry-go-round. Sipping non-alcoholic wine all through a party only to get home and drink. Sticking to mocktails all through a 12-day cruise and then finding herself at the bottle shop counter two days later.
It’s something addicts are told in rehab: your brains are wired differently to those who can drink or use drugs, even to excess, without ever developing an addiction. Recognising you are powerless over substances is the first step.
“Now I feel like I can admit, you know, I am an alcoholic, I cannot have a drink. So if I go to a barbecue or a party or whatever it’s just like, ‘I don’t drink’.”
Delay and distract
Rehab has been hellish. She’s hated every day of it.
“I know you’re not supposed to be here to break the cycle but that is one of the reasons I’m here: I can’t get any alcohol.
“I have therapy once a week and the counsellor’s really helped me get through a few childhood issues and stuff like that, so that’s been great. But generally it’s not what I expected.
“We have to do all the cooking and cleaning. I didn’t expect any of that. I’m paying 400 bucks a day — shit, can’t they get someone to clean the bathroom?”
It’s all by design, of course. Part of discipline and taking responsibility. But if Mandy had thought about it properly beforehand, she never would have come.
That’s the way most people arrive. In a chaotic whirl. Whether checked in of their own free will or by a loved one, it’s a point of desperation.
She’s wanted to leave countless times. It goes with the territory.
At almost any given time, at least one patient is threatening to walk out.
The local police are accustomed to Riverside clients marching up the road, fronting up to the station, demanding out.
“Mate, you’re in the best place you can be. Do what you’re told,” has been the response.
At Riverside, the strategy is delay and distract.
“We can’t prevent anyone from leaving but we put it off,” says rehab manager Cameron Leiper.
“We have you see the support workers, they delay you and support you. We try to get you in to see the counsellor. We use the community to try to support you to stay.”
Plus, you’ve signed your belongings over to Riverside and they don’t have to return them for seven days.
In Mandy’s case that included a driver’s licence, which she would need to board a plane back to Tasmania. She was stuck.
That, and the knowledge that she had paid $12,000 to be there, cooled her heels until the urge passed.
She lurched through her 30 days, the minimum-length stay.
Smoking is generally not given up at the same time as drugs and alcohol, but caffeine is banned since it's been known to induce paranoid delusions and psychotic episodes in recently detoxed people.
Surrounded by drug addicts — 80 per cent of Riverside’s clientele are ice users, mostly young men — Mandy has struggled.
“I’m a suburban housewife, legal secretary. They’re all drug dealers. I feel like I’m in an episode of Underbelly.”
Leiper says alcoholics typically present as “I’m going to control everything”, whereas ice addicts arrive totally out of control with no sense of time management. “Alcoholics, their rooms are immaculate, they’re always on time. Ice addicts, their room’s a mess, they’re never on time and they forget everything.”
He says alcohol can be a much more insidious addiction than ice.
It sounds strange to say, but in some ways, Leiper actually prefers ice, because it brings things to an undeniable head. It demands to be dealt with.
“If you’re using ice, you will end up running naked down the street, whereas you can drink in secret for years while keeping up the appearance of a normal life.
“We’ve all got the same problem,” says Leiper, himself a recovering ice addict. “We’re all addicts. In that sense there is a one-size-fits-all in terms of, you have an addiction.”
In its second year of operation, Riverside has a 67 per cent completion rate.
No sooner is a bed vacated than it’s filled by another addict. The centre can accommodate 19 people, but typically has 15 or 16 residents at once, mostly young men.
She’s been encouraged to spend longer in rehab, but she’s adamant.
“Thirty days is maybe not enough for some people but it’s all I’m doing. At home I will keep doing everything that I’ve been taught. You know, I wasn’t all that keen on going to AA meetings but now it’s like, ‘OK, I will do 90 meetings in 90 days’. I’ll get off the plane and I’ll go to a meeting. I already know where they are, there’s one every day.
“We’ll try to keep me away from situations where people are drinking alcohol for the first while. That’s probably the hardest thing, because it is so socially accepted. My mum likes to have a glass of wine pretty much every day. My daughter drinks.
“I can’t say what I’ll be like when I get out. Only that this time I’ve surrendered and I have the total willingness to change my life.”
