The science of medicine has come a long way in the area of how we manage pain.
In the mid to late 1800s, there was a product called Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. It was sold to parents as a way to alleviate the constant crying of their babies, particularly when a baby is going through the painful teething process.
And it definitely calmed down those infants – possibly because the main ingredient was morphine.
Another medication, popular for treating coughing and diarrhea, was opium.
And when Coca-Cola was first launched, it had two main ingredients: caffeine and cocaine. I guess it’s no wonder that one of their ad slogans was “a Coke and a smile”!
Of course, now we know better. Doctors and scientists have realized that not everything that helps with pain is necessarily something that’s good for you. But even modern day pain medication, stuff that’s supposed to be safe to use, can cause big problems for some people.
One of those people is my guest today, Frank. His experience with pain meds took him down a very dark path, and he didn’t see any way out. Until one day, when he got a surprise at work.
You can contact Frank by email: francisskey.062588@gmail.com
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) helpline: 800-662-4357
National Drug Helpline: 844-289-0879
Full show notes and pictures for this episode are here:
https://WhatWasThatLike.com/182
Graphics for this episode by Bob Bretz. Transcription was done by James Lai.
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Episode transcript (download transcript PDF):
The science of medicine has come a long way in the area of how we manage pain.
In the mid to late 1800s, there was a product called Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. It was sold to parents as a way to alleviate the constant crying of their babies, particularly when a baby is going through the painful teething process.
And it definitely calmed down those infants – possibly because the main ingredient was morphine.
Another medication, popular for treating coughing and diarrhea, was opium.
And when Coca-Cola was first launched, it had two main ingredients: caffeine and cocaine. I guess it’s no wonder that one of their ad slogans was “a Coke and a smile”!
Of course, now we know better. Doctors and scientists have realized that not everything that helps with pain is necessarily something that’s good for you. But even modern day pain medication, stuff that’s supposed to be safe to use, can cause big problems for some people.
One of those people is my guest today, Frank. His experience with pain meds took him down a very dark path, and he didn’t see any way out. Until one day, when he got a surprise at work.
Scott
When you were a kid – like a teenager – did you experiment with drugs like a lot of kids do?
Frank
Well, yeah, I mean, I was a child of the 70s, so most of the kids in my age range did experiment – nothing heavy. We mostly smoked pot and drank beer, that kind of normal stuff, but not really any harder drugs or drugs that you could have a problem with. I did have some friends, people that I knew that did go down that tunnel and wound up in bad shape because of it. So at the time, that was kind of a warning to just stay with what I was doing.
Scott
In order for your story to make sense, we got to know a little bit of your state of mind at the time, which means a little bit of background information. You graduated from college and got a good job. Where were you living at the time?
Frank
I was living in Philadelphia. Yes, I graduated college and I got a good job there. I had a wife and I had a daughter. She was four when our marriage fell apart. I was offered a job in Austin, Texas with the same company that I worked for but it was a much better job. At the time, I thought, “Well, I can take care of her a lot better if I make a lot more money.”
Scott
Cause that was quite a move. You were in Philadelphia, the Northeast, and you were going all the way to Texas.
Frank
Yeah.
Scott
You have to really think about all the factors, right?
Frank
Yeah. I thought that I did, but I didn’t. There was one factor that I didn’t think of, and that was guilt. I could come back and visit her and I did that often. I did that every 4 to 6 weeks. My job allowed me to travel and do that. But there was still, “You walked away from your daughter. You left her and went someplace else,” and that weighed heavy on me.
Scott
You moved to Austin for this new position. What happened there?
Frank
I did get remarried in Austin within a year. That was definitely a mistake. The kicker of it was I got married to a woman that had two children and one was the same age as my daughter. So it felt like I traded my daughter for someone else’s daughter, which just made the guilt worse. That was something that I battled every single day.
Scott
How did you meet this woman in Texas?
Frank
She worked for the same company that I worked for. In hindsight, it was a rebound relationship. It did not work out but I stayed in it for 10 years and that was much longer than I should have. It turned out– in my opinion, now, of course, I know that when you have a situation like that, there are two sides of the story and the truth is somewhere in the middle but it turned out that a short while after we got married, she suddenly didn’t want to work at the company anymore. She didn’t want to work anywhere. She basically was looking for someone to come in and finance her and her children. That’s what it boiled down to.
So I tried to do that and this is going to be a theme through this conversation. She was manipulative by using guilt. “You promised you would take care of us. You promised this. How are we supposed to do this?” And so my response to that was, “Well, I can work more. I can work my job and then I can work freelance because I have a creative background.” My degree is in fine arts and I am an artist and I ran a creative department for a publishing company. That was my main job. So I had opportunities outside of that to work freelance. So I would work my job during the day and then I would freelance at night to try to keep them financed. But it seemed that the more that I worked and the more that I brought in, the more they would spend. So it’s kind of like being on the hamster wheel.
Scott
Usually, you hear about artists always struggling to make money. You were doing pretty well.
Frank
I was doing very well, actually. I guess graphic arts are a little different because you can actually get paying jobs. It’s much harder if you’re a painter or a sculptor because, then, you have to just sell through to collectors. But I had also learned management skills. I had taken some management courses, so I was able to manage a department. So I had a creative job but also a management job.
Scott
When you mentioned being on the hamster wheel working all the time and still having the guilt and depression from being away from your daughter, it sounds like it was a pretty dark time in your life.
Frank
It was a very dark time.
Scott
And how old were you then?
