I had cancer 16 years ago when my son was just a baby. Now Jonathan is 17 and facing his last year of high school. I teach English in Turkey and miss him, hoping to sell more of my books and buy an airplane ticket back to visit him.
Sixteen years ago, after surgery and 4 months of chemotherapy, I suffered nerve damage and axiety. The doctors gave me anti-anxiety medicine and morphine, and I eventually became addicted. This chapter from my newest book tells how I stopped taking all prescription medication, suddenly, and almost died.
Nine
The Gates of Hell
“The battle is the Lord’s.”
1 Samuel 17:47
Edd stopped paying child support, and I had no money left for food or rent, so I did another stupid, senseless thing (in my hazy state of morphine and other medications) and moved in with a Mexican guitar player who had serenaded me in a restaurant a few months previously. His name was Miguel, and he was cute and short and jealous to the point of insanity. He locked me in a cage just like a bird and would not let me go anywhere out of his jealous sight, and that was so painful I cannot even write about it. But he also helped to set me free.
He was the first one to call me a ****ing drug addict. Though I protested that I never took illegal drugs in all my life, and doctors had written out quite legal prescriptions, I knew that he was right. He told me I could choose the drugs or him. And, finally, I realized that God required me to give up my addiction, so I let go.
The day after Mother’s Day, 2008, I gave all my colored pills to Miguel, like sand at the seashore. The waves swirled around my feet, and I threw my fistful of wet sand into the water. Then I knelt and thrust my hand into the waves until they cleaned them of every golden grain . . .
Since we were poor with just a barely furnished house in Big Bear, I could not check myself into a fashionable Drug Rehab Clinic. So I went off all my pills Cold Turkey, without a doctor’s care.
That action took me to the Gates of Hell. Continue reading →
Lonna Lisa Williams 