Dianne

Not only does Jack abuse heroin, he also abuses meth. I don't know if that's because he can't find the heroin or if the dealer doesn't have heroin or what it is. We let him come home once for a short amount of time between rehabs. In the middle of the night he said to my husband, "I need to go to the hospital." So I took him. Jack said he lost his eyesight and that he couldn't see. That alone scared me enough. He told us he had overdosed on meth, and he needed to go to the hospital. I went to the entrance of the emergency room and ran in to get the nurses. I told them my son was overdosing and I needed help. Jack was awake at that point in time. He had his hoodie on with his hood up. He always wore a hoodie and long sleeves to cover everything. I went and parked the car. They took him to the back. They put a sheriff outside of his door. I couldn't figure out why the sheriff was there. They had taken all of his clothes off. I looked in the room and I couldn't believe what I saw. It didn't even look like my son. His face was just disgusting. Open sores all over the place. And he had been living in our house. We didn't see it because he hid it so well. Unbeknownst to him at the time, I recorded his overdose, which was horrible. Even now I can't watch it. It just was so horrible. His legs were jerking. His head was jerking. He couldn't control any of it. I kept asking what was wrong with him. They said it's just the effects of overdosing on meth. I asked why the sheriff was there. They said he's here to protect everyone because sometimes these patients can go berserk and attack people. They couldn't keep him at that hospital. They transferred him that night to a different hospital and put him in a locked psychiatric ward for three days to try to get him medically detoxed.

That was his second stint in a psychiatric ward. The first one was when he had totaled his car.

He was driving home from Bloomington. He had gone to IU for the weekend to visit and was coming back on the interstate and fell asleep while he was high. He drove his car into a retaining ditch. They actually closed the interstate. I asked him if he had any drugs in the car and he said yes. And I'm ashamed to say that I told him to get rid of them. But he didn't get rid of them. They didn't search his car other than to shine a flashlight in there. That's when we took him to the first hospital and they put him in a psychiatric ward for seven days. He actually ended up coming out worse than when he went in. They had him over medicated and that was a mess. We swore we would never put him through that again.

He can stay well for about 10 or 11 months and then he falls off and has a relapse. I wish I could tell you how many relapses and how many different times he has detoxed and been in a 30-day treatment program, which is a joke. It takes much longer than 30 days. And he's such a great human being, as most of these abusers are. They're all good people. On Facebook last week, a friend of mine actually made a comment about two women who were arrested for dealing opiates. She said, “Get these scumbags off the street.” I sent her a behind-the-scenes message and wrote that those are someone's daughters, and to please remember that these people belong to someone. They came from decent families. And even if they didn't come from decent families, they are someone's children. She took it down and apologized. She said she forgot and that she wasn't thinking when she posted it and that she's sorry she did it. So I'm pretty comfortable letting people know that. And Jack is pretty open. He allows me to be open and to tell his story. It took us years before we told our parents. Absolutely years, and we had to hide it. Finally it got to the point where we couldn't do it without the support of our families.

Jack has been everywhere. So this time I said to my husband, let's let him come home and try to get well. We've never done that before. Let's have him come here and try. My husband said this is not going to work and that he didn't want to do it and that he didn't want him in the house. I said let's try it. Jack always said, "I want to be around my family. I miss everybody. It'll help me." He did OK until right before Christmas when Jack started using again. We picked up on a lot of the signs.

As a matter of fact, I'll show you one of the signs. I brought it. It's a shampoo bottle or a body wash bottle. You see the black marks? That's from his hands when he would cook his heroin. And these black marks are all over his bathroom: on the door, on the sink, on his toothbrush, on the soap, on his carpet. It's everywhere. Or it was. I've kind of kept this as a reminder to myself, not that there aren't a million reminders. It makes me sick to my stomach every time I look at it. I want to keep it so he can see when and if he gets better, he can see the things that we saw. Because he doesn't remember.

