For those who don’t know this already, I also have my own website, Ask Recovery Rob, and I write and post there but not as much as I do here. In some ways, it’s a little bit of a break from Pat Moore Foundation, and I seem to be able to reach others. People often go online looking for addiction advice and invariably it leads to talking them about alcohol and drug treatment advice.
Every contact has been personal and never been added to the comments section at the bottom of the regular content pages or blog pages. They’ve been strictly emails asking for advice at Ask Recovery Rob.
A woman named Jenny recently emailed me asking for advice on what to do about her husband. They’ve been married for 14 years, have two children from previous marriages and Chuck has been working in construction for more years than they’ve been together. About a year ago, Chuck began complaining about stiffness and pain in his hands and neck. He’d been calling in to work, losing jobs because he couldn’t work through his condition, whatever it was at the time. They went to see his primary care physician who diagnosed his condition as rheumatoid arthritis, so he wrote Chuck a prescription for the arthritis and another, Vicodin, for the pain.
It was like Chuck came alive again, she’d said in her email. He could keep up with the younger guys and began taking on some overtime, which was incredibly helpful since he’d had to call out on jobs so often in the recent past. Although she was lonely without him, they were getting out of debt; the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel was well within sight.
What she didn’t know, she said, was that Chuck was in more pain from working more hours so he told his doctor that the Vicodin wasn’t working as well. He hadn’t told his doctor about the additional hours, so the doctor upped the prescription.
About a month later, she said. She came home from work at lunch time and found him on the bathroom floor…unconscious. She dialed 911 and as the operator stayed with her, she noticed four different prescription bottles, all for Vicodin, but four different doctor’s names. He’d been doctor shopping. When the paramedics arrived, and one was working on Chuck, she showed the other attendant the bottles. He shrugged, sighed and placed them in a plastic bag.
As they lifted him on the wheeled gurney and placed him the back or the ambulance, she saw the second attending place the clear plastic bag of pills on the gurney with him.
Stay tuned next week for the second part of Painkiller Addiction – Ready or Not.
Recovery Rob BIO
Recovery Rob is a 48-year-old man who has more than twenty years of sobriety, whose drugs of choice at one time were alcohol and drugs, and he has worked in and around the field of addiction for more than 20 years. Having just recently launched his own website, www.askrecoveryrob.com, he hopes to reach out and continue to help others who work through their process of addiction and recovery. Recovery Rob is a professional writer who has published two novels and is currently working on his third. He has been writing and working as Pat Moore Foundation’s premiere blogger and content writer, which helps keeps Pat Moore Foundation’s addiction and recovery blog top-rated.