Plexiglass Partitions

I wanted to spontaneously combust at work earlier, standing behind the cash register, time ticking too slow out there and too fast in the system, stress crushed me under it's heel and was proceeding to rub me out. Every customer was slowing me down more than the last, and I was cutting them off mid sentence as they spelled out their first names--"3 letters is all I need" felt like my mantra, all I need to find you in my system, all I need to sell you the pills and get the fuck out of here.

Everyone always wants to tell me their life story. I was more than not in the mood. It seems like anyone outside the plexiglass partition has all the time in the world, and assumes that I do too. But the company times every activity I do there, from how fast I fill an RX, pick up a phone call, scan your rewards card, have your meds in stock, and how many more Rxs I can get you to fill--even if you don't need them. It boggles my mind that each person who calls in starts the conversation with a huge prologue before ever giving me his name or date of birth; he is always inevitably offended once I ask, as if my interruption had ruined his tale of woe and shitty doctors offices, mazes of insurance, transferring pharmacies, or some combination of all 3. Other people call in immediately on the attack, ready to curse out whoever picks up, until it becomes apparent whichever one of us who picks up has no idea what she is talking about. Usually, our confusion doesn't faze any of them, they enjoy a chance to fuck with someone who has no choice but to listen.

I felt my tears welling up as I sold some impotent 35 year old guy his medication to help him produce more sperm; his eyes looked straight through me, I had forgotten to act less like a human and more like a placid, Hindu cow.

Now I'm safe with a cigarette in hand, leaning back in a chair in front of my apartment, looking down at the courtyard below. My mind is left to crave only oxy and opana, forget food or sleep, all I need are drugs. Like my customers, I'm hooked on each new rx you give me, doc, and all I want are more.

I know I'm only supposed to take 3 oxys a day, I'm doing better at following instructions so that the bottle lasts me the full month this time around. That way I'm not wasting hundreds of dollars on some poor old ladies pills.

I was on the phone with insurance for 3 hours today for 3 different patients. For one of them, I was trying to get his suboxone to go through for free like it did last week when we didn't have any. Once it finally came in, he needed to pay his deductible which he hadn't done yet. Well, fuck, it went round and round, until finally the lady on the other side of the phone told him. I don't want any more calls today, any more people to talk to; once I get off work I become a misanthrope.

The opana is dissolving into a gelatinous blob of oxymorphone, that my stomach slowly eats away at over the next 12 hours. It takes 2 hours before the effects begin to peak, which is too long to wait today--please let it start sooner, and take me anywhere but here.

Without drugs, I'd be another miserable 26 year old punk--working my ass off during the week, going to shows on the weekends, and drinking my anger away. The constant need fills that void and gives me a way to fill my time, lying in wait for the moment euphoria to rush over me. When there are no pills, when withdrawal looms over me, then the void is filled with the hunt for relief and pills and to return to nothingness of opiate's embrace.

Texas is getting hotter by the day, but right now the breeze is perfectly warm. The burning menthol tasted in my mouth almost satiates me while I wait for the high to begin.

It seems like I have all the time in the world to wait now that I'm on the other side of the pharmacy, just like the rest of them.

Until next time...

Love,
Lucy

P.S. comment if you read this... let me know there is someone else out there...

Morphine Withdrawal

Behind the pharmacy walls Im dying.

I am ready to curl up and die there. Unable to stop the pain raging from my head down to my feet. The doctor wouldn't rx me anything until I saw him this week--2 days after my mirphine rx ran out. A week from my when my last oxy rx should have been refilled. The muscles in my legs contract. My eyes burn. I yawn again and again--I would take death over this feeling. I  forgot my wallet and have nothing to eat.

I feel the bile creeping up my throat.

And ther goes my breakfast.

Please god, kill me now.

Lucy

The Land of Scathing Sun

The asphalt steams my scrubs; my arms feel hot and sticky. Rain in Texas is always dangerous weather, trucks barrel down the freeway spraying water, sedans end up swept into puddles, and I'm stuck on wet cement for the 30 minutes I have away from the pharmacy in the back corner of the store.

A homeless guy presses me for a cigarette--3 times no and he won't listen to me, "I have 2 ciga left and I'm on my break." A lie to protect my only respite from the world.

Back behind the pharmacy counter, I wanted to scream at people to fuck off all morning. We can't see them approach the counter on the other side of the partition. Usually, within 20 seconds or less, we'll call "be there in a minute." Some immediately knock on the counter, scream hello, it makes me want to stab them with my spatula as I count out 120 Metformin 500mg. A Stetson floats above the glass, a disembodied hat. Fucking Texas.

Everyone is here for their speed and opiates--ready to get legally high, with their doctors' nods of approval.