Frank
I was 32-33. I just kept throwing myself into the work. That was kind of a place to hide, but it was exhausting too. I mean, honestly – this was in the earlier 90s – I was making $110,000 a year and our bank account was always overdrawn. My paycheck was spent before I even got it.
Scott
Wow. And not by you.
Frank
No, not really.
Scott
You mentioned there was an incident at a McDonald’s. What happened there?
Frank
Yeah, this was when I was really in a dark place and frustrated with the whole situation. I went to lunch at McDonald’s with a friend of mine from work that we did fairly often. He told me this later. When it occurred, I didn’t really think much of it or it didn’t really occur to me. We were in McDonald’s at that time and, out of nowhere, you just began vomiting this information, these stories about things that happened when you were a kid with your mother, things that were happening now, and just all this dark stuff. I never knew any of it and I didn’t know where it was coming from, so I just listened.
My assessment of that, when he told me that, when I look back on it, is I felt like I was– the way that I always process things that bothered me is I just swallowed them and pushed them way down and didn’t deal with them. It was kind of like I was a champagne bottle and you shook it up and, eventually, if you put enough champagne in it, it’s going to blow the cork. That’s what happened. That’s what happened that day.
Scott
Going forward, you were visiting Philadelphia. What happened there?
Frank
Yes. I used to go to Philadelphia but I would stay in New Jersey because that’s where the printers that I used were and I was done for the day. I was heading to Philadelphia and, to do that, you have to use one of their major bridges. One bridge rises, so traffic stops. It was wet up when I was crossing over so I stopped, but the bread truck behind me did not and I got rear-ended by a red bread truck which caused me some minor neck injuries, but a pretty serious shoulder injury to the seatbelt that held my shoulder in place while the rest of me went forward and it required surgery.
So I went back to Austin, was scheduled for certain surgery, and had it done, and that was sort of the beginning of, “Here’s your road to serious addiction.” Because after the surgery, they gave me Vicodin for the pain and I’ll always remember this. I remember what it felt like. It’s a crystal-clear memory. I went home. I laid in bed. I took Vicodin. 15 minutes later, I was like, “Wow, this is awesome. I don’t care about my problems. I feel really creative. I had all these creative ideas. I thought my problems were not bad. I can get right through them. I’ll just work. Everything was hunky dory as long as I took those. When I ran out, I was able to get a refill, so I refilled it and I kept taking them.
Scott
When you say you were able to forget your problems, did you really forget them or did you remember them but just not care about them for a while?
Frank
Yeah, that would be a better way to put it. I didn’t care. They didn’t seem that big because I felt great.
Scott
And had you ever taken Vicodin before?
Frank
No, never.
Scott: So you just continued to refill.
Frank
Yes. Until they wouldn’t do it anymore. At that point, I started seeking out other means to get painkillers and my rationalization was, “Well, your shoulder still hurts. They should give you more, but they’re not. So you have to do something else.” I had a friend who had cancer and he used to get painkillers by the hundreds. Back then, prescriptions were just a white piece of paper that the doctor wrote and handed you. He would actually create them. He would make fake prescriptions, copy the doctor’s signatures, and take them around to all different individual pharmacies – not chains, but individuals. He lives in New Jersey. I started to buy them from him and his were stronger. He would get Percocets.
Scott
You said he was in New Jersey?
Frank
Yes.
Scott
But you were back in Texas?
Frank
Yes. I would FedEx him money and he would FedEx me Percocets.
Scott
Would you say you were addicted at that point?
Frank
Oh yes, for sure.
Scott
How long did it take before you would say, “Okay, yeah, I’m definitely addicted now?”
Frank
Well, I did learn that, by the time you realize you might be addicted, you’re seriously addicted. So I would say three months is probably– I think I was addicted after a month but I realized that I may be addicted after three and I knew for sure I was addicted after that.
Scott
So from him, you were buying. Did he have Vicodin or did you say it was something different?
Frank
Now he had oxycodone, which is Percocet, stronger than Vicodin.
Scott
So were you taking both now or you kind of switched over to what he could get?
Frank
Oh yeah, I would take whatever I could get my hands on. Sometimes, I’d take them together – Vicodin and Percocet together – a couple of each.
Scott
How would you say the effect of oxy compared to Vicodin?
Frank
Oxy is stronger and I would say it’s a little– I don’t know if this is going to make sense, but it’s a little warmer. It’s a little more of a warm, secure feeling. Vicodin is a little more of a chemical feeling. It makes sense to me but I don’t know that it would make sense unless you were me.
Scott
Would you say it’s kind of like you have a drink of brandy that has that warm feeling that you get from that?
Frank
Yes. Versus a beer. Yes. It kind of gives you a warm glow.
Scott
I’ve taken Vicodin and it just makes me drowsy. I never really got any kind of what you would call an enjoyable high from it. It had a different effect on you. Why do you think that is?
Frank
Yes. See, that’s the thing. They make most people drowsy but there is a small percentage of people that it has the opposite effect. It actually stimulates you. That’s what it did for me. In my situation, it stimulated me so I could work more. It was kind of the same as doing amphetamines or coke, which I have never had any interest in either of those and that kind of thing, but they stimulated me in a good way that I could work till four o’clock in the morning, go to bed, get up at seven and go to work, and I did that for a long time.
Scott
And so you were able to still be accurate and productive in your work?
