This Is Insanity

A crazy dahlia called Bed Head

I've spent the past three days working to get a very sick woman friend into a distant hospital for severe opiate addiction.

Day 1: Confront the lies and find out if she wants help or not (YES!), then locate the right kind of hospital for her and make arrangements.

Day 2: Work with family, hospital, friends, and a very messed-up woman to get her on the road and through the ER admission process.

Day 3: Cope with a now-unwilling sick woman who is clamoring to go home, she’s fine, she's not really demented from fistfuls of narcotics every day for the past four months, so come and get me! she says, this once-beautiful woman who looks like she is now 80 years old and who doesn’t know reality from a hole in the ground. Sigh.

My husband calls opiate addiction "dancing with the devil." It is impossible to extricate oneself from the grip of the devilish disease by sheer willpower. It is impossible to make someone else want to be free of the grip of the devil. Until a person wants to be sober more than she wants to be loaded, there is nothing anyone can do, not her, not friends, not doctors, not the U.S. Senate.

Today I am enormously grateful for the grace of my Higher Power. I don't know why I was blessed with that willingness. But blessed I was and am. If you say prayers, please pray for a sick addict today.

Gratitude After a Relapse

The Drug Addict’s Lament

the dope the dope the dope
shrieking at you in the cupboard
open the door the sleight of hand
stealing on Easter for Christ’s sake
how can you
the dope the dope the dope
shrieking so loud you hear nothing
but its call from the cupboard
so you open the door on Easter
rolling the stone away from the tomb
and free the dope the dope the dope
shuddering with shame and gladness
leaping into the tomb

Today I'm grateful for the freedom I have through the power of my God.

The BB says, "The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in drink. Our so-called will power becomes practically nonexistent. We are unable, at certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first drink."

It's part of my story that I was sober one Easter morning, and on a visit to my aunt I stole her painkillers--without a single thought about my sobriety! I'd had 15 years and drank again (see My Story), then got 14 months both clean and sober, then came that Easter morning and the attack of the "strange mental twist."

So today I keep a close walk with my Higher Power and I work extensively with other alcoholics. One of the meditations in my "Twenty-four Hours a Day" book has been a help to me:

"Keep as close as you can to the Higher Power. Try to think, act, and live as though you were always in God's presence. Keeping close to a power greater than yourself is the solution to most of the earth's problems. Try to practice the presence of God in the things you think and do. Abide in the Lord and rejoice in His love."

"Nothing will so much insure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics!"

I am doubly grateful that my Higher Power has put newcomers in my life. They give me joy when all else fails. Today I'm off to the beach with Julia, to read the eighth step and go to an open-mike poetry reading. It doesn't get any better than that!