Opioid Odyssey (eBook)

Story 1: Krista

Leaning back, Krista pulled open the heavy drugstore doors. After entering she bounced between the shampoos, feminine hygiene products, sleep aids, and cereal aisles. Then, standing in front of her on a wire rack was her favorite cereal, Apple Crunch Cheerios. She took it as a good omen. She paused for a moment and allowed her eyes to pass over the various types of chocolate syrup, peanuts, candy.

She strived to look composed, but she was, to be sure, a bit preoccupied. To other eyes, she hoped, she appeared to be just another Saturday suburban shopper, enjoying the wide variety of useful products available at her local pharmacy.

As usual on such errands, she was clad in her old high school gymnastics uniform. She found that people loved it, and, now in her mid-twenties, it still made her look, at least to the unperceptive eye, like a teenager. People knew her as “Tiny Krista,” and she was famous, at least among the few people with whom she still spent time, for being able to pack prodigious amounts of opioids inside her diminutive frame.

At that moment, Tiny Krista felt good, really good and optimistic. She was still riding the high of her last dose. Unfortunately, however, those were the last pills she and her boyfriend Patrick had. As the moments passed, she sensed the clouds appearing in the distant sky; the peak was behind her, and her high was just beginning to wear off. She knew what was happening. She sensed the deep rumblings, the subtle tremors, and the slight changes in her body temperature, changes that normally came before the terrible reality of dope sickness hit.

Of course, she’d been here before. Done this many, many times. This was not her first or second or even one-hundredth rodeo. She had with her perfect reproductions of physician narcotic scripts, the expert work of Patrick and herself. She made her way over to the pharmacy counter and presented the script, smiling innocently at the busy pharmacist, who reached out a hand as she stood, still staring at her computer screen.

Then, back over by the Cheerios, Krista waited. It was important not to give any indication of strangeness. The goal was not to give the pharmacist any reason to question why cute little Krista needed another refill of sixty pills of oxycodone. Of course, why wouldn’t she need these narcotics? She was a pretty, amiable, tragically injured gymnast, right?

Krista took a quick peak over at the pharmacy counter, and immediately her mood plunged. She just happened to catch the gaze of the hard-faced pharmacist, who at that very moment had the phone pressed between her shoulder and ear. She was peering at the green square of paper as she talked intensely on the phone. The green square of paper looked just like Krista’s forged prescription.

Of course, she and Patrick had tried to make the script look like all of the others they had made throughout the years. But still, she became nervous. She prayed that her sudden anxiety, like so many other times, was just another false alarm. However, even from across the store, she could practically read the pharmacist’s lips and sense the terrible message associated with her grimace. “Yes,” Krista imagined her saying to her faraway colleague, “here’s another one trying to con me.”

Then the pharmacist laughed, a small, cynical burst of laughter. She shook her head and made a final quiet comment and quietly returned the phone to its cradle. As Krista watched, nervously flickering her eyes from one anonymous object to another on the shelves, the pharmacist placed the green piece of paper in a special basket far away from all of the others.

Then, remarkably, the pharmacist raised her eyes and her gaze connected directly with Krista’s.

For a few brief, intense seconds their eyes were locked together. The visual blow felt to Krista as if she had been struck by an air hammer. The pharmacist, unsmiling, appeared for a moment to be peering deep into Krista’s very soul. Krista’s blood pressure rose as the color drained from her face and her pulse increased. Slowly, almost robotically, she turned and put the bag of candy she was clutching in her damp hand on a counter. Unsure what to do, she began smoothing the fabric of her sweats, the uniform that she had worn so long ago, seemingly a lifetime ago, when she would bounce and fly so carefully and yet so effortlessly across the mat. She looked down at the sterile linoleum floor. Then, decisively, Krista turned and with quick steps strode out the glass doors to the street.

Her mind was as empty as the inside of a balloon but filled with a silent throbbing as she walked the half a mile back to her mother’s house. She had been living with her mom for the past year, because she had no money to live on her own. The empty space in her brain seemed to echo. Now, at last, it seemed, there was nothing to be thought, nothing to be said, nothing to be done.

Over all of the past year Krista hadn’t even told her mom that she was on probation or, for that matter, that she had violated probation twice already. But she sensed that her mother already knew, as mothers do. Nowadays, with the arrival of social media, communication moved at a lightning speed. As usual, Krista realized, the only person she was conning was herself. So, with an addict’s wisdom and a suffering person’s capacity to face hard realities, Krista knew in her gut that she was done. Not wanting to prolong the inevitable, she picked up her pace even more.

By the time she got to the house, she was a little sweaty and her stomach was beginning to churn with that sickly rumbling that signaled the nausea to come. She didn’t even bother to go inside; she just sat down on the steps and waited. She did not know what it was, but something, she knew, was about to happen. Strangely, somewhere beneath the familiar tinge of nausea and the tremors, there was a sense of relief. Krista was, in truth, tired of the game, tired of the pursuit of the drug and sick and tired of being sick and tired all of the time. Really, she just wanted to go to sleep and wake up when it was all over.

There was nothing she could do, so she was finally free to do nothing. She lowered her head towards her crossed arms on her lap and just caught in her peripheral vision a glimpse of the cruiser turning the corner and slowly advancing down the street. She sighed and felt the gentle breath on her forearms. She tried to relax for a moment, slowly inhaling and exhaling, over and over again. It was the same thing she had done before some of her best performances years ago. Then, like now, she had just waited for the next moment to arrive.

Krista had come by her persistent optimism naturally. The younger of two sisters raised in a loving home with warm, intelligent, and very creative parents, when we talked, she described her childhood as “interesting” and “a lot of fun.” Although her parents divorced when she was just six years old, her father, who was a combat jet pilot in Vietnam before becoming an airline captain, “was always present.” According to Krista, her father loved his kids and did a good job of protecting his family.

But, like many Vietnam veterans who at a very vulnerable age had seen and done much more than they could be expected to understand, her father drank too much after the war. He drank so much that Krista’s mother eventually divorced him. But, surprisingly, the divorce seemed to cause him to wake up, that and an unexpected late-night experience of psychically channeling a fifty-eight-year-old Vietnamese man, who, he understood, had been killed during one of the many fire bombings that Krista’s dad had inflicted on Vietnamese villages years before.

During the channeling, Krista’s father learned that the Vietnamese man forgave him from the depths of his heart and the essence of his soul, which was remarkable, and very inconsistent with Krista’s dad’s then-limited Western perspective. The man, it seemed, having negotiated the journey of death, understood why Krista’s dad had done what he had done. The Vietnamese man realized, through his elevated and now otherworldly perspective, that sometimes even very terrible things need to occur, especially if the vast and incomprehensibly intelligent turnings of the universe are to progress towards its inevitable destiny.

And there were others after that, others who had been forcibly escorted to another plane of existence by Krista’s now very spiritually attuned dad, others who let him know that his perception of good and bad, guilt and innocence, and shame, while in some ways noble, were also a sign of an unacceptably limited awareness. Sometimes things, even things that appear to be terrible, just need to be.

As Frederic Perls, a Gestalt psychologist, used to say, “To die and to be reborn is not easy,” nor should we expect it to be. “In the vast incomprehensible cycle of tones and vibrations, suffering,” the Vietnamese man said, “is just another note; a note that is necessary for completion of the great symphony, and in that sense, as paradoxically great a gift as can be given.”

Krista’s dad appreciated and respected these amazing gifts, and, over time, he shared them with Krista. For him, retirement meant becoming a reiki instructor and a kind of modern-age shaman. He understood that...