Frank
Well, I thought so. I mean, I was definitely a functional addict. I did go to work every day. When you’re in an addiction like that, you think that people don’t notice because you feel like you’re the same but people do notice. They just don’t say anything for a long time. I would doze off in my office in the middle of a conversation. Periodically, if I would run out of drugs and I would be really sick, I’d miss work for four days in a row and then, suddenly, I was great because I got more and I put on a lot of weight because one of the things that opiates do is slow down your metabolism.
Scott
That’s one thing I wanted to ask you about – running out. How worried were you about running out?
Frank
I was worried all the time. It was a miserable existence. That was the number one concern of mine at all times. I knew exactly how many I had. I knew exactly how long they would last me. So I was always working angles to get more.
Scott
But when you see how many you have left and you don’t have any new ones coming in, did you ration those out?
Frank
Well, that would be the plan but it never worked. You think you’re going to rush them out or wean off of them and it just doesn’t work. You just take them anyway. But I always had something working.
Scott
Talk about the first time you did run out. How did that end up happening?
Frank
I was supposed to get another delivery and, for some reason, it didn’t happen. I thought, “Oh my God. I just took the last ones and I don’t have any more.” I went to bed and I woke up about four o’clock in the morning, sick. Withdrawal sickness– the best way I can describe it is to imagine you had a stomach virus, the flu with aches and fever, and super high anxiety all at the same time. It’s a horrible feeling. You can’t hold anything down. You can’t hold anything in. You can’t sleep because you have anxiety and everything hurts. It feels like you have a migraine. It’s very strong motivation, unfortunately, to get more drugs.
Scott
What you were experiencing were the first signs of withdrawal.
Frank
Yes.
Scott
And how long did you go through that?
Frank
Well, if I didn’t get any drugs immediately, I got as long as four or five days like that where I only got out of bed to go into the bathroom and be sick. Other than that, I laid in bed and I was covered in sweat and aching and strung out from anxiety. It was awful.
Scott
But even in that condition, you were able to be on the phone trying to get more. Were you ordering online at this point?
Frank
Yes, what happened was my friend in New Jersey, unfortunately passed away. Here’s how bad my addiction was when he passed away. The first thing that popped in my head was, “Oh my God, where am I going to get drugs?” Not “I’m going to miss him. What a shame. I feel bad for his family.” It was, “Where am I going to get drugs?”
Scott
You’re definitely going to miss him just for the wrong reasons.
Frank
Yes. I mean, now I miss him for the right reasons, but then it was the wrong reasons. I got online and I thought, “I wonder if anyone sells them online.” Lo and behold, I found a website that was like a portal for worldwide distributors of medications and you didn’t need a prescription. You didn’t need a doctor. All you needed to do was pay them and they would ship you whatever you ordered. So depending on where the pharmacy was, I would get different drugs. This is when things got really bad. There was a drug called dihydrocodeine and they don’t sell it. They’ve never sold it in the United States but it was rated as the most addictive drug in the world.
Scott
And that’s what attracted you to it?
Frank
No, I found this out after I was addicted to it.
Scott
How did you come across it? Did you see this and you thought, “Okay, that’s what I want to order.” What made you decide to do that?
Frank
Yeah. This site listed the pharmacies but there were also comments like, “This is a legit business. If you order, you’ll get it in two weeks. Don’t order from here.” So there was just a website with all kinds of drugs. I went to the pain medications and I looked and there was a description, and they said, “It was very similar to oxycodone, but it also had caffeine in it. So you really got to jolt out of it.” And I said, “Well, let’s try that.” So I ordered it. Amazingly, over the time, I ordered things like that a lot and I only ever had customs nab it once.
Scott
What countries were these being shipped from?
Frank
These were from Spain. I also ordered from the Philippines. I think they were the main two countries because the drugs from Spain did the trick and there was no limit to what you could order. So I would order a ton of them and I would get a gigantic envelope when they came and they were kind of like pills in those punch packs, like a foil punch pack. So you could get a lot in a regular envelope and it wasn’t very suspicious. Look, again, I would order them to my work. So the mail run would come around and they would have my drugs in the mail run.
Scott
Why have them sent to your work rather than to home?
Frank
Well, because I didn’t want my wife to know that I had a problem at the time. She never knew with all this odd behavior. She never knew and I don’t think she was interested, to be honest with you.
Scott
That’s amazing that she could not know this.
Frank
Yeah. I thought so too.
Scott
How many pills were you taking during a day?
Frank
Well, it depends on what I was taking. If it was Vicodin – because I did have a source that got those illegally that I could buy, like, 300 at a shot – the normal dosage of those is, like, one every six hours. If you get it from your doctor, I was taking about 25 or 30 a day. When you take drugs like that, you build up a tolerance, so you need to take more and more. But still, even though you have a tolerance, that’s a very dangerous level of drugs to be putting in your system.
Scott
Well, you mentioned that you were making really good money, but you were always overdrawn. How were you affording all of these drugs? Or are they really cheap from overseas?
Frank
Yeah, they were really cheap. They were not expensive at all. I mean, I could get a thousand pills for $100, something like that. They were much more expensive off the street. When I was buying them from my friend – he got jars of a hundred – he would sell them to me for $50 or $100, just $1 a piece. So, it was really very affordable. I would just make sure that I pulled cash out of the bank when it was actually in there so that I could do that.
What was happening was– if we go back to the withdrawal, in order to prevent that, I always had orders out. There was always this cycle of orders placed, something coming so that they would overlap and it would take, like, some sort of a problem like customs taking your order to throw a wrench in that and throw you into withdrawal.
