I’m Brooke, and I am a person in recovery from drug addiction.
I have suffered from addiction for 10+ years. I have been addicted to meth, opiates, and heroin within those ten years. They say addiction takes you three places: jails, institutions, and death… I have been to all of those places but one, and I hope that I never have to meet death because of my addiction.
After I had my son in August of 2014, I went to my doctor with some residual pain from his birth. She subsequently wrote me a prescription for Hydrocodone… Little did she know that I was already abusing someone else’s prescription. I started taking 20-30 hydro’s a day, at 5 dollars a pill and it was getting to be too expensive to keep up with as a single mom. (Mind you I was an IV meth addict for several years before I had my son and swore I’d never touch needles again.) It didn’t take long before I was seeking out more potent pills to save money.
One day, I couldn’t find anything and I was sick as a dog, and had to go to work within the next hour. I ended up snorting a line of meth to get me through, and a day later I was sticking needles in my arm again. I was dating a man who was using opiates IV, and he showed me how to do it. Within a month I lost my home, and I lost my child.
Everything was spiraling out of control and I couldn’t stop. Money became non-existent and pills got too expensive to buy on the street. This was when I met heroin. “This is it, I thought… This must be what love feels like.” I remember all the guilt and problems of the world falling away as I nodded off and the sickness subsided. Nothing else mattered but the next bag of black tar I was going to melt down and shoot into my bloodstream. I started stripping to make money, but wasn’t very good at it because I spent most of my time in the bathrooms trying to find a vein. What little money I made was spent before I ever even had a chance to stick it in my wallet. I had to do something else to make better money… My habit was costing more and more every day. I was a mere 90 pounds going into some of the scariest situations, trying to coax my dealer with sex to get a bag.
Finally, my life had become so unmanageable that I just stopped going to work and I started to panic. I started sleeping with people to get pills or money, and most of the time I would tell them what I wanted out of it and they wouldn’t even have it to give. So I just got whatever they had in their pockets to give. Luckily that didn’t last long, I had only slept with 2 men for money (which was two too many, trust me), and I ran into a guy I went to high school with. He took me into his home and funded my habit out of pity.
My last day high was probably the worst experience I’d ever had in all my days of using. I was waiting for money to come so I could buy heroin and get unsick. The money didn’t come through. I had a bag of meth saved that I was gonna trade for the money, so I pulled it out and hoped it would be enough to end my life. It wasn’t, but it was a lot more than my body could handle. I was sitting in my car in a parking lot, and I was so messed up I couldn’t control my bodily functions. I peed all over myself in the front seat of my car. Then, I sat in my own urine and cried for a while. Someone offered to pay for some drugs for me so I drove their direction, and stopped at a gas station to at least try to clean up and vacuum out the seat. But I guess I was just too high because I passed out. I slept there for hours until someone called the cops on me. I was picked up and taken to jail.
I sat in the back of that cop car and prayed to God, THANKING HIM for saving me from myself. I was at my lowest and he saved me.
That was on March 13th of 2016, and I have been sober ever since. Now I am working towards becoming a substance abuse counselor to help people like myself from the depths of hell, I even got my son back. AND my dignity. If I did it, anyone can. Because I truly believed I was as hopeless as they come.