me and my shadow

Hello. I am Chris and Im an addict.......... In this page I will be explaining the metamorphoses I have taken in the last few years from a happy productive citizen to a rock bottom dwelling crack and intravenous cocaine and heroin junkie to the enlightened ,never take anything for granted individual I am today... Prior to May of 2002 I lived life as a "normal person". I owned my own home, I had a small construction business and 2 beautiful kids (a daughter and a son). I spent weekdays working hard and spent weekends with my friends playing cards drinking and smoking an occasional joint. I often took vacations to amusement parks (I love adrenaline) and to Florida (Love the ocean)a few times a year .I skydived ,rode mountain bikes and I was an avid hunter and fisherman who loved the outdoors. Life was AMAZING ..... On may 30th 2002 I spent the day celebrating my birthday while attending the funeral of one of my closest friends. After the funeral my friends and i had a few too many drinks at the bar to drown our sorrow we returned to my friends home (the brother of the deceased).I had recently been left by my ex of 8 years for a scumbag of a man. My ex pulls up with the man who she left me for a month or so before all of this. Needless to say we did not get along.We had already fought once in my driveway a week before and after getting the best of him I was jumped by several of his cousins and friends . He ran up to me after I pushed my ex away and told her to go home. After a lot of chaotic screaming and fists flying he jumped in his car and backs out of the driveway at full speed. My son who was 4 at the time was standing in the direct path of his car. It was like slow motion as I dove and knocked him out of the way. I immediately saw red and went into a rage. I chased his car down the road for about 40 feet. He then travels about a hundred yards down the road and turns around with tires screeching. Im still in a complete rage at this time stand at the side of the road begging this moronic idiot to stop. My desire to put a few dents in his head and a large amount of tequila left me without any fear of the car he was driving. As the car sped closer i realized he was coming right at me. I had no time to react and he swerved onto the grass and smashed into me doing 40 mph. I often wonder what I looked like flying through the air as I have no memory of the actual collision. I do remember landing some 30 feet away.The next memory i have is that of me trying to continue running after his car.. With each step I kept hearing this weird crack and pop sound. Suddenly i realized one of my legs seemed a lot shorter than the other one. Apparently my ankle was so smashed my foot was only held on by the skin still surrounding it... I was running on my ankle while my foot was flopping around 45 degrees to the side. I reluctantly decided to give up the chase and sit down on the grass. Immediately I see all my friends surrounding me with horrified looks on their faces screaming things like call 911! and look at all the blood ! and Oh my god hes gonna DIE!....... Wow some birthday !...... After hearing my son was ok I started to try and evaluate just how messed up my body was. I started to make small movements in various parts of my body and realized things were not quite right. I wasn't really in any major pain i just realized some things were definitely going on. I immediately looked for the source of the massive amounts of blood that covered my entire body. As I searched my body over, someone shrieked look at your hand! As I looked my hand had a massive gash in it and I could look into it and see all the sinew and bones. It looked pretty bad but amazingly I still felt no real pain. Its amazing what a huge dose of adrenalin can do . By this time the ambulance had arrived followed shortly by a half dozen police cars. It took most of them to subdue my best friend who was screaming "Im gonna kill him" .I still wasn't seeing the severity of my injuries... I tried to relieve the insanity with a joke that I was pissed the EMT s were cutting off my brand new bluejeans i had just purchased the day before. I was taken to the local hospital (a pretty big one that is respected) and told that they were trying to get me a helicopter to medi-vac me to Indianapolis Methodist hospital. I was getting concerned at this point because i felt a lot more discomfort coming from a lot of different parts of my body. Then i thought to myself,..... wait a minute..... a fuckin helicopter? Just how bad am I? I remember asking the doctor to please loosen the bandages on my ankle and him replying with an insane look on his face as he worked at a frenzied pace on my smashed up body "Thats the only fucking thing holding your foot on!" ... At this point im getting a little freaked. It didn't help that while this was going on my best friend , who just lost his brother the day before is screaming at the top of his lungs "im gonna kill the motherfucker!" ,all the while punching the wall. Thank god my family showed up when they did. My family is and always has been my strength. My mother who knew my friend well ,calmed him down enough to get him and his bloody fists out the door just as the police came in to arrest him. I then overheard a transmission over an EMTs radio that the helicopter was not available at the moment due to it being used by a small child who fell into a grain elevator..... (I often wonder if the poor kid made it.) I was then stuffed into an ambulance and away we went