Scott
So if customs did that, they knew that it was being shipped to your work. Were there any repercussions on you? Or they just disposed of it?
Frank
Amazingly, no. What they do is they open it, they take the drugs out, they put a little note in and say, “These have been seized by customs. If you want to dispute this, here’s the phone number.” And they put that slip in, seal it up, and deliver it.
Scott
And nobody ever called that number.
Frank
No. You just placed another order. Cause it was like a crapshoot. You put enough orders in and most of them got through.
Scott
Would you order online with a credit card or did you have to send those people cash?
Frank
No, with credit card. Some of them took PayPal. There were also some people in the United States on that website too. There was one doctor in San Antonio that did a phone consultation, which was really kind of bogus and a five-minute conversation and then he would prescribe you whatever drugs you wanted and he would send it into your pharmacy.
There was another pharmacy in Alabama. They put the elements together and made the drugs. They would just ship them to you from Alabama so there’s no customs involved. The first doctor actually wound up going to jail. Then, there was a pharmacist in Pittsburgh who apparently had a gigantic warehouse full of drugs and custom cars and all kinds of expensive things. He had a little club and you had to send him a request for the club and he would send you very detailed forms, all this information about yourself, and I guess he would check you out and then he would let you know, “You’re in. You can buy drugs from me.” So, if I get in, I could get a prescription, double strength from him. I can just send him cash. I had FedEx some cash and he would UPS back drugs. It took about three days. He also was raided and he went to jail for quite a long time. They actually raided him for failing to pay child support and they found the other stuff.
Scott
Those agents stumbled into a jackpot there.
Frank
Unfortunately, he had an envelope full of my cash when he got arrested.
Scott
Oh, so you lost that.
Frank
Yeah.
Scott
When you were in the middle of this, obviously, you knew you were absolutely addicted. Did you ever think about the future or how you thought this whole thing might end?
Frank
It’s pretty much day-to-day. It’s one batch of drugs to the next. I knew that I couldn’t do it forever and I knew I was going to have to get off of them somehow but, once you do that withdrawal once, you don’t want to think about doing it again unless you absolutely have to, unless there’s no other way. But my behavior and my health were becoming much different and a lot of people started to notice and I knew this couldn’t continue for a whole lot longer. I was either going to die. Actually, I was thinking I’d prefer to die than go through withdrawal but I knew I would either die or there would be some divine intervention or I would tough it out and go through withdrawal.
Scott
What you’re describing on purchasing online and from other countries or even in the US, it’s no longer possible to do that, right?
Frank
I don’t believe so, no. They’ve changed a lot of laws. You can’t even get a prescription now – like a paper prescription – for any controlled substances. The doctor sends it through a computer system to the pharmacy and there’s a national database that checks and sees if you ordered it somewhere else before.
Scott
And that eliminates the doctor shopping where you’ve got half a dozen doctors giving you the same prescription.
Frank
Right. And I’d be surprised if you could do it. I don’t look anymore. I don’t have any interest in looking but I would be surprised if you could still do it online.
Scott
And I know you went on like this for years.
Frank
Four and a half years.
Scott
Four and a half years. What were some of the ways or the outer signs that your life was just kind of spiraling?
Frank
Physically, I had gained a lot of weight. I wasn’t sleeping except for a little bit and that had advanced. I started to have hallucinations and I think that was a combination of the drugs and the sleep deprivation. So I would have visual hallucinations. I remember, one time, I was in Florida and I was driving up 95 and, up ahead, there was a guardrail along 95 and up ahead. I watched this guardrail turn into a giant silver lizard and turn around onto the highway and look at me and start walking towards me. I panicked and pulled off the road, trying to figure out how to turn around because I thought it was really a giant lizard and I thought, “Okay, this is not good when you’re seeing things like this.”
And then I remember being home at night and looking out the window to the outside. Instead of the window to the outside, it was like I was looking in the window to someone else’s house and I was watching these people doing things, eating dinner, washing dishes, and I thought, “Who are these people? Why am I seeing them? There’s something majorly wrong here.” So a lot of things like that.
And then also audio hallucinations. They often happen when I wake up because, even though I said I would sleep 3-4 hours a night, it was very broken sleep. I’d sleep 45 minutes and wake up. I would get up and go to the bathroom and I would actually hear– it was like a PA announcer at a sporting event only announcing what I was doing. I know it sounds crazy but it’s what I was experiencing and I thought this was getting way out of hand.
Scott
And you even sleepwalked sometimes.
Frank
Yes. I was sleepwalking a lot, creating some embarrassing situations and dangerous situations. I mean, when I would sleepwalk at home, that was one thing. One time, I woke up in my backyard and I woke up in the kitchen. But I traveled for my job. I was still traveling for my job. One time, I didn’t know that this happened until the next day. I always stayed at the same hotel in New Jersey, so they knew me. I apparently got up, left my room, went down to the elevator, went down to the first floor, and went to the front desk in my underwear, and they could see that something was up like I was sleepwalking or something. The woman that worked the night shift there walked me back to my room, put me in my room, put me in bed, and I never knew.
Scott
How did you find out that happened?
Frank
She told me. I mean I knew her well enough. We knew each other well enough that, thank God, it was her and not a stranger. Another time, I woke up– because these rooms were kind of like suites. I think it was a doubletree. So you have a bedroom and then you have a little room with a kitchen counter and sink. I woke up and I had stood on a chair and then stepped up on the counter and I was reaching and touching the ceiling when I woke up. If I had fallen, I would have been seriously hurt because, I mean, it’s not that far, but it’s far enough to get hurt. So things like that were becoming regular.
