After I finally was discharged, I decided to go to a treatment center in Tarzana, CA that I knew would detox me off of the remaining methadone, and that there were fully funded beds for people with AIDS. I mistakenly believed that I would be out of there in 3 weeks max. When the doctor doing my intake sorted out how high my level of opiates had been he looked at me and said — Oh my god, you are going to be with us a long time. I was totally puzzled and he explained why it was going to take so long.
Until the last 14 of my 72 days in detox, things were manageable as their evil queen bee nurse ‘laurie’ was on vacation. Everything changed with she got back. This woman reeks of anger, resentment, envy, pride, and a tendency to abuse the power that her position conveys that is nothing short of sickly malevolent. Where the medical director and the unit operations director treat patients like people, she starts at ‘dirty little addict’ and it goes up or down from there depending on much one panders her. The nurse in charge until her return, and actually miss L’s supervisor was great until her return, then everything changed. Laurie is very tall, and I would venture to guess not a happy person in general, and as she came in on the tail end of my stay, she assumed several things that simply were not true.
I had self-admitted, meaning I wasn’t sent there by anyone including the state’s prop something or other, nor was I in the throes of beating my drug of choice. I wanted help getting off all of the pain meds. No one had told me to do so, I just wanted to feel normal again. From time to time, I, like everyone else, was being detoxed too fast, and went into shaking withdrawal. Even though the order was written to give me a ‘stat’ dose — meaning an immediate 1 mg oral dose to calm the shakes, she would act as if she could not have cared less. One had to sit at this desk in view of her elevated glassed in throne-room, while she would trim her nails, re-apply her lipstick, whatever, occasionally gazing at the stat-order and after oh a period of 3–4 hours, she would allow the medication nurse to give the dose. If you so much as looked at her, much less tried to get her attention, she would quipp ‘nurse get’s annoyed when you ask her things — and that just slows down the process.’ It was so barbaric, it’s hard to believe she hasn’t had her credentials revoked. I am sorry, but I maintain that browbeating is NOT necessary to detox someone. I admit, there was enough nefarious crap going on there to sink a ship, and people had a code of silence, lest you get beaten in your sleep. But just being cruel to anyone, especially since they are there for you to help them, is inexcusable.
At about a dose of 1 mg a day, I started having severe pain at my incision site from my last operation. I had to be admitted to the local hospital which ended up keeping me a week. I kept telling them to just look at my incision, and even the ‘special surgeon consult’ called in, refused to do so, saying that my problem was either a kidney stone or in my bowel, and I had a battery of G.I. tests that yielded nothing. The bottom line was that everyone at that hospital kept me at arm’s length for several quite unfortunate reasons: Where I was sent there from, my AIDS diagnosis, and because of my rich medical history. You know, it never ceases to amaze me how reluctant and scared surgeons are to touch anyone else’s patients, lest they be sued for something that was really the other surgeon’s doing. SOMETHING NEEDS TO CHANGE IN OUR MEDICAL SYSTEM. Well, many things do - this is just one.
When I went back to detox, the entire sequence of detox/pain events repeated(gee what a surprise). The fact that ‘the experts’ at Tarzana hospital found nothing wrong, to the treatment center staff, made me a drug seeking liar. Once again, I was told that ‘I am not a doctor’, so I could not possibly know what was going on in my own body. Queen Laurie pulled me aside saying ‘now Jim, people get scared to leave our safety here, but its time..’ I almost leapt at her throat when she said that, but thinking it better to just agree and get the hell outta there, I agreed with her and left. I went to the good old pain doc the next day and he ran his finger along my surgical scar and when he hit a small bump, I shrieked in pain. ‘Oh, I know what you have — it’s a neuroma. The vascular surgeon sewed a nerve into your wound, let’s get you into the treatment room and I will oblate it(burn it out with sound waves).’ 30 minutes later and the pain was gone. I was actually off all pain meds for a week, when, after a routine spine exam, I was back in the O.R. having another spine repair. So, all was for naught.
Today, I am still on a constant daily dose of Methadone — lower than before, but it’s there and I feel it. I once again tried to detox myself, and at this point, several years later, I really have so much chronic pain, that doing so makes no sense…and so it goes. Both my pain and primary care physicians forbade me to ever detox myself again. I see the new battery of ads for treatment, now that in CA insurance is required to pay for it, and they scare me. In the throes of detoxing, advocating for one’s self is near-impossible. Make sure that someone you trust keeps their watch for abuse.