Ash
At 39, his body is a wreck.
One weekend, while Ashley Hobbins was on leave from rehab, there was a party. He picked up a stubbie of VB and held it to his head, against the two plates in his face.
“This is what you did to me,” he told it. Then he put it down.
It was the car smash that prompted him to book himself into rehab.
He’d jumped behind the wheel after a night at the bowls club. His team had won. He thought he was alright to drive. Came across the West Gate and slammed into a wall, five metres away from a shrine for five kids who died when their car hit a tree in the same spot two years earlier.
Ash escaped with a fractured face and broken ribs. It makes the hair on his arms stand up, how close he came.
“They say about a spiritual awakening. That was f***ing mine.
“To walk away from something like that, I knew if I didn’t get the help I needed probably within the week I’d be in jail, or I would have killed somebody or I would have been dead myself.”
It began 15 years ago.
Ash was 24 and a ship foreman at the wharf, running the night shift.
He was beneath a 20-foot shipping container when a workmate jibbed it down instead of up.
“I had just enough time to pull my body out of the way but it caught my hand,” he says.
“I can still picture it right now. I was running around the hatch and I went to climb up the ladder to get out and I thought, I can’t get out of here.
“I could see my hand with the pigskin glove on where it basically just burst out the side of the glove, all the meat, you know.
“That’s something that will probably never leave my mind and it’s probably why I’ve ended up where I am today.”
The surgeons told him he was going to lose his hand.
“It was the size of a football,” Ash remembers. “I just said, ‘Whatever you do, try to save the hand’.”
A dozen operations later — skin grafts, carpel tunnel — he kept the hand but ended up on a “crapload of medication”.
OxyContins, Endones. Ganglion blocks infusing anaesthetic into his shoulder. A spinal cord stimulator implanted inside his stomach to interrupt pain messages to the brain. He was so rigged up he’d set off airport metal detectors.
“The stimulator was bulging out my stomach. It broke down three times. The third time I said, ‘I don’t want it in there’. So I went back to the ganglion blocks to see if that would work.
“My doctor basically said, ‘There’s not much more we can do for you. You’re going to have to be on this medication until it subsides,’ sort of thing. I couldn’t even function. I was all over the joint. I had a couple of seizures from having too much of it, fell down the escalators at the World Trade Centre and smashed the side of my face.”
There’s no point in blame, but Ash looks back and sees that’s where it all started. The slide into addiction.
Three or four years after the accident, he started smoking dope.
Life rolled on. He became a stay-at-home-dad after a split with his partner. Met a new partner. But in the evenings, he would drink.
A fight broke out at a party. Ash was hit over the head with a baseball bat, his skull fractured. Post-traumatic amnesia layered on top of the post-traumatic stress he was already suffering from his accident back in 2002.
Recovering from the injury, Ash pulled back on the drugs. But he was still drinking. Down to maybe four to six beers a night, instead of just smashing himself with half a slab. But drinking.
Who are you going to be?
Ash’s own father was a mad alcoholic. Five strokes in three years and another three after that. He was still alive but stuck in a nursing home bed.
“I’d only let Dad back in my life in my mid-20s. I remember my kids being around him and I don’t want to be that person where I’m on my deathbed and my kids or their kids are going to be seeing me, my grandchildren. So I use that as motivation.”
Ash remembers eying himself in the mirror on a daily basis, wondering. Who are you going to be today? What are you going to do?
Now in rehab, Ash hasn’t been this dry since the accident. A decade-and-a-half of his life. One big blur. Whether it was medication, or alcohol, or drugs of some type.
“I thought I was 29 but I’m 39. I don’t know where the last 10 years have gone. To actually stick my hand up and ask for the help was a massive turnaround for me.
“I know who I don’t want to be anymore, I just don’t know who I am right now. But this is a great stepping stone for me.”
Residents are monitored by CCTV cameras. There are only four rules: no using drugs or alcohol, no threatening behaviour, no sexual conduct or fraternising and no theft or destruction of property. Breaking them spells expulsion
Triggers
Ash is scared to walk out those doors. Rehab is one thing, but the real world is full of triggers.
There are loads in the house where he’ll be living, where there are still holes in the walls from his fists.