Scott
I think you told me, one time, you had a seizure.
Frank
Yes. I had a seizure at home. I woke up in the middle of the night, I sat on the edge of the bed, and then the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor seizing my arms straight up in the air and my legs stiff and that ran its course. Of course, I didn’t do anything about it cause I didn’t want to tell anybody why it happened but it was undoubtedly a seizure.
Scott
Then came what you called the day you call in recovery. You say they call this your birthday.
Frank
Your birthday, yes. Your birthday is the first day that you don’t take drugs or alcohol or whatever your substance is, when you start seeking help. I went to work just like always and I got a call from my boss who was a vice president of the company, and she asked me to come into her office. I went in and she was sitting at a little round table at her office and so was a woman from HR. The woman from HR had a legal pad and I could see on it, it had a list of drugs that I had been taking and I thought, “Oh shit.” So I sat down and my boss looked at me and said, “We know that you have a problem and we’d like to help you. You are the best creative services manager I’ve ever worked with. I don’t want to lose you, but I can’t have you here like this. So if you will accept our help, I will make sure that your job is safe. I want you to go and get healthy and then come back when you’re healthy and your job is secure. Otherwise, I can’t have you here anymore. I just need you to tell me that you have a problem.” I’m not an overly emotional person but I just burst into tears. It was such a relief. And I said, “I absolutely have a problem. I absolutely need help. If you will help me, I promise I will come back and you’ll be glad you did.”
Scott
This was your one big shot to get out of this.
Frank
Yes. And what I didn’t know at that moment was that my boss had a sister who worked with nurses who became addicted to painkillers and helped them to get better and get back to work, and she had a significant other who was a recovered alcoholic. So, she was very empathic towards the situation. I couldn’t have asked for a better person to bust me than her. So the company had a program – I think it was called EAR. They have those different programs where you get help for a variety of things and I arranged to go the next day to a detox hospital.
Scott
Did your wife still not know at this point?
Frank
She had no idea. I think that she didn’t want to know. She had to know that there was something up with me because my behavior was just so strange. I was sick more and more often. My weight had ballooned up. I was roaming around the house at night but I really felt like, as long as I was bringing home a paycheck, she didn’t want to stir the pot. I scheduled that. Then, I went home and I told her, and the first thing she said to me was, “Are you still going to get paid while you’re in the hospital?” And I thought, “Now I understand.” I went the next day and the hospital was in San Antonio. It’s about a 90-minute drive from Austin.
Scott
What was this facility? It was a hospital but was it for detox? Because that’s what you do first, right?
Frank
Yes. Part of it was for detoxing and part of it was a mental health facility. In fact, when I was there, they had a construction issue and they moved the detox people in with the mental health people, which was quite interesting. But I knew that it was all business when I got there and they took my shoelaces off my shoes. They do that so that a person does not hang themself
Scott
Because you’re about to go through withdrawal again, right?
Frank
And it’s a mental health facility, so I guess it’s happened before. In fact, they told me it happened right before I got there and that’s the room that I got. You go there and they assign you a doctor and, basically, what they do is keep you comfortable while you’re withdrawing with other drugs – Valium and things like that. Honestly, I have very little recollection of that process.
Scott
That’s good, right? Because it was probably pretty miserable.
Frank
Yes, that was the best detox withdrawal that I suffered from, so to speak. Then, after about four or five days, I kind of woke up out of it where I was a little more lucid and the doctor came in and talked to me. The first thing she said was, “You are really lucky to be alive. The amount of drugs that you were taking would kill most people.”
Scott
What do you attribute that to? Was this because you had built it up over time or just your biology just allowed it to happen?
Frank
Yeah, I really don’t know. I think the biology allowed it to happen. I said I added a lot of weight but I’m also kind of a stocky version and I think maybe a little stronger. I really don’t know. I just know that I’m really fortunate that I didn’t die. So then, they give you a couple of days of classes in there about different aspects of drugs and addiction and then they release you. I had arranged to be released when I was released from there to go to an inpatient facility because I figured, if I’m going to go through this, I only want to go through this once and I want to solve this because I’ve hated this life. I said I was addicted for four and a half years and, like, three and a half years were just miserable. I would have given anything to get out of it and this was my opportunity. I chose an inpatient facility that was really rough. It was the facility where they sent the court-ordered people. It was run by a Catholic organization and it was kind of a combination of prison and college.
Scott
What was it that made it rough? Would you compare it to, like, a military environment? Or you mentioned it was kind of like prison. What was it like there?
Frank
Yeah, military would be a good way to put it too. I mean, I see a lot of things on TV where there are rehab facilities that are like these luxury places where they walk you on the beach and you practice yoga and this sort of thing. This was military. You slept in basically a cot in a barracks with a group of other guys. There were multiple barracks and there were women there too. They had their own facility. Every morning, they woke you up at 6 o’clock and you had to get up and make your bed. You had 15 minutes to shower and then you had 30 minutes to eat your breakfast.
Every person that went there– I thought this was really great. You got a schedule. It was like a school class schedule and they tailored it to your addiction. So I had classes on opiates. I mean, some of the classes were the same, but then they were tailored. Like, I majored in opiate addiction, if you wanted to put it that way, and I learned so much about addiction and how it works and what causes it.
