My First Experience With Opioids: Why That Feeling of Relief Stayed With Me

I can still remember being told to count backward from ten.

I was a kid and had been hit by a car while riding my bike. My leg was broken in several places and I needed surgery. I was scared, but what I remember most isn’t the accident or even the pain.

It’s what happened when they put me under.

As I started counting backward, this wave of calm came over me. The constant noise in my head just stopped. For the first time that I can remember, everything felt quiet. Everything felt okay.

Then, blackness.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that feeling would stay with me for years.

I Was Always the Kid Who Couldn’t Sit Still

Growing up, I was constantly in trouble.

Today we know a lot more about ADHD and kids whose minds seem to run a hundred miles an hour. Back then, I was mostly considered a problem.

I went to Catholic school, where I became known as the bad kid pretty early. I couldn’t sit still. I acted out. I was impulsive. The more trouble I got into, the more I started believing that was simply who I was.

That’s why what happened during that surgery was so memorable.

Suddenly there was no noise. No anxiety. No feeling like I needed to crawl out of my own skin.

Just relief.

The Pain Went Away. I Still Wanted the Pills.

After the surgeries, I was sent home with pain medication.

Obviously, I needed it in the beginning. My leg was seriously injured.

But eventually the physical pain wasn’t really there anymore, and I remember continuing to take the medication anyway.

Looking back, that’s an important part of my story.

I don’t know that I was consciously thinking, “I want to get high.” I was young. I didn’t understand addiction or what these drugs were capable of doing.

I just knew I liked the way I felt.

Or maybe more accurately, I liked the way I didn’t feel.

The noise was quieter. I felt comfortable in my own skin. Things that normally bothered me didn’t seem to matter as much.

A seed had been planted.

At 18, Everything Changed

When I was 18, my father died from lung cancer.

My dad had struggled with addiction himself, although he had gotten sober before he died. Losing him affected me deeply, and there were pain medications left from his illness.

When I took them, I found that feeling again.

That sense of ease and comfort. That quiet.

Except this time it didn’t end.

From 18 until I got sober at 30, opiates were part of my life every single day. And I mean every day.

I didn’t draw a sober breath from 18 to 30.

What had once been a feeling I remembered from a hospital became something I depended on just to live my life.

For years, I still managed to convince myself that because they were pills, I wasn’t really using “drugs.” I could look at people using other substances and somehow believe I was different.

I wasn’t.

The Solution Eventually Became the Problem

That’s one of the strangest things about addiction when I look back on it now.

The thing that eventually caused so much destruction in my life originally felt like a solution.

It gave me relief.

Until it didn’t.

Eventually, I wasn’t taking something because life felt better with it. I needed something just to function and avoid feeling sick.

There is a huge difference between those two places, but I never noticed myself crossing from one into the other.

By the time I was 30, that kid who had once discovered a few moments of quiet on an operating table was 127 pounds and headed to his third rehab.

This isn’t everyone’s story with opioids. It’s mine.

But if you’ve ever wondered why something that eventually caused so much pain could have felt so helpful in the beginning, I understand that contradiction very well.

I’ve lived both sides of it.

And my story with opioids didn’t end there. After 17 years of sobriety, addiction eventually found its way back into my life through kratom, extracts and ultimately 7-OH.

That became another chapter entirely.

Continue reading: Kratom to 7-OH: A Progression I Never Saw Coming