So, back to letting him come home, we let him come home and he started using again around Christmas. Jack’s bank account is hooked to our bank account. My husband opened accounts for all three kids when they were minors. And this is the only account that Jack has. I check it maybe once a week, and I saw that he had all this money being deposited into his account and he was taking it right back out. I confronted him and I said, "You have no money. You have no job. Where is this coming from?" Jack said he stole a check from his dealer and that he'll never know it's missing. I came to find out he had stolen his father's business checks. He picked the locks on a file cabinet and took forty-four hundred dollars from my husband's account and six hundred from his younger brother's account. His younger brother works so hard. He is on his own. He is twenty-six years old. He's done everything to be able to do this on his own and he never asks us for money. That was his rent money. So not only did we have to cover the forty-four hundred dollars plus all the fees that came from Jack's account, we had to cover his brother's rent. So that's when we told him he had to leave and he couldn’t come back. Jack did all the legwork and got himself back in the same place in Prescott, Arizona. And that's where he is now. It is a 30-day treatment program in Arizona. He arrived there mid-January and then he moved into a sober living house with other men. He goes to his meetings and groups while he lives there.

There's nothing worse than telling your own child they can't live in your house. I mean there are worse things: he could be dead. It's hard. I mean … he's just … he's a part of me. He's my heart. And to tell him that he isn't welcome in our house … is just … it's devastating. I can't even cry about it anymore, which is hard too. It's just been so long. And I'm so tired. The nice thing about finally being able to cut him off is he doesn't call as much anymore. I used to get 10 - 15 text messages or phone calls from him a day. And now he might call once a week because he knows he's not going to get any money. My husband hasn't spoken to him since he left. He's so angry. His brother and sister have cut off all ties. That's probably another one of the hardest things is to have your kids hate one of their siblings. We don’t do family trips. We don’t do family dinners. When they say it affects the whole family, there is nothing further from the truth. I'm the oldest of six. It affects all of my siblings. It affects my husband's siblings. It affects our friends. We're lucky because our friends haven't shunned us. They're all pretty understanding. For the first probably three years we didn't leave the house. We didn't go out. We didn't do anything. We didn't tell anybody. Because Jack is not a polite drug addict. He's very mean and nasty and for years the name he used for me when he didn't get his way was three horrible words.

Recently when Jack asked me for 15 dollars and I said no, he argued with me about it. I said, "I'm arguing with a 28-year-old man over fifteen dollars." But he thinks like a 12-year-old. He thinks like he did when he first started abusing drugs. And it's hard to reason with him because he thinks he is entitled. He does tell his friends that we are the best parents and that we've never abandoned him and that we've done everything we can. But to us, he tries to manipulate us. So it's quite a ride.

But this time I'm very proud of myself. Jack hasn't had a dime from us since January 15 when he left. He got on an airplane and called when he got there and said, "How are you going to get my car here?" We said we're not getting a car there. We've shipped his car twice: once from Arizona to Washington state and then from Washington State back to here. This time he hasn't had a dime from us. Or his car. He likes to throw in little jabs like "I had to walk here." So we just change the subject quickly and move onto something else. It's the hardest thing I've ever done. It hurts my heart. But I know he's not homeless. I know he's not going hungry. And I know he's safe. So … this may really piss him off. But you know what, we're pissed off too. If he had cancer, he'd fight cancer. But he's not fighting this the way he would fight a disease like that. It is tricky though because this disease messes with your will to fight. I mean … I get that this disease changes your brain. I get that. It's so tough to understand for those of us who aren't addicted. It's just so hard because your typical thought is that these people are dirtbags standing on the corner all dirty and their clothes are shabby and gross, and that's not my son. My son is a good looking boy. He's been raised well. He was raised the best way we knew how to raise him. He had just about everything he ever wanted in life, which is a detriment also. He was a varsity athlete all through high school. He played basketball with the number one NBA draft pick when he was in high school and with another boy who is one of the highest paid players in the nation. Jack had good role models. He is a good person. His brain is just so whacked out and changed. He hates authority. He rather punch someone with authority instead of sitting and having a decent conversation with them.

I feel like we've done everything we possibly can for him. And we've been so blessed because we have been able to, for the most part, afford most of the treatments for him. My husband did have to go into his retirement account to fund some things.