The physical aspect of addiction is actually very interesting. It’s a shame it’s a bad thing but it is interesting. I don’t know if you’ve heard people say addiction is an illness and some people have it and they can’t help it, and that actually is true. Here’s how that works. Just real quick. There’s a section in your brain that’s about the size of a chestnut. It’s called the pleasure center and that is what gets stimulated when you do certain things and reward you with endorphins. When you eat good food, when you exercise, when you have sex, they’re all things that help the human race to exist. They reward you for things that are going to help you procreate and humans to stay on the planet. Also, alcohol and drugs stimulate that too and that’s not necessarily a good thing. There are some people who have an overly sensitive pleasure center. So, what happens is when you stimulate it with drugs, it likes it, it rewards you, and then it has a reaction that says, “Do it again,” and it keeps asking you to stimulate it again. It’s a reflex. So you keep rewarding it because your brain is telling you to. That’s the difference between people who they say have an illness of addiction and other people who don’t. I happen to have one of those.
Scott
I know, a lot of times, being addicted to whatever is seen more by society as a character flaw. It’s really just biology.
Frank
It’s not a character flaw. In my opinion, it’s biology coupled with environmental. Something pushes you to seek self-medicating and then your brain likes it and tells you to keep self-medicating. The other thing that I learned is you will never beat the addiction until you deal with what your problems were that pushed you there in the first place because they will just come back and start again. I had issues from when I was a child primarily with my mother until I dealt with those in therapy. Actually, to my mother’s credit, I had a long conversation with her about it as adults and settled on and learned that my mother is a human being just like everyone else and she makes mistakes just like everyone else. She acknowledged that she made some mistakes and she wished she didn’t, but she did, and that kind of worked for me. That was kind of a light bulb going off saying, “Yeah, we always look at our parents as larger than life. But in reality, they’re just like us. They do things wrong and you can’t take them back.”
Scott
So you’re in the inpatient facility for how long?
Frank
30 days.
Scott
I know it was a tough place but, after a little while, did you get kind of used to the routine and it wasn’t quite so bad? Or was it terrible you just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible?
Frank
I didn’t like it. I didn’t really like the routine but I did see how it worked for a lot of people there because a lot of people had much less structure in their real life than I did, so they really thrived. There were some people that were in there for six months and didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to leave until I felt like I got what I needed out of the program and that I could safely leave there and kind of integrate back into my life.
Scott
So it was up to you when to leave?
Frank
Yes, because I was–
Scott
Oh, you went there voluntarily…
Frank
Voluntarily, yes. I could have left at any time but I wanted to get the blessing of my therapist there. I wouldn’t leave until she said that it was okay. So after 30 days, she felt like I was pretty good but I should go to outpatient, which I did.
Scott
Okay. And what does that look like?
Frank
That’s twice a week. That was in Austin too, so it was a lot easier. There is a facility in Austin and you go there and you go to a room and you sit around in a circle of chairs and you have a therapist who leads the conversation and you do a lot of different activities and have conversations. I really liked outpatient. It was a lot more creative and they would sometimes bring in guest speakers to talk about different things. And it was a smaller group, so we all kind of got to be friends and supported each other while we were there.
Scott
You said that was, like, a couple of times a week. Were you also going back to work by now? Or what did you do the rest of the time?
Frank
Yes, I went back to work. It was really nice too because, when I talked to my boss and said, “I’m ready to come back to work,” she said, “Okay, take the rest of this week off. Come in on Monday, but come in at lunchtime because I’m busy in the morning.” So I went in at lunchtime and I was scared to death.
Scott
What were you scared of?
Frank
I thought everybody knew and everyone would be looking at me and talking about me and it’s kind of like when you get caught with your head in the cookie jar. I don’t know. I was really afraid and nervous that people would treat me differently, but I went in and my boss asked me to come to this one meeting room to talk. I went in and they had a big party for me. It was really nice.
Scott
You had a really good boss.
Frank
I did. We kind of are not near each other anymore but, every year on my birthday from drugs, we’d get together and have lunch.
Scott
The day that you got called into the office.
Frank
Yes. But yeah, she was great about it. The funny thing was most of the people at the company did not like her because she was a very direct type of person and people were afraid of her and I just thought she was the greatest thing since sliced bread. We had a great relationship and people were kind of in awe of me. How do you do that? I said, “She’s not mean, she’s just direct.” Actually, I like direct people because I don’t have to guess. I remember one day that I was eating lunch with her in her office and the door closed, she said, “Let me ask you a question. People here don’t like me, do they?” And I said, “It’s not that they don’t like you. They’re afraid of you.” And she got really quiet and I looked at her and I could see that she was crying a little bit. If you knew her, she is very corporate. Then, she made some changes to be more available and friendly with the other people and it worked out well for her.
Scott
So all your coworkers did know, right?
Frank
The people in my department knew.
Scott
Okay. but your boss must’ve kind of coached them ahead of time, “Look, this is what’s happening. We’re not going to denigrate Frank for what he went through. He beat it and let’s welcome him back.”
Frank
Yeah, that’s correct. They all knew there was a problem, I mean, by my behavior. By that point, you would have to be blind and not know, so they were actually very happy to have the old me back, and that was very heartwarming and made me glad that I went through everything that I went through.
Scott
When you went back that day, would you say you were pretty much back to your old self or were there still some lingering symptoms or problems?