I pop my own, sitting in the thick air of the parking lot. Customers stare at me as the awning drops on me, I pretend not to notice either. It doesn't matter if you don't look.

I gulp down a 10/325 Percocet and 30mg XR adderall. My own legal euphoria. I have a legitimate condition, undifferentiated spondylarthritis and hypersomnia, along with a million other conditions I take 12 pills to keep in check. I'm a walking disease, an invalid.

I need to pick up my handicapped placard. The prescription is waiting for me at my rheumatologist's office. I'll probably pick it up after I see my new pain doctor.

I hate pain doctors. They treat us all like junkies--piss tests every time. The glances of disbelief at your first meeting, as is maybe all the MRIs and years of testing are wrong. The new guy sounds good though, maybe he'll be able to help me with the burning pain in my feet and the tearing sensation in the tendons of my ankles--along with the deep, crushing aching in my spine and knees, my hands as well.

My break is done, my cigarette barely finished. I watch the clouds of smoke trail off. I grind it out with my feet so that annoying homeless guy can't smoke it. Maybe that makes me an asshole. I haven't decided yet.

Anyway. Back to life behind the pharmacy,

Love you all,

Lucy

All Wired Up and Nowhere to Go

There's ash all over my keyboard again, and now beneath the keys--no easy way to get that out of the computer. The only reason I'm awake is how violently pissed off I am by the doctor.

He theoretically accused me of being wired up by my doctors--well, more that me taking 0.25mg of xanax (the lowest dose made) for anxiety that I thought might almost mean I needed to go back to the psych ward was a problem. I couldn't get my RX because he is a moron about pharmacy law, which I didn't feel like arguing about--although if I had the chance right now I would.

Pain management doctors are so high and mighty, prosecution, judge, jury, and finally warden of the patient's medication. If he knew the laws in this state, he would know you can't fill an RX less than 2 days before the last day supply runs out (regardless of the date on the script, so if you have a 30 day supply, you can fill a new one in 28 days). He didn't know you can write in your own earliest fill day on the bottom of the RX, but it all has to be hand written. He was talking down to me about all of this, telling me that my pharmacist isn't do it properly and all this bullshit, when really I wanted to spit in his fat face.

Now I'm up at 3:30am smoking and ruminating.

Anxiety is a fucking side effect of Enbrel, my main medication for my undifferentiated spondylarthropathy (or USpA). It has been a miracle worker, but it doesn't do enough and I can't change that it is the last line of defense. I wonder if I shouldn't just lay down and go through withdrawal and wait to die in pain.

Fuck. I shouldn't let people crawl up under my skin, but I'd gladly trade bodies with a healthy person any day.

Earlier I wanted to bang my head against the wall, boiling over with rage and no way of expressing it, but I took a xanax and didn't hurt myself. Maybe it's just a bandage, but it's smaller than the one I'd need to cover the gash on my head.

Until tomorrow, with love,
Lucy

Waking Nightmare

Momentarily, I'm stranded on the sand, gulping for air.

The basket of drugs fell out of my hands, muffled as it crashed by the carpet in the pharmacy. My head jutted upwards, eyes opening widely--I had nodded out again. I bent down to pick up the bottles of medication, placing them back into the black basket.

Embarrassment could have flushed my cheeks, but I was too overcome by the stream of morphine from last night and this morning, plus the xanax as well, flooding my body. My emotions were absent, my mind far from the current situation--I can't remember any thoughts, fear.

My pharmacist was far too busy trying to control the mess in front of her; she's constantly overwhelmed by her own incompetency. L was at the register, in an area separated from the back of the pharmacy by a wall. I was on my own.

I finished putting every bottle carefully back up on the shelf and returned to the computer to type up prescriptions.

Again, I felt my neck snap forward and rattle me awake.

I was running out of control--and no one knew it. The customers weren't flooding in front of me, so I quickly ran to the back. Telling my coworkers I had to take my meds, as I quickly departed. I popped the top off my adderall bottle, and tossed it in the back of my throat with some water. If I had been more present, I would've thanked whoever created those tiny little gel caps for saving my ass.

Now the fear had started to set in, hard and fast, running down my spine and across my face. Back in the pharmacy, I made sure to keep awake and upright. I imagined I could only fall asleep twice standing up before someone noticed--not that anyone I worked with would've put the two together. At least, I don't think so--although my prescribed medications are known to my coworkers, so easy enough to chock it up to them and lack of sleep.

Hours later, I am ready to bang my head into the wall, so frustrated and out of control with no where to send these emotions. The kratom and morphine and 1 oxy, plus some xanax, is not helping me cope with myself and the knot in my stomach is growing unruly.