“But now every hole I’m patching up, it’s patching up an old scar.”
He believes in AA’s 12 steps.
“I’m not one to believe in too many things, but these steps have actually given me a pathway. Instead of going right, I’m going straight. Before it was just like a figure eight, I just kept going around and I always kept coming back to the same point, which was daunting.
“I’d seen psychiatrists, psychologists and all that, but until I came in here and saw things clearly, it was very scary, very scary. I was only in survival mode, I was just getting by. I wasn’t living week by week, I was living day by day.”
Now, too, sobriety will be a daily proposition.
“I don’t think I’ve felt like this for a long, long time. I’m happy but scared at the same time, but I know we’ve got a brighter future. I’ve just got to keep the faith, as my nan would say. I’m doing it for my kids just as much as I’m doing it for myself.”
Giulia
Every Wednesday when she was 16, Giulia Condello’s dealer would pull into the driveway of her school.
She would say she had a stomach ache, walk out of class and jump in the car. From the car she would go straight to the toilets.
At one point during Year 11 she was smoking ice “just about every half hour”.
“You don’t realise it, but you create this monster of constant dissatisfaction. I can sit with myself now. I’m not constantly looking for something to put in me. Before, I felt lonely in a room full of 15 people.”
Stealing $400 a week from her parents’ business. Wasting down to 38 kilograms. When the school noticed and drug tested her she covered up, said she’d been abusing cold and flu tablets. They bought it. She went through the motions of seeing a psychologist for anorexia she didn’t have, to keep up the ruse — and continued to use.
Peeled off her face one time. Destroyed the lining of her stomach, she now knows, from using so much GHB.
There were two life bans at a Chapel Street club after they found her slumped under the bar, foaming at the mouth.
“They took me in a back room for about four hours and I was, like, hitting myself and having fits and stuff. You don’t realise what your disease does until you get clean because as I was walking down the stairs I had another charge, thinking it was funny.”
In the space of one week at the height of her addiction Giulia lost her job and her licence, got withdrawn from her course studying specialist effects make-up and moved out of home.
Living with a stripper and a drug dealer.
Clarity
After detoxing, it took three weeks to see she had hurt those around her. To remember her father sitting on the end of her bed before dawn, crying. Her mother, in tears as she checked her daughter into rehab for every substance under the sun.
“I never actually lost my family. I just lost myself. You’re not you, it’s like mourning your own death without dying.”
Now 20, Giulia’s experiencing sobriety for the first time since she began messing with light drugs and alcohol at the age of 12. At 14 it was pills. The night before she came to rehab it was mushroom caps, G and ice.
The first time she tried crystal meth, she didn’t know what it was. Stole a baggie and a pipe and smoked it.
The switch was flicked.
Now, coming out the other side, she wants others to know that the moment you first pick up the drug doesn’t have to seal your fate.
“I think if more people publicised their recovery it would give others a different direction — as opposed to trying to stop people from trying it in the first place. Because people still make the choice to try it, but they trick themselves into thinking they have to keep going, to keep using. Especially with ice, I feel like everybody thinks that once you have it, you always crave it. It’s not like that, at all. Once you try the other way you see that you’re no longer held by something. It’s your choice at the end of the day, there is another option.”
The first thing Giulia said when she came into rehab was, “I’m not an addict”.
Talking gibberish, making no sense.
“I couldn’t really speak when I first came in. My dad said he was really scared because I kept looking over my shoulder because, I don’t know, I was probably tripping. But whenever I’d speak it’d just be like ‘uh, uh’, a bunch of noises. And then I would laugh and wait for everybody else to laugh but nobody knew what I was saying.”
They gave her four Valiums and she went to bed.
It’s the same for almost everyone. At first, you’re a zombie.
Then, as the drugs leave your system, the work begins.
“I think the biggest thing is your emotions. While you’re using, your emotions are completely deteriorated, they’re not there anymore. So when you first get clean you’re feeling all these things and your first reaction to that is a craving. You want to use drugs.”
For Giulia, the trigger is having a good time. The party scene.
It helps, though, if she reminds herself of the bad things that follow the good feelings.
“I always lose something. Whether it’s a friend, physical injuries, whatever it is.