Frank
Well, I had a lot of hard work to do still with the emotional stuff. I would say that, physically, I was back to myself. I had all the drugs out of my system. I had been through withdrawal. I had started to lose weight already. I mean, as soon as I stopped taking them, I started to lose weight but, mentally, I was fragile. I wasn’t worried about falling back into the drugs but, mentally, I was fragile. I had a lot of things to work on myself. Now, I became a firm believer in, “If you have a problem like I did or any kind of problem, you can blame the circumstances or what another person did to you to cause that problem only up until you acknowledge that you have a problem, then it is your responsibility to take care of it.” So I was in my “responsibility to take care of it so it doesn’t happen again” mode.
Scott
You’ve been clean now for 22 years.
Frank
Correct.
Scott
Congratulations on that. I mean, that’s amazing. Since that time, have you had surgery or anything else that would require the use of painkillers? How do you handle that?
Frank
Yes. I had back surgery in 2018 and there are alternates. I mean, I also have arthritis in my knee really bad. I have to get a knee replacement pretty soon. So thank God for Deproxin for one thing.
Scott
What is that?
Frank
It’s Aleve. It’s over-the-counter, anti-inflammatory. And there’s a medication called Gabapentin, which deals with nerve pain. That’s somewhat helpful. Other than that, Tylenol. I just have to tough it out. What I’ve learned is when you are hooked on painkillers, pain is amplified. So something that really hurts you when you’re addicted to painkillers doesn’t hurt nearly that much when you’re not. So it’s more manageable when you’re off of them and it’s just kind of the price I have to pay.
Scott
Do you ever think you would be tempted to go back and take those?
Frank
Absolutely not. I’d never want to fall down that rabbit hole again. That was the most miserable existence that you can imagine. I thought that I was crazy. I thought I was losing my mind. I thought I was going to die. I thought that my body was going to quit. I hated myself. I hated my life. I don’t ever want to go down there again. In fact, I’m always happy to try and help someone else who’s headed in that direction because I don’t want to see anyone– having been on that side of it, I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.
Scott
As an artist, you mentioned that art has actually helped you in your recovery.
Frank
Yes. One of the first therapists I went to was an art therapist and she suggested that– what an art therapist – what she did anyway – was give you a pad of paper and a pen and just ask you to draw while she talked to you, while you talk to her, so you’re kind of, like, doodling. You do it without thinking and you’d be amazed what you wind up with. They can tell a lot about how you’re feeling.
Scott
That’s interesting. I’ve never heard of that before.
Frank
Yeah. It was cool. The first thing that I did the first day was draw these shapes and gizmos and things, and they all became like a big pile of things and they kind of tapered down into a point and then there was a little person under them. And she said, “Well, clearly you’re carrying a large burden. You may not know it, but you are.” So she suggested that I use my art at home too. So I started to paint. I actually had never painted before. I was always a graphic artist and I would draw but I’ve never painted, so I kind of taught myself to paint. I did do one painting that was based on that original sketch, which you’ve seen the one with the elephant.
Scott
Is that the one that’s called “A Sense of Impending Doom”?
Frank
Yes.
Scott
Okay. And we’ll have a picture of that in the episode notes so people can see that. Can you just give your description of that painting?
Frank
Yeah. It’s a tall, thin painting and there’s a very thin rope like a highway wire on the edge bent, pulled all the way down because there’s a big elephant standing on the middle of it precariously balanced and under it is a mountaintop with three people. One standing on a chair and then the other one is on their shoulders. Another one is their shoulders with just an umbrella under it and the rope is burning. Any minute, it’s going to give way and the elephant’s going to fall on the people and all they have is an umbrella which is great for rain, but not falling elephants. That’s kind of the way that it feels when you’re in this addiction process. You always feel something bad’s going to happen at any time.
So I started to figure out the different feelings I had, the different things I had been thinking about, and translating them into paintings. I’ve always been very influenced by Salvador Dali. In fact, I did a detailed paper study of him when I was in college. So my paintings, though I don’t paint like him – I wish I did – are kind of in the same style, meaning that they have a lot of things in them that look like random stuff but really represent things.
Scott
I’ve seen several of yours that you sent me pictures of. I’ve been to the Salvador Dali museum that’s here in St. Pete about a half hour from me because I’m fascinated by his work and I can definitely see the similarity there. It’s very obvious that his influences is pretty clear.
Frank
Yeah, like I said, I don’t paint as well as he does but the thinking is the same. So I started putting these different thoughts and issues, turning them into paintings, and I learned that, by the time I finished a painting, I had put so much into that from my head, from that issue that it wasn’t in me anymore and I could move on from it.
Scott
That’s pretty good therapy.
Frank
Yeah. And I would take those a chunk at a time. Okay, well, let’s do a painting about this now. In doing the painting, I never had a full plan on what the painting was going to be. I just kind of started and added stuff and painted. So as I thought through it, again, I would be at the end and I’d be done with that one, and I had a whole large collection of them, which someone bought almost all of them at one point but that was fine because I was finished with them. They did what they did and thank God I had that outlet. I don’t know how I would have dealt with those things. I think I would have been in therapy a lot longer just talking about them.
Scott
Frank, what’s your incentive to get your story out there?
Frank
My incentive is, especially now you hear the opiate crisis and we have an opiate dilemma in the country and a great deal of it is from fentanyl which is brought into the country not so much as prescription drugs– but my main reason for this is to tell people that it is possible to pick yourself up from the bottom of that hole and turn your life around and have a good life, that if you have a problem like that, it’s not the end. You just have to put in some work and you have to trust in some people in your life that say they care, that they really do. Like I think I said before, I’m always open to helping, talking to anyone that is having a problem, if they ask. I would like to help us stop, save as many people from this as possible. The only catch to that is, I did learn this, you can’t help a person unless they want help. You can’t force a person to get better from addiction. You can force them to go to rehab and therapy. You can force them to do all kinds of things but it won’t work unless they want to make it work.
