With Angela working until after midnight most evenings, there was really no point to me coming home early either. I had full season’s tickets to the Oilers and Eskimos which provided a night out now and then, and I was playing indoor and outdoor soccer with a competitive team, but there was still an awful lot of free time to try to account for. I was fortunate enough to work with a colleague who had asked a few times if I would like to meet for a drink after work and I ran out of valid excuses so one night I said yes.
Jim was a tremendous older fellow who had a terrific life story and an ability to tell the story well, and in a few short weeks I had become a regular with a small cadre of drinking buddies who met several times a week on Whyte Avenue or the Irish Club for pints of Guinness and shots of Macallan. We would typically schedule our appointments so that we were done our day by 0330 and have a pint in front of us at the Black Dog or Empress shortly after. Happy hour would end at 0600 or 0700 and it would be time to head home before the college kids took over the bar. Saturday would see us at the Irish Club around noon and drink until dinner time.
At first I would limit these nights to one or two times a week but the camaraderie and the fear of my quiet home soon lead me to sometimes five or six pub nights a week. This put me in a dire position both financially and morally. I was now trying to find my way home to the west end from downtown at the worst possible time of day and in no condition to do it well. Secondly, my $5 a day six pack had now become a $40 to $60 a day pub tab, not to mention nights where I had an Oilers game to go to after.
Angela and I made very good money but it was impossible to hide just how much I was spending. For years she had buried her head regarding our finances which gave her the high ground whenever she wanted to complain, but now even she was forced to try and get a handle on things. She cut up all the bank and credit cards, had my name removed from the accounts and declared I would now be on an allowance. It was brilliant on her part and completely the right thing to do, but she and I both knew she lacked the conviction to try and remain in charge, and I soon made her life so difficult harassing her with questions about the investments and bill payments that she quickly handed me back all the control. However, she had unwittingly laid the groundwork for a perfect escape, and I was too pleased with myself to notice the trapdoor I was standing on.
For as long as I had known Angela, she had suffered with a variety of health issues, and for the most part the myriad of symptoms remained unconnected and therefore went undiagnosed. Her GP’s would medicate whatever symptom was most prevalent on the day but no one could see the big picture and her mental state gradually deteriorated as well. Severe and debilitating migraines, massive weight fluctuation, deep and worsening depression, her hair falling out in clumps; she would go for test after test but no one could provide the answer and her fragile mental state suffered more every day. She would spend weeks locked in her room in the dark if she wasn't at work, and she would absolutely panic if she even felt a twinge of a migraine onset. I drove her to emergency several times to get her sedated on morphine on nights when the pain was too much, and the panic in her eyes when she was in the throes was heartbreaking. At its worst, she could hear a TV on in the house next door and it would cause her to sob in agony.
Her incompetent doddering GP, at his wits end, decided she should try a prescription for Stadol** and that was the final nail. Stadol is considered a controlled opiate and she shouldn't have gone through more than a single inhaler in a month, within weeks she was going through two to three a day. I discovered that he was over-prescribing her and loudly confronted him causing him to ban me from ever coming with her again; but she was also going to all the drop-in clinics in the west end collecting prescriptions as she went. Her benefits provider quickly raised a red flag so she started paying cash and before long I was living with a junkie.
As a result of the stress and the drugs, she would now have multiple mini seizures every day. Part of her brain would swell and cause her heart to stop, and she would collapse in a heap wherever she happened to be. It would take her up to thirty minutes before she would regain mobility but she would be groggy and would often not remember who she was or what she had been doing for many hours after. The panic this created for me was dreadful; because she never saw it coming it could and did happen at the absolute worst times possible. Coming down the stairs, running the bath, loading the dishwasher, climbing a ladder at work, driving home from work...I learned to hear the sound of her crumpling to the floor even in my sleep, and in a panic I would rush to find her and make sure she hadn't cracked her skull or something worse. Eventually her shallow breathing would get stronger, and she would open her eyes and whisper "Daddy.." to me in her little girls voice.
This was my life on New Year's Eve of 2006; my wife sedated and locked in our room at 6 pm, me watching the hockey game downstairs with a pizza and a bottle of vodka and our plans for the night in shambles. I was 260 pounds, I was miserable and I was lonely. We hadn't been intimate since we left PG four years ago and we were essentially just shitty roommates at this point. I simply could not imagine anything worse than I how trapped I felt right then, and of course I was about to find out just how wrong I could be.
**Butorphanol is a morphinan-type
synthetic opioid analgesic developed
by Bristol-Myers. Brand name Stadol was recently
discontinued by the manufacturer. It is now only available in its generic
formulations. Butorphanol is most closely structurally related to levorphanol.
Butorphanol is available as the tartrate salt in injectable, tablet, and
intranasal spray formulations. The tablet form is only used in dogs and cats
due to low bioavailability in humans.
Butorphanol is
listed under the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs 1961 and in the United
States is a Schedule IV Narcotic controlled substance with a DEA ACSCN of 9720;
being in Schedule IV it is not subject to annual aggregate manufacturing
quotas. The free base conversion ratio of the hydrochloride is 0.69.
"Sowing Season
(Yeah)" Brand New
Was losing all my
friends
Was losing them to
drinking and to driving
Was losing all my
friends, But I got them back
I am on the mend
At least now I can
say that I'm trying
And I hope you will
forget the things I still lack
Yeah, yeah
Is it in you now
To bear to hear the
truths that you have spoken
Twisted up by
knaves to make a trap for fools?
Is it in you now
To watch the things
you gave your life to broken
Stoop and build
them up with worn out tools?
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah
Nothing gets so bad
A whisper from your
father couldn't fix it
Your whispers like
a bridge, it's a river span
And take all that
you have
And turn it into
something you would miss if
Somebody threw that
brick and shattered all your plans
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah
Time to get the
seeds into the cold ground
Takes a while to
grow anything
Before it's coming
to an end, yeah
Before you put my
body in the cold ground
Take some time and
warm it with your hands
Before it's coming
to an end, yeah
It's coming to an
end
Do you miss the
blend
Of colors she left
in your black and white field
Do you feel
condemned just being there?
I am not your
friend
I am just a man who
knows how to feel
I am not your
friend
I'm not your lover,
I'm not your family
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah
Time to get the
seeds into the cold ground
Takes a while to
grow anything
Before it's coming
to an end, yeah
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