“So now I just play out every memory to the end, and that’s when you stop the excitement and you get the sadness and you don’t want that.”
Cooked
Looking back, Giulia can see it.
“I think about me and my sister growing up, and you see addictive behaviour in you as a kid. And it’s not just things like overeating or stuff like that, it’s the dishonesty.”
You don’t just binge on the chocolate. You eat it in secret then hide all evidence of it.
“I used drugs to self-sabotage. Like, my potential. It was like, ‘If I fail, I’ve got a reason to, because I’m cooked’.”
When you’re using, you find yourself losing the basic principles of life without even knowing.
Even love is distorted.
In the grip of ice, Giulia thought she was being honest because she didn’t hide how off her head she was.
“I would openly be cooked at home. But then when I’d be asked why, I would say I wasn’t on drugs and I’d think, ‘No, no. I’ve got this. Nobody knows, like, it’s only affecting me’.
“You’re not actually hiding from anyone, you’re just hiding from yourself. Like, as soon as my parents knew what was going on, because people had approached them and stuff, I ended up in rehab and now I’m well.
“By hiding it, you’re just protecting that one thing that wants to kill you — your disease. I don’t know why we do that.
“Rehab is not just like a holiday for you to come and take some time off. People are here for three months to work out you — and who Giulia is. You just bring it back to how you’re supposed to be on this earth. You get taught again how to be a normal person in society.”
Low point
The night before she came into rehab, Giulia had one of her scariest experiences.
She was using with a close friend.
“I remember passing in and out and to this day I still can’t recall what happened. But I remember waking up and he was on top of me. And when I got myself out of the situation, I told someone about it, and it was the whole, ‘You’re too cooked, how dare you say that about him?’
“That was a big turning point for me because I was reaching out for help about a situation [but] I couldn’t even say whether it was true or not. If I was sober, there’s no way that would have happened and no way I would have been questioned.
“You get to a stage where you can’t even look after yourself. People take advantage of that, you know. You can’t put your life in someone else’s hands.”
Clean and serene
The Narcotics Anonymous tag says it. Clean and serene. 90 days now.
“The way I feel at the moment is really important because it’s really enjoyable. It’s, like, everything. Physically I can walk, like, I can walk around the block and not need an asthma pump. I can spend time with my family.
“And, like I said to them, ‘I didn’t hate you, I just hated that you didn’t let me smoke a pipe in front of you, which is f***ing crazy to sort of want. But, I enjoy your company’. I’ve got no idea what next year has in store but I’ll get to choose and determine how my life goes.”
She knows she won’t be able to socialise the way she did.
“Before I came in here, if I had a mate who went to rehab and I saw them out I’d say, ‘Hey, do you want some stuff?’ because they’d just come out, it’s like a celebration kind of thing. But that’s not how I want to be right now.”
This New Year’s Eve was a revelation.
“This year, compared to last year, I don’t have my job and I mightn’t have money at the moment but I was present. I remember it ticking over. Little things, they start to give you happiness, which is good.”
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-30/addiction-rehab-riverside/8576832
Chaos, denial, rock bottom. Addiction is a hell of a disease.
Secrets and lies.
Life used to be awash with them.
There were the lies Amanda French told her husband. That she wasn’t drinking. The waiting for Monday morning when he went to work before she started, trying to stop before he got home. Though he pretty much always did know. He knew.
There were the lies she told at the bottle shop. Oh, I’m making red wine casserole, I just need a cheap bottle. When really you’ve scrounged coins because you told your husband to take away your cards, take your cash. Hide your car keys so you can’t get to the store.
And then there were the lies she told herself. I’m not an alcoholic. Why can’t I drink? Everybody drinks.
“I was pretending to be normal but every day I was drinking. I’d get up at four o’clock, have a drink, go to sleep for a bit, then I’d be up at eight o’clock, have a drink. I’d cook all this food and wouldn’t eat it.”
The 50-year-old would run away to the beach. Sit in the sand dunes where no-one could find her. Disappear. Her family not knowing if she was alive or dead.
One night — a couple of nights — she jumped in her car at two in the morning, drink-driving. Went to Kmart, stayed all night.
“I lied and I lied and I lied. I can walk to two bottle shops five minutes from my house in Launceston. But I could go to a different bottle shop every day for a month and they wouldn’t see who you are.
