I have a secret

I have a bottle of Xanax that no one in the house knows about but me. I let my husband hide and keep the old bottle so that I couldn't reach for it myself. The only way I could get it was to ask him and then only when I needed it BAD. The one time he let me know where it was, I used it a little more liberally than is wise for a woman who ended up in a psych ward for overdoing it, so I asked him to hide it again, and I haven't asked where it was since.

And now, there is this bottle. I don't tell myself I will be able to handle it. I don't know if I can. I figure that when the pull is really strong every time you think about it, you ought to be keeping an eye on things.

Like, this is how addicts act.

I was addicted. I am addicted?

I just wanted to go to sleep. I was having regular panic attacks and was in the middle of a bout of insomnia that had lasted for months and all I wanted was to fall asleep. Just to relax. So when my doctor said hey, you need a little Xanax, I said I'll take anything if it helps me sleep.

I had heard of Xanax, of course. My impression was that it was going to be something like Valium, like a glass of wine at bedtime. Something to take the edge off.

When you look to chemicals to take the edge off, you ought to stay away from chemicals.

At first, it worked GREAT. Wow . . . how come no one told me about Xanax sooner? I could sleep! I only had to take half a 2.5 mg pill, too. Took the old edge right off, boy howdy. I got that lovely fuzzy feeling and I could lay my head down and my thoughts didn't race around and around like a train on a track being controlled by the Marquis de Sade. I could fall asleep and I stayed asleep.

And panic? Nipped that right in the bud.

After a while, though, I had to take a whole pill to fall asleep.

Then a pill and a half.

Then the prescription was raised to 5 mg pills.

Then I needed one and a half of those.

Then two.

Three.

Add wine.

And then, one day, I had a panic attack and just started taking them two and three at a time. An hour apart.

A half hour apart.

I walked into traffic.

My family took me home.

I grabbed a bottle of vodka and kept taking pills.

And woke up in the hospital. My family tells me that I tried to fly. In fact, my family tells me I behaved in ways that would have horrified me if I had been me. Before, I mean, it would have been utterly alien for me to fall apart in front of my kids.

To be fair, it does say on the bottle don't take with alcohol, so I lose points there. I should have known better, mea culpa. But to be fair to me, no one told me that if you took it long enough, you would need more and more of it to get the desired effect.

Or, if taken long enough, the effect you desired would warp drastically.

I didn't know you could get addicted to it. It wasn't heroin. It wasn't sleeping pills. It wasn't illegal. My doctor had prescribed it for me, for christ's sake!

No one told me. And I honestly didn't think to ask. By the time I should have been aware of what was happening, I was deep in the middle of a muddle that I couldn't think through. I would get up in the morning, tend to the kids, tend to things that needed tending all day. It never affected my ability to tend to my home or family.

Until it did and I gather it did long before I was hospitalized.

Maybe I didn't want to know, though.

And all I wanted was to just get some sleep.

I got a lot of that in the hospital. Not so much the seven or so days I spent in the psych ward after that, though. No feeling of bugs under my skin and no withdrawal symptoms at all that I could think of. But having coincided with my 40th birthday and my first real bi-polar mania and being in the middle of what could fairly be called a nervous breakdown, trying to find a pharmaceutical alternate to control all the above had some nasty side effects, I'll tell you.

They tell me I could have died. In fact, the combo of Xanax and alcohol is so deadly, they assumed I was trying to kill myself at first.

Lucky little junkie.

Not that I am going to laugh about that. Thank god for luck or divine providence.

So I get out, and they prescribe Ambien for sleep.

And guess what?

That's addictive, too.

I only spent a night in the hospital, that time.

And then I got a decent doctor who found me the right meds for being bi-polar, and I decided that sleep was highly over rated if it meant having to drug myself with stuff that makes me try to fly. And though I wasn't an alcoholic, I stopped drinking because I didn't want to take a chance that alcohol would interact badly with my new meds. Because my kids are everything in the world to me and under no circumstances would I choose to put them or myself at risk, even the risk of making them nervous.

Not one drink in a year and a half, just in case.

And every six weeks or so, I ask my husband for a Xanax. So far, so good.

And then, for no reason I can understand except that I get tired of running to him and asking for anything, I filled the prescription.

In fact, to fill that prescription, my doctor had to okay it. The same doctor who had originally prescribed it.

I think I had been counting on her to just say no for me.

So now I have this bottle sitting in that little drawer with all the other meds.

But it's whispering to me. And that little bottle feels so comfortable in my hand. It fills my hand in such a warm, fuzzy way. It doesn't feel dangerous in my hand, at all. If I just go by the way it feels in my hand, the idea of taking a whole bunch of them at once feels, well, warm and fuzzy.

I know that this is bad. It's bad, it's so bad.

But I want them.

BAD. I want them so bad.

Oh wait - my husband just got home. You think I could maybe keep a few and give him the rest?

Ok, right. So if I give him the whole bottle, could I just take one now?

I don't really feel like I need one, now.

That's the best reason for giving him the bottle. That I want to take one even though I have no real need to but need.

So I did. I just gave him the bottle. I didn't take one, I didn't keep any.

Fuck, fuck a duck.