I just keep spinning out further each day and I don't know what I'll hit before I stop.

Barbaric Thoughts

The front of my head screams for more, and yet there is nothing to feed it. Morphine might as well be a fucking aspirin--it has no high. It contains nothing.

I'm splayed on the bed, watching the fan spin above me spin in a blur, listening to the newest album by The Libertines (Anthems for Doomed Youth). Time ticks by waiting for the krater to set in--a crap replacement for oxycodone, when 20mg of oxy won't even get me high. At least I'm trying, that's what they always said was the important part.

Like the fan, I'm spiraling out of control with anxiety and pills. I'm far too close to being out with at least 2 weeks before I can even fill a new prescription. Living in the pharmacy, I factor in the number of days in a month, the rules of how soon I can fill, and how the doc will write my script this time--my script, my ticket out of this hell hole of a mind.

I'm far too close to cracking in 2, or 5, or dissolving into a puddle of pure excrement. Back to the old punk ways of showering barely twice a week (not a good look in public). Maybe I can just blame it on my old ways starting to break back in.

I lay my arms out across the bed and close my eyes, as if to summon the days of my youth when I would save those precious few oxys I'd thieved for the end of the week. On Friday nights, as Trainspotting or the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson played in the distance of my darkened bedroom. My arms across my chest, ready for the grave, nodding in and out of those strange dreams. Sometimes, I'm amazed at my self control to save those pills for the end of the week, when now I can't keep myself from my fingers reaching back into the bottle for double the pills I'm prescribed.

40mg of oxycocdone/apap and 30mg of morphine er a day should suffice for one human being, but there's no way to stop myself from crawling back into that amber vial. I hand them off to R to hold for me, but he's far too nice to stop me when I request another, and another. He can't help it, he loves me, wants me happy. And sometimes, I equate happiness with being high. Depression has swept back over me like the waves on Long Beach Island, where the Atlantic would come crashing down on my head once more--suddenly gulping sea water and tumbling in the surf.

Drugs surround my every waking moment, from work to home to sleep, dreaming of aisles, shelves full of medicine for those broken minds, bodies, and bones.

Squirming in my Skin

It is unending... a tape worm that never gets enough and it's eating through my brain. I took the 3.5 oxys after work plus now my nightly morphine, a tizanidine, and an adderall xr since Rob took one a while ago before going to class at 7:30. I figure an rx speedball is always a good night. Perhaps I'll be entertained for long enough to keep my mind off of how low my drug supply is becoming.

I have 7 days to get to my doctor appointment, which means I have only 2 oxys a day if I want to have some each day.... technically less than that even. That's half the amount I should have, minus the couple of days from then until when my fill date "should" be. However, he wrote it last time 2 days before I filled it last, and i'm hoping that means he'll let me fill it right away. He may be slightly off from his family emergency that totally fucked up my medication schedule because he wasn't in his office and no one would tell me what was going on. I ended up getting my oxys early, I filled my morphine on time, and now I'm wondering how this will all play out.

There is a special kind of hate that blossoms when you realize your past actions are constantly undermining your future comfort you can't help but hate it. I have to take a xanax, only 0.5mg, although I'm not such a big fan of them. I'm squirming in my skin and ready to run out of the room, under the Texas moon, and scream as loud as possible until all this frustration that's built up subsides.

We have no money, running out of my meds, constant stress stress stress, and I have to hold it together for R. He's an adult, and he handles a great deal of our responsibilities, but I always have to deal with the real tough shit: insurance, bonds for his school, getting his fafsa taken care of, getting our SNAP benefits together, etc.. It becomes tiring to feel like both a wife and a caregiver (not a mom). I want him to do some shit on his own, but his anxiety builds to the point where he is stammering and unable to even move let alone work on anything complicated.

I love him and I know his anxiety/mental problems are not his fault--if he could do anything, it would be to be mentally healthy.

.........

1 day until the doctor. Tonight we're off to see the Toasters, and my excitement is mixed with pain.

The soles of my feet burn and the bones running up my legs ache without end. I woke up like this and I will go to sleep like this. I am left with 1 oxy, my nightly morphine, and maybe some tea--if it's necessary to keep me on my feet for the show.

This fucking body is only 25 but 25 more years stuck here seems interminable. The only positive are the drugs--amphetamines in the morning to wake up, and morphine to keep my pain reduced, and oxycodone to really knock me and the pain out.

The world is fucked up, it's not related to fairness, but sometimes I wish that it was a little less arbitrary.

I'm rambling now. the pain is distracting pushing every thought out.

I'll be back later on.

I love you all,
Lucy

P.S. If you ever have a question or anything, feel free to comment or follow me on twitter. I'm here, just quiet sometimes.