“It’s just like being sneaky and cunning and I don’t want to be that person anymore. No. I just want to be myself. A good person. A good friend, wife, mother, daughter, sister.”
The spiral
Mandy always had a glass in her hand, as far back as she can remember.
When she was younger it was always wine or bubbly. You’d have a few drinks before a party to get a boost. To feel more confident, more attractive.
I’ll just have one more, you’d tell yourself. And then just one more. And then, by the time you looked, you’d have downed a whole bottle.
“I might not have any more that day but I always liked to have a reserve bottle just in case I needed it. I mean, it got to the stage where there was no wine in the fridge, my husband tipped out all his rum. I never drank scotch or bourbon because it made me sick, but five-dollar bottles of red wine, yeah. It’s like you’ll do anything to have a drink.
“For me, it really spiralled from being a social drinker to being a heavy drinker to being unable to stop drinking. I was just totally out of control.”
Why can’t you just stop? Her daughter, her son, her husband must have asked her a thousand times. Why do you do this? You make the choice to go buy a bottle of vodka. Make a different choice.
“I now realise it’s a disease. I cannot stop drinking on my own will.”
She’s ridden that merry-go-round. Sipping non-alcoholic wine all through a party only to get home and drink. Sticking to mocktails all through a 12-day cruise and then finding herself at the bottle shop counter two days later.
It’s something addicts are told in rehab: your brains are wired differently to those who can drink or use drugs, even to excess, without ever developing an addiction. Recognising you are powerless over substances is the first step.
“Now I feel like I can admit, you know, I am an alcoholic, I cannot have a drink. So if I go to a barbecue or a party or whatever it’s just like, ‘I don’t drink’.”
Delay and distract
Rehab has been hellish. She’s hated every day of it.
“I know you’re not supposed to be here to break the cycle but that is one of the reasons I’m here: I can’t get any alcohol.
“I have therapy once a week and the counsellor’s really helped me get through a few childhood issues and stuff like that, so that’s been great. But generally it’s not what I expected.
“We have to do all the cooking and cleaning. I didn’t expect any of that. I’m paying 400 bucks a day — shit, can’t they get someone to clean the bathroom?”
It’s all by design, of course. Part of discipline and taking responsibility. But if Mandy had thought about it properly beforehand, she never would have come.
That’s the way most people arrive. In a chaotic whirl. Whether checked in of their own free will or by a loved one, it’s a point of desperation.
She’s wanted to leave countless times. It goes with the territory.
At almost any given time, at least one patient is threatening to walk out.
The local police are accustomed to Riverside clients marching up the road, fronting up to the station, demanding out.
“Mate, you’re in the best place you can be. Do what you’re told,” has been the response.
At Riverside, the strategy is delay and distract.
“We can’t prevent anyone from leaving but we put it off,” says rehab manager Cameron Leiper.
“We have you see the support workers, they delay you and support you. We try to get you in to see the counsellor. We use the community to try to support you to stay.”
Plus, you’ve signed your belongings over to Riverside and they don’t have to return them for seven days.
In Mandy’s case that included a driver’s licence, which she would need to board a plane back to Tasmania. She was stuck.
That, and the knowledge that she had paid $12,000 to be there, cooled her heels until the urge passed.
She lurched through her 30 days, the minimum-length stay.
Smoking is generally not given up at the same time as drugs and alcohol, but caffeine is banned since it's been known to induce paranoid delusions and psychotic episodes in recently detoxed people.
Surrounded by drug addicts — 80 per cent of Riverside’s clientele are ice users, mostly young men — Mandy has struggled.
“I’m a suburban housewife, legal secretary. They’re all drug dealers. I feel like I’m in an episode of Underbelly.”
Leiper says alcoholics typically present as “I’m going to control everything”, whereas ice addicts arrive totally out of control with no sense of time management. “Alcoholics, their rooms are immaculate, they’re always on time. Ice addicts, their room’s a mess, they’re never on time and they forget everything.”
He says alcohol can be a much more insidious addiction than ice.
It sounds strange to say, but in some ways, Leiper actually prefers ice, because it brings things to an undeniable head. It demands to be dealt with.
