Things were great...

Things were great....
Nov 19, 2008 12:37 am
...for a while. Soon after, another problem arose. The Meteor had chronic back pain. While suffering, he injured his back while on the job, and was given pain medication for it. It started with Tylenol 3's and then the Vicodin. It moved on from there to Elevil, to help his body better use the pain meds, and Neurontin. They sent him for test after test, pain specialists, neurologists, and no one could really see what the problem really was, he insisted that he didn't want to use the pain meds, that he wanted to be 'normal'.Well when pain management didn't work, and the neurologists refuse to do surgery, what was left?? Higher doses, different medications, more drugs. Soon came the Morphine injections when the pain was really bad, and the Fentynal patches.He abused them all .... When the Fentynal became 'less effective' they transitioned him to OxyContin and Morphine tablets. That they sent home with him, filling 15 - 30 tablet prescriptions daily. God Bless the United States Military. All the free drugs an addict could want!What I had on my hands was no longer a man; it was a whining, crying, sniffling, messy, zombie, 6'3", infant.I felt sorry for him. However, he was a danger to himself AND others. I quickly made a rule: No smoking in the house. This was after I found burn marks on the sofa, from where he obviously nodded off after leaving a burning cigarette on the arm of the couch.It wasn't long after that I knew that I couldn't go to sleep if I knew he was going to be "awake". If he was not lying in bed next to me... then I needed to be awake... for fear he'd hurt himself. Or burn the house down. One night I woke up at 3 am to find him in the kitchen, eggs broken on the floor, a knife on the floor, the burner on - on the stove with an empty pan burning on top, and him nodded out at the kitchen sink. I lived like this for more than a year. Then he received a medical discharge from the military. And we moved back to New Jersey... with his parents.