I said I would tell you how things went after I left the hospital.
Maybe it doesn’t ever completely ‘go away’.
It goes, somewhere, but not ‘away’. I know that is not a super sciency explanation, but this is a real-life, true to every day explanation.
Like if our brains were old farm-houses. Our old addictions or our addictive patterns would just live in the attic, and no one would ever visit them. Or, if our brains were Clark Griswold’s home from the movie Christmas Vacation, our old addictions would be staying out in the RV with uncle Eddie and his nasty ass dog.
That is, until we invited them back in the warm, clean, cozy part of the house.
The first few days were fine. I took my script like a reasonable, rational, responsible adult without being supervised like a gigantic baby.
After one week of taking Percocet every four hours I remember walking in the kitchen feeling good. By good, I don’t mean high, I mean well.
Pain free and I hadn’t taken any pain medication that day.
So I walked to the cabinet and grabbed the bottle of Percocet from the top shelf and I literally stopped myself and looked out my kitchen window. I stood there and I knew right then that I needed to flush them.
And that was that.
I wasn’t in enough pain to justify ‘needing’ them at that point so I did what I knew I needed to do.
The actual flushing part got pretty weird.
I didn’t really want to flush them and I tried to justify not flushing them, because of course, maybe, what-if, the pain returned and I flushed them?
I literally had a full-fledged conversation with myself in the bathroom hovered over the toilet.
My mind had made up reasons to keep them ‘just in case’ with things that would have sounded very close to actual ‘logic-and reason’ if I wasn’t a rational, sober, honest, adult.
Ultimately, I dumped every one of them (even the few that I had considered keeping)
and flushed the toilet. Too close to the fire, Brittany. Too close.
Conclusion:
It ALL boils down to what I choose to do.
Every step of the way I had choices to make.
I had tools to take advantage of and they were my responsibility to utilize and to practice.
Those principles that I memorized all of those years ago?
I had to practice them.
I had to implement and honor them.
(and for the record, baby is almost 6 weeks old and we are both doing great)…