“If you’re using ice, you will end up running naked down the street, whereas you can drink in secret for years while keeping up the appearance of a normal life.
“We’ve all got the same problem,” says Leiper, himself a recovering ice addict. “We’re all addicts. In that sense there is a one-size-fits-all in terms of, you have an addiction.”
In its second year of operation, Riverside has a 67 per cent completion rate.
No sooner is a bed vacated than it’s filled by another addict. The centre can accommodate 19 people, but typically has 15 or 16 residents at once, mostly young men.
She’s been encouraged to spend longer in rehab, but she’s adamant.
“Thirty days is maybe not enough for some people but it’s all I’m doing. At home I will keep doing everything that I’ve been taught. You know, I wasn’t all that keen on going to AA meetings but now it’s like, ‘OK, I will do 90 meetings in 90 days’. I’ll get off the plane and I’ll go to a meeting. I already know where they are, there’s one every day.
“We’ll try to keep me away from situations where people are drinking alcohol for the first while. That’s probably the hardest thing, because it is so socially accepted. My mum likes to have a glass of wine pretty much every day. My daughter drinks.
“I can’t say what I’ll be like when I get out. Only that this time I’ve surrendered and I have the total willingness to change my life.”
Ash
At 39, his body is a wreck.
One weekend, while Ashley Hobbins was on leave from rehab, there was a party. He picked up a stubbie of VB and held it to his head, against the two plates in his face.
“This is what you did to me,” he told it. Then he put it down.
It was the car smash that prompted him to book himself into rehab.
He’d jumped behind the wheel after a night at the bowls club. His team had won. He thought he was alright to drive. Came across the West Gate and slammed into a wall, five metres away from a shrine for five kids who died when their car hit a tree in the same spot two years earlier.
Ash escaped with a fractured face and broken ribs. It makes the hair on his arms stand up, how close he came.
“They say about a spiritual awakening. That was f***ing mine.
“To walk away from something like that, I knew if I didn’t get the help I needed probably within the week I’d be in jail, or I would have killed somebody or I would have been dead myself.”
It began 15 years ago.
Ash was 24 and a ship foreman at the wharf, running the night shift.
He was beneath a 20-foot shipping container when a workmate jibbed it down instead of up.
“I had just enough time to pull my body out of the way but it caught my hand,” he says.
“I can still picture it right now. I was running around the hatch and I went to climb up the ladder to get out and I thought, I can’t get out of here.
“I could see my hand with the pigskin glove on where it basically just burst out the side of the glove, all the meat, you know.
“That’s something that will probably never leave my mind and it’s probably why I’ve ended up where I am today.”
The surgeons told him he was going to lose his hand.
“It was the size of a football,” Ash remembers. “I just said, ‘Whatever you do, try to save the hand’.”
A dozen operations later — skin grafts, carpel tunnel — he kept the hand but ended up on a “crapload of medication”.
OxyContins, Endones. Ganglion blocks infusing anaesthetic into his shoulder. A spinal cord stimulator implanted inside his stomach to interrupt pain messages to the brain. He was so rigged up he’d set off airport metal detectors.
“The stimulator was bulging out my stomach. It broke down three times. The third time I said, ‘I don’t want it in there’. So I went back to the ganglion blocks to see if that would work.
“My doctor basically said, ‘There’s not much more we can do for you. You’re going to have to be on this medication until it subsides,’ sort of thing. I couldn’t even function. I was all over the joint. I had a couple of seizures from having too much of it, fell down the escalators at the World Trade Centre and smashed the side of my face.”
There’s no point in blame, but Ash looks back and sees that’s where it all started. The slide into addiction.
Three or four years after the accident, he started smoking dope.
Life rolled on. He became a stay-at-home-dad after a split with his partner. Met a new partner. But in the evenings, he would drink.
A fight broke out at a party. Ash was hit over the head with a baseball bat, his skull fractured. Post-traumatic amnesia layered on top of the post-traumatic stress he was already suffering from his accident back in 2002.
Recovering from the injury, Ash pulled back on the drugs. But he was still drinking. Down to maybe four to six beers a night, instead of just smashing himself with half a slab. But drinking.
Who are you going to be?