down the highway at a pretty good speed. I remember that it seemed the driver was intentionally hitting every pothole he could. By this time huge waves of pain were creeping from my mid section down to my feet. Reality started to take hold as the initial shock was wearing off. Strange gurgling noises were coming from my gut.I realized now something serious was going on.. I started to panic a little..........Darkness!..........The EMTs must have noticed this and put me to sleep............Suddenly as I opened my eyes this insane feeling that I was dead came over me. I was in a small dark room with a sheet over my entire body. Everything was fuzzy as looked the room over. Next to me was another body on a gurney covered with a sheet as well.There were no windows . Was I dead???....The walls were stainless steel and I just knew I was either dead and in the morgue or an abduction case and in some kind of weird UFO. I then started shaking violently with the worst chills I have ever encountered. I have sat in the dead of winter half covered with snow for 4 or 5 hours while deer hunting and never known this kind of cold. I felt very dizzy and groggy............Darkness.......The next time I opened my eyes I was relieved to see a room filled with balloons ,cards and a nurse intently putting a new I.V bottle on a stand next to me. Well well, Chris you are finally awake. She then showed me a button attached to my shirt and said if I was in pain to push it. I did...........Darkness...........I later realized this was a morphine pump and I could push it every ten minutes as needed. I had never taken anything like this and it was an amazing feeling of cold surging through my arm into my chest followed by euphoric waves of energy followed by the most vivid and amazing dreams I have ever encountered. This became my escape from the horrifying reality of life. I pushed it as often as I could so I didn't have to think... Days came and went with fleeting moments of seeing my family and friends standing around me. I was later amazed about how many people came and said I spoke to them but I remembered very few. I remember my mother saying your dad flew in from Florida ..say hi . I did and all I remember is him saying don't push that button yet!!!.........Darkness.......I guess I hit the button. After about a week a deep dark depression started to come over me. I had started to realize the extent of my damages. My hand was sewed up and resembled something from a Frankenstein movie. My knee had a quarter inch steal rod going threw it holding it up in traction. My knee also had an enormous gash carved into it and my ankle was turned to powder. I found out that my pelvic bone was broke into pieces and shoved up into my intestines.(this explained the gurgling noises coming from my abdomen) My hip joint was damaged with a very bad gash into it from being ripped from my broken pelvic bones. My mother then notified me that I almost died during my first surgery because of a severed artery and internal bleeding. I guess I lost like 7 units of blood . Something like half my blood I guess. I had felt depressed before, especially when my girlfriend of 8 years left me for another man but something about this was different. This depression hurt in every inch of my body. the mental pain was more tan i could handle... While waking one day there was my beautiful son sitting next to me looking horrified at my bandaged body. I missed him soooo much and just wished my daughter was there too.........Darkness....... After something like 4 more surgeries ( I think I blocked alot of it out) and them taking my leg out of traction the depression was getting the best of me. I would awake in bed at night soaked from the tears streaming down my face. I cried like a baby every waking moment. I hated the nurses who gave me shots day and night and I hated the doctors who told me that I may never walk again.... I hated the drab hospital colors on the walls and I hated the smell of the hospital itself.... I hated the physical therapists that would make me sit up and I hated that after my caphetor was taken out I needed help to go piss or wipe my ass.... I started realizing that my house would be foreclosed on and that I would probably never work in construction again.... I realized simple tasks like playing catch with my kids or going for a bike ride were now probably things of the past.......Darkness.........I couldn't take it anymore. They had taken my morphine pump away by this time and I couldn't stand being there anymore.The pain meds weren't working... After heated arguments with my doctors and nurses I told them I just wanted to go home. After many debates, and with the doctors not liking the idea I decided enough was enough. I was wheeled to my grandparents car and away we went. After arriving home my friend (from the hospital) had to come and help carry me in to my mothers home.....was this the way it was gonna be now?...needing help to do anything? One good thing came from all this. Prior to my accident I had met a girl who used to date my brother years ago and she had informed me she used to have a crush on me. She and I had gone out a few times before my accident and now she was at my bedside almost daily...I could see in her eyes she truly cared ... She was amazingly beautiful and made me very happy that she cared enough about me to drive to Indy to see me like she had done . Now at least I could be closer to her. ........................................TO BE CONTINUED (SPIRAL INTO ADDICTION NEXT)