 HEROIN- A Distant Memory |
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Kerry is now part of the T.H.O.M.A.S. Drama Workshop. She is a remarkable young woman who has turned her life around. The tourniquet is placed tightly round my arm, a minute passes, yet no vein surfaces. I pray that one will appear, that the needle will just slide in and blood will fill the barrel. I am all too familiar with the feeling. I look down at my arm in disgust, a hole which is the scar from an abscess cut opened and drained, the colour of my skin tone, all purple and blue, blotchy, marked, tracked and scarred from previous injection sites. I feel shame! I am sitting in a treatment room with two nurses trying in vain (pardon the pun) to take some blood for tests. I look up at the nurse with tears in my eyes. Can she not sense my shame? I feel as if the label ‘Dirty Smackhead’ is stapled to my forehead. I sense her utter impatience as she undoes the tourniquet and goes to get someone else to have a go. Another blue coat arrives and straps up my other arm. A minute passes and nothing surfaces. ‘Hmm you don’t have any veins do you…Injecting?’ she asks. She looks at me as if I had just walked excrement all through her surgery. I replied in such a childlike manner ‘Yes, but I have been clean for fifteen months’. I may as well have been talking Russian. I left that room feeling as if my whole life had been shattered, like a mirror carrying 7 years bad luck! Within minutes though, this feeling vanishes, for I am listening to the most beautiful sound I have ever heard - the sound of my 13 weeks old baby’s heart beat. Like I said I have been clean since I went into re-hab. 15 months ago after a 10 year battle with heroin and crack addiction (to name just a couple). My experience with those nurses is one of many examples of how my ghosts come back to haunt me. My scars both physical and emotional, my criminal record, the memories I have that come back to haunt me daily, and the continuous stigma of being an addict (in recovery or not) are another few examples. Yes I have been on a long degrading journey through drug addiction but, I am one of the lucky ones, for I have come out on the other side. I have started my life over and today I really live. The most magical thing I have in my life today is FREEDOM. Freedom from active addiction, from pain and suffering, freedom to laugh, and to cry, although I rarely cry anymore. I cry for my past, for the lost girl that I was, but mostly today I laugh, have freedom to play, dance, sing, to love, to give and receive love and also the freedom to choose. I believe today I have that freedom and I feel it each morning when I awake. I have everything I ever dreamed of and much more. I am going to be a mum in September, a miracle in itself and something beyond my wildest dreams. I have the most wonderful partner, the light of my life and the father of my baby. We met in re-hab. An absolute no-no in the counsellors eyes. ‘You’ll kill each other’ they would say. We each have our own recovery, but we feed off each other, give support, encouragement and love. He is the most loving, generous, sensitive and thoughtful person I have ever had the pleasure to meet and I love him to bits. We talk, laugh and play and he wholeheartedly encourages me to spread my wings and be what I want to be. I love our life together very much and I sense from the sparkle in his eye that he loves it too. We live together in a beautiful house, another miracle. A house I’d walk past in my dreams, peer through the window and wish one day that I too would live in a house like that. Today I do. I have two jobs. I volunteer a mentor for the Prison Service, giving support to inmates due for release. I now also work for T.H.O.M.A.S. running the ‘Empowered’ group – which consists of myself and 6 boys who have completed the T.H.O.M.A.S. re-hab. We perform a drug awareness play in schools. We also have an aftercare group where we provide support to one another. We are a bunch of recovering addicts helping each other stay clean for another day. I love my job and I especially love the friendships which have evolved from my job. I am truly grateful to Father Jim for looking further than my past and seeing the potential in the person who stood before him and for giving me the chance of legal employment, I hope that I can do T.H.O.M.A.S. proud. Another very important part of my life is the relationship I have with my mum, which was non-existent during my using period. As every mother would, initially she did everything in her power to protect me and keep me from harm and gave into my manipulation, time after time, after several years of constant abuse and kicks to her heart. She learned that she had to let go. Tough love I think they call it. Although at times I resented her and hated her for not being there. I understood it was the best thing she could have done for both of us. I hit rock bottom time after time (I have a very high tolerance for pain you see) until I was lying in a hospital bed after almost losing my leg and deciding to seek help. Months of more pain and homelessness, degredation and despair followed until I got a place in re-hab. I did this entirely off my own back (well with a little help from my Guardian Angel), not to please my mum or to coax her back into my life, not to give my boyfriend a break but because I decided to try my hand at living and I needed to get clean and learn a lot about myself in order to get any kind of foundation for a life. Time and re-hab. gave me this and much more. So you see I have a lot to be grateful for. I am so proud of myself for where I have come from to where I am today, for struggling through hardships in recovery without using and most of all ….proud to be the person I am today. |
