I’d experienced withdrawals before. I’d run out of money, or the supplier would go dry. The body aches would set in; there would be pain from head to toe; diarrhea, nausea, and stomach pains, not to mention the mental battle of wanting another hit. Long hours on the couch in a fetal position, incapacitated. Imagine the worst flu you’ve ever had. Multiply it by ten.
Symptoms would last five days, sometimes longer.
I had no idea what was going to be involved in a full detox. I’d never made it that far, but I’d never heard of any process that wasn’t torturous. And would it even work? It’s often said that traditional recovery approaches show no better than a 20-percent success rate.
So regardless of my parents’ determination, I didn’t feel much hope. I just knew I’d come to the end of the road. I was placing my life—what was left of it—in their hands.
Lori, with a sad smile, said, “Looks like you and me will be going through treatment together.”
“What are you talking about?”
“While they’re fixing you, they’ve decided to fix me, too—I’ve got to quit smoking.”
I had to smile. Misery loves company. “The Warden’s trying to lock both of us up,” I said. We both laughed.
Our parents videotaped something off the TV about kicking the cigarette habit, figuring it would give them something to help Lori. But it was even more helpful than that. The show documented an alternative approach to treating drug addiction, involving NAD therapy—supposedly it was vastly more effective than the usual approaches. The catch was, this treatment wasn’t available in the USA. Up to this time, it lacked approval by the Food and Drug Administration, so you had to go to Tijuana, Mexico, to get it. Apparently Tijuana was becoming quite the hub for alternative medical treatments of various kinds.
Mom and Dad liked what they heard on the TV special, but the irony of going to Tijuana wasn’t lost on me. You flew into San Diego and crossed over to Mexico, just like my old friend Rodney had done. I thought about how he should have been here with me now, flying over there to turn his life around instead of to load up on more ketamine. Instead of getting high, I was going to get help.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Believe me, Tijuana is the very worst place to turn loose an addict like me.”
“You won’t be turned loose,” my dad smiled. “Mom’s going with you. The people at this clinic say, ‘Bring somebody with you for support,’ so you and Mom will have a little vacation, eat some Mexican food, and relax.” He laid out the plan to fly over there four days from now, and I’d get ten days of IV transfusions.
“This has got to be costing some money,” I said. “Over-the-border treatments won’t be covered by your group policy. How are you paying for it? And how is Mom going to get off for two weeks?”
“Don’t worry about any of that, Robby. This is your life we’re talking about. You have one job, and it’s to get well.”
Best I could tell, the treatment would cost my parents about the same amount I’d stolen from them—doubling down on what I’d done to them financially. Years later I’d realize they were showing me a perfect model of the love and grace of God. I had inflicted the deepest kind of hurt on them, stealing from them and using the money to further wreck my life. Any other victim and I would have gone to prison.
I’d sinned against the very people on this planet who loved me the most, and now they were willing not only to take me in, but to uproot their lives and fork out that much more money to rescue me. How did they know I wouldn’t just break their hearts again?
They didn’t.
They just knew that love wouldn’t let them give up on me.
At this point, no one in my family, least of all me, understood the spiritual concept of grace, as shown in Christ—yet somehow they lived it out. God took my family in his merciful hand and carried us forward.
The problem was, I was still an addict, and my body was still crying out for what it needed. There was no option of going “cold turkey,” simply cutting off the flow of medication; I would have gotten very sick, very quickly. Mom and Dad called the clinic in Tijuana and came to understand there was nothing to do but buy some time with a few more pills until I could get to Mexico.
I needed four to five Oxy 40s a day just to maintain my habit, and my parents had to finance that at a hundred bucks per day. Drug dependency was awful, but I was used to that. Financial dependency on Mom and Dad for my habit, however—that was utterly humiliating. I didn’t want them anywhere near the dealers and the transactions.
I told myself that if I could ever get clean, I was going to stay that way, if only for their sake.
I lined up a dealer and made the arrangements to get enough pills to hold me until the plane took off for Mexico—a maintenance dose. But I was so much in the grip of this addiction that I took more than I’d promised, of course. I’d take the next dose a little too soon. Or a lot too soon.
So the day we were supposed to take off, I saw I would run out of Oxys. That meant my inner clock was ticking. I had thirty-six hours, more or less, until I would be way too sick to fly or move for that matter.
Addicts live with constant fear of something happening to the dealer, or running out of money, or anything that could separate them from their dosage. It’s utterly nerve-racking. So, approaching the time to fly out, I was