Ash’s own father was a mad alcoholic. Five strokes in three years and another three after that. He was still alive but stuck in a nursing home bed.
“I’d only let Dad back in my life in my mid-20s. I remember my kids being around him and I don’t want to be that person where I’m on my deathbed and my kids or their kids are going to be seeing me, my grandchildren. So I use that as motivation.”
Ash remembers eying himself in the mirror on a daily basis, wondering. Who are you going to be today? What are you going to do?
Now in rehab, Ash hasn’t been this dry since the accident. A decade-and-a-half of his life. One big blur. Whether it was medication, or alcohol, or drugs of some type.
“I thought I was 29 but I’m 39. I don’t know where the last 10 years have gone. To actually stick my hand up and ask for the help was a massive turnaround for me.
“I know who I don’t want to be anymore, I just don’t know who I am right now. But this is a great stepping stone for me.”
Residents are monitored by CCTV cameras. There are only four rules: no using drugs or alcohol, no threatening behaviour, no sexual conduct or fraternising and no theft or destruction of property. Breaking them spells expulsion
Triggers
Ash is scared to walk out those doors. Rehab is one thing, but the real world is full of triggers.
There are loads in the house where he’ll be living, where there are still holes in the walls from his fists.
“But now every hole I’m patching up, it’s patching up an old scar.”
He believes in AA’s 12 steps.
“I’m not one to believe in too many things, but these steps have actually given me a pathway. Instead of going right, I’m going straight. Before it was just like a figure eight, I just kept going around and I always kept coming back to the same point, which was daunting.
“I’d seen psychiatrists, psychologists and all that, but until I came in here and saw things clearly, it was very scary, very scary. I was only in survival mode, I was just getting by. I wasn’t living week by week, I was living day by day.”
Now, too, sobriety will be a daily proposition.
“I don’t think I’ve felt like this for a long, long time. I’m happy but scared at the same time, but I know we’ve got a brighter future. I’ve just got to keep the faith, as my nan would say. I’m doing it for my kids just as much as I’m doing it for myself.”
Giulia
Every Wednesday when she was 16, Giulia Condello’s dealer would pull into the driveway of her school.
She would say she had a stomach ache, walk out of class and jump in the car. From the car she would go straight to the toilets.
At one point during Year 11 she was smoking ice “just about every half hour”.
“You don’t realise it, but you create this monster of constant dissatisfaction. I can sit with myself now. I’m not constantly looking for something to put in me. Before, I felt lonely in a room full of 15 people.”
Stealing $400 a week from her parents’ business. Wasting down to 38 kilograms. When the school noticed and drug tested her she covered up, said she’d been abusing cold and flu tablets. They bought it. She went through the motions of seeing a psychologist for anorexia she didn’t have, to keep up the ruse — and continued to use.
Peeled off her face one time. Destroyed the lining of her stomach, she now knows, from using so much GHB.
There were two life bans at a Chapel Street club after they found her slumped under the bar, foaming at the mouth.
“They took me in a back room for about four hours and I was, like, hitting myself and having fits and stuff. You don’t realise what your disease does until you get clean because as I was walking down the stairs I had another charge, thinking it was funny.”
In the space of one week at the height of her addiction Giulia lost her job and her licence, got withdrawn from her course studying specialist effects make-up and moved out of home.
Living with a stripper and a drug dealer.
Clarity
After detoxing, it took three weeks to see she had hurt those around her. To remember her father sitting on the end of her bed before dawn, crying. Her mother, in tears as she checked her daughter into rehab for every substance under the sun.
“I never actually lost my family. I just lost myself. You’re not you, it’s like mourning your own death without dying.”
Now 20, Giulia’s experiencing sobriety for the first time since she began messing with light drugs and alcohol at the age of 12. At 14 it was pills. The night before she came to rehab it was mushroom caps, G and ice.
The first time she tried crystal meth, she didn’t know what it was. Stole a baggie and a pipe and smoked it.
The switch was flicked.
Now, coming out the other side, she wants others to know that the moment you first pick up the drug doesn’t have to seal your fate.
“I think if more people publicised their recovery it would give others a different direction — as opposed to trying to stop people from trying it in the first place. Because people still make the choice to try it, but they trick themselves into thinking they have to keep going, to keep using. Especially with ice, I feel like everybody thinks that once you have it, you always crave it. It’s not like that, at all. Once you try the other way you see that you’re no longer held by something. It’s your choice at the end of the day, there is another option.”
