Crew Accidental Addict

A True Story of Pain and Healing....also Marriage, Real Estate, And Cowboy Dancing
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4835-7365-6
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 414 Seiten

An award-winning writer's riveting story of inadvertent addiction and full recovery from opioid painkillers and the benzodiazepine, Xanax, prescribed by physicians following total knee replacement surgery.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Crew, Linda

Leseproben

January 30, 2015   My trees are probably wondering where I’ve been all this time. I’m afraid the answer’s not pretty. But on this gloriously spring-like day, with rare-for-January sunshine streaming in low from the south, I’m finally feeling good enough to head out and check on them. Let’s just see how far I can get, I think, using the sort of encouraging self-talk in which I’ve recently developed such proficiency. Let’s just see what will happen if I try acting like a healthy, confidently energetic person. Out in the driveway at the pick-up’s tailgait, I press in my earbuds and dial my iPod to the playlist my husband made as background music for a novel I was working on three years ago when the little boat of my life got completely blown out of the water. I pull on my rough leather work gloves and seize the grips of the long-handled red loppers from the truck’s bed, flipping the tool over my shoulders to carry as a triangle. As I saunter off toward the trees, Garth Brooks starts singing “If Tomorrow Never Comes.” My favorite trees are the Douglas firs, the far five acres Herb and I planted together almost twenty years ago now, but today I stop short, figuring to give some attention to the pines, mainly so I can work in the full, healing light, these trees not yet having gained enough height to form a sun-screening canopy. I wade into the winter-dead weeds and start attacking the prickly hawthorn shoots; those and, as always, the wickedly arcing blackberry vines that threaten to take over the entire twenty-five acres every time I turn my back. I can’t believe how young and dumb I was forty-one years ago when the Realtor showed us this place and all I could think on the subject of blackberry brambles was the endless supply of pies I’d be baking up for my darling new husband. Too much in love to see straight, I guess, and starry-eyed with Jesse Colin Young’s song “Ridgetop,” where he extolls the joy of a yard full of bushes that turn into pies in July. At each pine I nip off the lowest limbs. At a dead one, I pull the roll of hot pink flagging tape from my vest pocket and tie a piece around a browned branch, a message for Herb: Chainsaw needed here. The iPod playlist has worked itself to my personal, watch-what-I-can-do theme song, Maria Muldaur belting out “I’m a Woman.” (Aint nothing I can’t do!) Hey, don’t look now, but my positive self-talk is working. I am back. Not only that, I’m on a roll. I’ve missed this, the warmth of the sun on my shoulders as my thoughts float free. It’s a laboring that smells good, too—the Christmassy scent of the sap. Working my way north toward the golf course abutting our property, I’m so pleased to feel like myself again that it almost seems like it’s okay, what I’ve been through. I can put it to rest. I can be forgiving. The past doesn’t matter, as long as I’m loving my now and I actually have a decent looking future. I clip a little pine, Alison Krauss singing, “Country Boy.” I love the song, but I can never listen to it without thinking that poor guy ought to just go ahead and ask that prettiest girl in town to marry him. How can he be so sure she won’t say yes if he hasn’t got the guts to speak up? I look up, scanning for my next tree. I never restrict myself to any rigid system of working up one row and down another. Where’s the fun in that? I’m not an employee here. I’m the boss of myself and these are my own trees. I’m pretty sure that in my happy, haphazard way, I have, over time, met and dealt with each one personally. It happens just as Alison hits the part about silver in the stars and gold in the morning sun: I trip on something and, in a twisting motion, pitch forward. Even as I’m going down, I’m already whimpering my pathetic plea to the universe: Do-overs? Lying flat on my back, clenching against the pain in my right ankle: Do-overs, do-overs. Hey. It’s worked in the past. I once brought down a big fir limb that felled me with a smack hard enough to my shin to raise a lumpish bruise that lasted for months. I remember lying there that time murmuring Do-overs, do-overs, and when the pain subsided, I got up and kept working. So