Scott
As you might have guessed, Frank is no longer married to the woman who only cared about his paycheck. He later met Marie, and they’ve been married now for 21 years. He told me she’s really helped him and he wishes he met HER many years earlier.
Also, you heard Frank say that he loves to help people. We’ll have some resources in the episode notes for anyone who might be struggling with addiction. And we’ll also have Frank’s email address there, if you feel like you would like to contact him directly.
You know I love telling you about podcasts that I think you’ll enjoy. This recommendation isn’t a promo trade or a paid ad. In fact the other show doesn’t know I’m mentioning it here. But this is a show I listen to every week. It’s called My Unsung Hero. The tagline is “stories where one person helped another, in a time of need”. And that’s exactly what it is. Each one is like a 5 minute story of a time when the storyteller got some much-needed help from someone. And in a lot of cases, they never got a chance to thank the person when it happened – so they’re doing it on this podcast.
I love shows like this – as you probably could have guessed – because it always leaves me feeling good about the world and the human race. We need more stories like this. And the episodes are so short, whenever I see a new one show up, it goes right to the top of my playlist. Again, it’s called My Unsung Hero, and it’s put out by Hidden Brain Media. They have some other shows too. Check it out and let me know what you think of it.
Graphics for this episode were created by Bob Bretz. Full episode transcription was created by James Lai.
And now before we close out this episode, we have this week’s Listener Story. This is where a listener records a 5-10 minute personal story and sends it in, so that we all get to hear it right here on the podcast. If you have a story, we’d like to hear yours too!
This one is a story about skydiving – and an unexpected after-effect.
Stay safe, and I’ll see you soon.
(Listener story)
Hello, Scott. This is Camille. I want to share with you an experience that I had and explain to you what that was like. For my 40th birthday, I decided that I wanted to try skydiving. Of course, I had been trying to do special things for my birthday. For my 37th birthday, I went and got a nose piercing that I had wanted to do for 20 years. For my 40th birthday, I said, “I’m going to skydive” and I found a location in Georgia and I went.
A gentleman I was dating at the time went with me. Of course, if it’s your first time, you do it attached to someone else. They call it, I guess, tandem. So you’re basically strapped onto a more experienced skydiver. The guy that I was strapped onto– we had to ride a bus and then from the bus, we got on the little plane. The whole time, he was checking that I’m completely strapped onto him and I felt really good about his OCD because I was like, “There’s no way there’s going to be a mistake here because he keeps checking and rechecking.” And I keep feeling him tugging on these straps.
We got up in the air. It was our turn. They told you just to fall out of the plane and they also warned me that the air rushing at us and hitting me in the face would make it hard to breathe. I had actually witnessed a friend of mine – or been with a friend of mine – when she gave birth by C-section and I remember the anesthesiologist telling her the same thing that she would feel like she couldn’t breathe but just to continue to try to breathe and that it would work itself out. They had warned me. So we fell out of the plane. I mean, I could not catch my breath and I remember the anesthesiologist telling my friend to just keep trying. So I was able to catch my breath but it was quite terrifying not to be able to breathe. Then, on top of that, you’re seeing the earth come at you at a really, fast pace. I wasn’t prepared for just that free-falling feeling and seeing the earth come closer and closer.
Then, the gentleman told me to go ahead and pull our cord, so I did. Of course, I was trying to find it. I was panicking. I pulled the cord. We slowed down. We were enjoying the view. We’re enjoying descending and we actually had a perfect, beautiful landing. I was not expecting that either. I mean, it was just smooth and easy. So we got up and he, of course, unclips me from him and, really, it could not have been a better experience.
My partner at the time and I walked around the property a little bit and we enjoyed just kind of walking around. We got in the car to go home. It was about an hour and a half drive to where we lived or I lived at the time. We got in the car and he was driving and I was hit with this incredible wave of nausea and vertigo and I was just instantly sick as a dog. It got so bad that I asked him to pull over. I fell out of the car, opened the door, and fell out. I went and laid in the yard of someone on the side of the road. I don’t even know whose home this was. I just laid in the grass. All I could do was moan. I was so scared.
Well, of course, my partner was really worried about me. So, we drove to a pharmacy and he went in and talked to the pharmacist and, apparently, this is a thing. So he called the company that I did the skydiving with and it does happen quite regularly to people that skydive. Now, I had talked to probably 10 people that had skydived before. No one had ever mentioned this, but when he called, they said, “No, this does happen.” So now, just as a side, my purple public service to the community, anyone that tells me they’re going to go skydiving, I am sure to tell them, “Oh, it’s wonderful. You’ll love it but do not be alarmed if you become sick because I got so motion sick and it honestly took about eight hours for it to wear off.”
I got home. I laid very still. I will say, overall, I enjoyed the experience of skydiving. I’m really glad I did it. I would recommend anyone that’s interested in doing it to do it but I would never do it again. I was so absolutely sick afterwards. That’s my story. I’m going to tell you, from my 50th birthday which I just celebrated, I did something a little less adventurous. We decided to take a trip to Acadia Park in Maine and do that instead. Anyway, thank you for letting me share.