The first thing Giulia said when she came into rehab was, “I’m not an addict”.
Talking gibberish, making no sense.
“I couldn’t really speak when I first came in. My dad said he was really scared because I kept looking over my shoulder because, I don’t know, I was probably tripping. But whenever I’d speak it’d just be like ‘uh, uh’, a bunch of noises. And then I would laugh and wait for everybody else to laugh but nobody knew what I was saying.”
They gave her four Valiums and she went to bed.
It’s the same for almost everyone. At first, you’re a zombie.
Then, as the drugs leave your system, the work begins.
“I think the biggest thing is your emotions. While you’re using, your emotions are completely deteriorated, they’re not there anymore. So when you first get clean you’re feeling all these things and your first reaction to that is a craving. You want to use drugs.”
For Giulia, the trigger is having a good time. The party scene.
It helps, though, if she reminds herself of the bad things that follow the good feelings.
“I always lose something. Whether it’s a friend, physical injuries, whatever it is.
“So now I just play out every memory to the end, and that’s when you stop the excitement and you get the sadness and you don’t want that.”
Cooked
Looking back, Giulia can see it.
“I think about me and my sister growing up, and you see addictive behaviour in you as a kid. And it’s not just things like overeating or stuff like that, it’s the dishonesty.”
You don’t just binge on the chocolate. You eat it in secret then hide all evidence of it.
“I used drugs to self-sabotage. Like, my potential. It was like, ‘If I fail, I’ve got a reason to, because I’m cooked’.”
When you’re using, you find yourself losing the basic principles of life without even knowing.
Even love is distorted.
In the grip of ice, Giulia thought she was being honest because she didn’t hide how off her head she was.
“I would openly be cooked at home. But then when I’d be asked why, I would say I wasn’t on drugs and I’d think, ‘No, no. I’ve got this. Nobody knows, like, it’s only affecting me’.
“You’re not actually hiding from anyone, you’re just hiding from yourself. Like, as soon as my parents knew what was going on, because people had approached them and stuff, I ended up in rehab and now I’m well.
“By hiding it, you’re just protecting that one thing that wants to kill you — your disease. I don’t know why we do that.
“Rehab is not just like a holiday for you to come and take some time off. People are here for three months to work out you — and who Giulia is. You just bring it back to how you’re supposed to be on this earth. You get taught again how to be a normal person in society.”
Low point
The night before she came into rehab, Giulia had one of her scariest experiences.
She was using with a close friend.
“I remember passing in and out and to this day I still can’t recall what happened. But I remember waking up and he was on top of me. And when I got myself out of the situation, I told someone about it, and it was the whole, ‘You’re too cooked, how dare you say that about him?’
“That was a big turning point for me because I was reaching out for help about a situation [but] I couldn’t even say whether it was true or not. If I was sober, there’s no way that would have happened and no way I would have been questioned.
“You get to a stage where you can’t even look after yourself. People take advantage of that, you know. You can’t put your life in someone else’s hands.”
Clean and serene
The Narcotics Anonymous tag says it. Clean and serene. 90 days now.
“The way I feel at the moment is really important because it’s really enjoyable. It’s, like, everything. Physically I can walk, like, I can walk around the block and not need an asthma pump. I can spend time with my family.
“And, like I said to them, ‘I didn’t hate you, I just hated that you didn’t let me smoke a pipe in front of you, which is f***ing crazy to sort of want. But, I enjoy your company’. I’ve got no idea what next year has in store but I’ll get to choose and determine how my life goes.”
She knows she won’t be able to socialise the way she did.
“Before I came in here, if I had a mate who went to rehab and I saw them out I’d say, ‘Hey, do you want some stuff?’ because they’d just come out, it’s like a celebration kind of thing. But that’s not how I want to be right now.”
This New Year’s Eve was a revelation.
“This year, compared to last year, I don’t have my job and I mightn’t have money at the moment but I was present. I remember it ticking over. Little things, they start to give you happiness, which is good.”
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-30/addiction-rehab-riverside/8576832