for a moment I cling to the faint hope that the incantation will magically save me. Maybe it’s too soon to go all Worst Case Scenario. Maybe the pain will stop. It doesn’t. Well, shit. I can’t believe this. Except that I can. It’s exactly the sort of thing that would happen to me. I swear, my whole life has been blessed/cursed with dramatic good luck/bad luck timing. I lie there looking up at the blue sky. Oh, shut up about that poor wimp of a country boy. I yank out my earbuds. Now I can hear a tractor over on the golf course. Okay, let’s see…my father broke his ankle in his sixties walking in a local woodland park. Son Will broke his ankle on the soccer pitch at fourteen. Stories I’ll be needing to re-visit. And wait…my friend Maggie Chang suffered a broken ankle just as she was trying to pack up her household in a move from Williamstown, Massachusetts, to Bainbridge Island, Washington. Stories. Isn’t that what we always want? Something happens to us and suddenly we want to hear how it all turned out when it happened to somebody else. Our brains run a search and retrieve for the details which flew right past us upon first hearing, but which now have such sharply personal relevancy. I push myself to sitting. Maybe I’m jumping the gun. Maybe it’s not broken and I’m still suffering from hyperalgesia. Learned all about that nasty business the hard way when I was in opioid withdrawal. Here’s the deal: basically, anything that’s going to hurt will hurt a whole lot more. If that’s the case now, it could be weirdly good news. It might mean the physical damage isn’t as bad as the pain level makes it seem. Should I pull off my rubber boot to check it out? I briefly contemplate the boot’s faded pattern of twining flower vines. Nope. Forget it. Too much trouble. And I’d just have to get the darned thing back on. It wouldn’t solve anything. I’d still be sitting here, more up close and personal than ever before, I believe, to the winter-smelling mud. I’d still have the same problem—how to get myself back to the house. Of course any sensible person would simply pull out her cell and call for help. And I would be that sensible person if I weren’t so busy being the stupid person who has drowned three cell phones, one after another, never learning from my mistake, every time carefully following the same fatal procedure, throwing my Carthartts in the wash with the phone in the “handy” phone pocket, sensibly making sure I immediately got any residual poison oak oil washed off the pants. My smart phone plan had been to be smart and not put the poor little device at risk. My decidedly unsmart and unfancy phone is back at the house, safely tucked in the cozy leather pocket of the Frye bag Herb wanted to buy me at Nordstrom on our way to the Bonnie Raitt concert. Well, dammit. I look at my watch. That’s right, I’m so old, I still wear one. 11:15. It’s a five-minute, stop-start struggle to get myself upright. Let me be happily surprised, I pray as I brace myself with my hands. Let’s say the way this goes is that my ankle feels stronger than the pain is suggesting. Nope. As usual, I’m not calling the shots on this story. I’m just trying to live it. This is an ankle that doesn’t want any weight put on it. I stick the loppers point down in the mud and begin a labored sideways perambulation, taking a little hop to the left, using my right foot only for glancing balance. Hardly efficient. My left knee is artificial as of two-and-a-half years ago and, oddly, one maneuver that just doesn’t seem to work after knee replacement is hopping. Ten minutes of this tedious business gains me about ten feet, just over an old irrigation pipe and into the grassy, slightly less bumpy road that divides the pines from the poplars. To my left I see a tractor pass on the golf course a hundred yards away, but I no sooner entertain the thought of yelling for help than I abandon it. Too many memories of chasing Herb down in field, forest, or orchard, yelling for attention, silently begging for him to just, please, for God’s sake look up and see me. But when men are engaged with their roaring machines—tractors, mowers, chainsaws, whatever—they don’t look up. They’re not supposed to. I turn right, toward the house, recalling stories of people crawling incredible distances from accident sites with broken limbs. I’m picturing hands and knees, though, and that’s another thing artificial knees don’t do well. Only when the whole ordeal is over will it occur to me I might have made better time scooting backwards on my rear, using my ever strong triceps to haul myself along. In the middle of it, though, with the ground so boggy, I...