Top Ten Reasons To Quit Pain Killers In-Depth: Reason #4

Reason #4: “Your Children Know and They’re Concerned”

This reason is titled incorrectly because it could easily be a family member or a friend who “knows” and is “concerned.” On the “Top Ten Reasons To Quit Pain Killers” page here on this site, I gave a brief example from my own personal experience for the 4th reason why you need to quit your opiate addiction. I talked about a disturbing incident when I was reading to my daughter and I had gulped down my usual night time snack of 5 Norcos and about 5 glasses of Woodbridge Chardonnay. I was having kind of a hard time reading for some weird reason, and lo and behold I was reading a book to my little daughter that even a sober person would have a hard time reading…Green Eggs and Ham. Anyhow, as I was intensely trying to pronounce every “gabloonka” and “trapinka” and “madooka” and “plinkinka” (Thanks Dr. Seuss…), my daughter was just staring at me. It was so shockingly apparent that she sensed that something was wrong with me…she KNEW that I was somehow, not right. She won’t remember that night. But I will.

People who are close to you know when something is out of whack and although people who are on opiates might be the more “sober” than say, meth addicts, people that really know you understand that there is something rotten in Denmark. They’ll notice those oh so subtle changes in you like mood swings that swing a bit farther in each direction or that odd fascination you have with counting your pills. There are just a multitude of slight changes in your personality and how you live your life that when all added up don’t equal the person that you once were. The problem is that some of these changes are so slight that its hard for people to really pin down what has happened to the person they used to know and love. It sometimes takes months or even years for those close to you to actually make the connection between the pills and how you have changed as a person.

Unfortunately, whether it’s your husband or your best friend or your child, the tendancy is to not blame the pill addiction; they usually blame themselves. And that’s the really unfair part of the whole opiate addiction equation. There are countless times when I would justify my own use of pain killers by saying to myself, “well I need to keep active and pain free for my job, I need to have patience with my kids, I need to be in a good mood for my wife. These pills allow me to be the person I need to be.” This of course was completely false but at the time, I had convinced myself that the only way for me to stay functional both physically and emotionaly was to keep taking the pills. I really wish I would have at least tried getting off of the pills during those couple of years because had I known what I know now, I wouldn’t have been able to rationalize my addiction. I wouldn’t have been able to keep feeding myself that ridiculous propoganda that I was somehow a “better person” on those Norcos. So if you’re out there and you can relate to anything I’m saying in this post or any of my other posts do something that I never did; ask the people that love you, “Am I happier? Am I a better person now than I was when I wasn’t taking these pills?” If you’re afraid to hear the answer, well then I suppose you already know what they are going to say don’t you?

-G

Links to other “Top Ten Reasons To Quit Pain Killers In-Depth” Posts:

Reason #1: “The Highs Are Getting Lower and the Lows Are Getting Longer”

Reason #2: “Your Work Is Suffering”

Reason #3: “You Can’t Remember All of the Good Stuff”