Author: Living with the Devil
Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2011 11:52 am
What’s different this time is she has pleaded for help and can’t get it. I think she is taking over the counter sleeping pills to get her through the day. She has not worked in 11 yrs and has no insurance and no income. I am her mother, single, age 65, retired 2 yrs. ago and am on SS retirement and pension. I have had legal guardianship of her 3 children since 2003 when her husband died of testicular cancer. She has never smoked, never drank and never taken anything before this started. She had a back injury just before her husband’s diagnosis and her "doctor," a retired anesthesiologist turned pain specialist gave her Vicoden. As his cancer spread, the more she had to cope with and depended on pain killers long after she needed them. By the time we discovered it, she was taking 90 Vicoden every 5 days.
At one point she was even taking his morphine. The day of his burial she wrote two prescriptions from a stolen pad and was arrested and detoxed in jail. She lost the house, both cars and nearly everything they owned. Medical bills were over $1.2 million. She got 2 yrs. probation and a court ordered county drug rehab program which was totally ineffective. I think she should have been treated for depression right from the start. I had to watch her like a hawk for fear of relapsing.
They all came to move in with me and we sought help from our local community behavioral health facility. They put her on Suboxone 8 mg. two times a day. No counseling, just Suboxone. Her inability to pay for these started a bad check writing/stolen debit card spree from my purse at night.
She developed strange habits like sleeping all day with blankets on the windows, then awake from 10PM to 6AM. We would pass each other on the steps when I would begin my day shift with the children. She would eat tons of powdered sugar donuts, sunflower seeds, and any food was broken into tiny pcs. She would obsess over the kids laundry and wash them with her hands while they were in the machine, one pc at a time. She became totally unavailable and unresponsive to the children needs and it was heartbreaking to see them hurt over and over again. She has no friends and no family member contact. They don’t even want her in their house. I imagine her guilt is overwhelming.
Family interventions and well intentioned attempts at detoxing her, caused her to relapse 5 times now. She has gone through all 18 doctors with Suboxone waivers/certification in the 10 mi. radius of our home and their credentials are geriatric oncologists, internal medicine and holisitic shrinks with a MD degree. She usually writes them a bad check and then can’t pay for the fees, then moves on to a new one. She is 5’1" and weighs 90 lbs. I had her arrested for taking my checks and she detoxed again in jail. A schizophrenic inmate who got out early bailed her out after 30 days using her accrued SSI money. She stayed sober another month after that and gained weight–she looked great. The agreed plea was for the judge to order her into rehab in lieu of jail time but it has been a year now and her trial has been postponed 6 times now due to a complete turnover in the public defender’s office.
Desperate to stay on her Suboxone, she started pawning everything she could get her hands on, even her son’s new computer and the girls IPODs. She went to my other daughter’s house and took her jewelry. She filed a report. She went to a neighbor’s house in good faith and stole their jewelry. They filed a report. I’ve had all my jewelry in a safety deposit box for several yrs. I keep no cash in the house and sleep with my debit card in my bra. She has been on one 8 mg. sublingual Suboxone film, which she has been cutting into fourths.
She’s only awake now 4 hrs. per 24 hr day, so I believe she is taking sleeping pills. Tell me – will she end up like Michael Jackson? Why does this drug have such a grip on her, even on this low dose? Believe me, I’ve searched her purse and every hiding place and found nothing but 1 Suboxone film cut in fourths. Even at this dose her pupils are still pinpoints.
There is a waiting list to get into the local YWCA Recovery Program. Should I not wait and have her committed?
I really need to know how I can help her through this.
