The addiction

So here I was in November 2011 with a finished manuscript which I had entered into my first competition hoping for a fast track to success.

I was still seeing my chiropractor, but because my money was starting to run out I was now only seeing him once a week, instead of three times a week which I had when I had first ruptured my spleen.

I had travelled through the gates of hell; back and forth for many months suffering agonising pain as I paid for my sins in life.

Slowly, and very slowly indeed, I began to fight back as I tried to regain control over my body.

I was dropping four pain killing tablets down my throat every three hours. I had been for months, and like a spider in the night that creeps up and spins it webs, I was entangled in a never ending desire to pop the pills.

I have read in the press about super stars who died after overdosing on prescription drugs and you think to yourself, ‘how could they be so silly.’

Well I wasn’t on prescription drugs which are a lot more powerful than the basic pain killers you can buy over the counter. But and this is a very big but, I found that I couldn’t go more than three hours without the need to pop more of these, over the counter pills.

I kept saying to myself, ‘Just take four every six hours.’ But just like the night follows the day my body followed the same routine in its hunger for pain relief.

If I missed the schedule my back would ache in pain; then one day I had enough.

I bought a bottle of strong cider and thought, ‘f@uk the pain killers.’

I drunk myself silly on a 3 litre bottle of Frosty Jacks cider (7.5%) and for a short period of time I was in a heavenly bliss.

I awoke the next day with a hangover, but and again this is a big but, I had broken the three hour cycle of pill popping which my body now demanded, and I was never to go back.

Slowly, very slowly I reduced the pain killers, and I found that the more I reduced the intake of these, the more my pain abated.

As in a previous chapter I talked about a book called, The Secret, who basic ethos is that everything is connected by our thoughts in the brain. This experience only confirmed this ethos. Pain was in my thoughts constantly so I popped the pills to stop it, but as I reduced the pills, the pain also reduced.

Why was this?

Because the less I thought of pain killers, the less I had pain.