Chapter 11: Linda Comes Home

Linda Comes Home

The day they released Linda should have been a happy day for me. But it was not. I was so scared. The nurses had told me that if they could, they would have kept Linda for longer, but that was not possible. I had no idea what to expect, or what our new life was going to be like.

As we left the hospital, Linda was overwhelmed by everything. She could barely walk, taking baby steps instead of striding the way she used to. I walked her out to our van and helped her get in. She was happy to be free, but at the same time she was scared of her own shadow. The confident, self-reliant woman I had married was gone, and while she would get better, I would never see that version of her again.

Linda wanted to stop at Dairy Queen on the way home. I pulled in and we walked up to the window. It was a weekday and there was no one else there, but Linda could not speak to the person at the counter. In fact, when they asked what Linda wanted, she nearly ran. Finally, I had to whisper to Linda, and she whispered back with her order.

At home, she went straight to bed.

In the weeks that followed, Linda went to her program every day, but most days her anxiety got so bad that she refused to stay, and I had to bring her home. Some days she would go back after a short rest; others she would not. Fortunately, my employer allowed me to work from home.

Slowly, she stopped going to her sessions, and I had no way to force her. She was recovering a little. She was not as timid as she was when she was released. She finally was able to order in restaurants. Linda wanted to start driving herself to sessions and other meetings. I did not want her to drive, but her doctors told us it would be okay. Linda was my wife, not my slave, so I had no way to stop her.

Some of you may have been wondering how Linda paid for the drugs she was using. Each time she got them, it was a minimum of $200.00. The simple answer was that she was stealing; stealing from us. Linda had been taken off the checking account and had given up her credit cards. But she still found where I was hiding my wallet and would take the ATM card, though I changed the PIN number. Other times, she would steal checks from the middle of the checkbook so I would not notice they were missing.

Linda was released on April 9th, 2003, and it was not until June 3 that she had recovered enough to be sneaky enough to find a way to get drugs again.

Using drugs is dangerous. I think most people would agree with that statement, but they have no idea how dangerous. I know that I did not. There are the dangers of overdosing or buying one thing and getting another. One might think of the dangers of dealing with the kind of criminal scum who sell this stuff. But on top of all of that, using drugs, in and of itself, is dangerous.

One of the ways I found out when Linda had gone out was that her hands would be covered in blisters, especially her thumbs. She would use a lighter to light the crack, and she would have to light it over and over until she developed blisters on her thumbs. Or, she would hold the pipe while she smoked it and burn herself. If you see someone with hands that are covered in blisters, it is a good bet they use this stuff.

Linda found new ways to hurt herself while using drugs that the people in the emergency room had never heard of.

I am not certain when the following part of the story took place but I think it is important, so I will put it here. I do not want to go into the details of how to smoke crack, but it involves placing steel wool in a glass tube and then applying a flame to the steel wool while inhaling. This time Linda inhaled just a little too hard, and sucked the steel wool into her lungs.

When I came home, Linda was in a lot of pain, but did not know what to do. I, of course, said there was only one thing to do. We should get to the ER as quickly as possible.

A big part of addictions is the constant drive to hide the fact that you are addicted. Linda did not want to go to the ER, and if we were to go, she wanted to go to an ER far from where we lived. She was concerned that if our local hospital found out that she did drugs, they would not hire her.

This was a ridiculous fear, and Linda knew it. What happens in the ER is doctor-patient privilege and cannot be used during hiring. Besides, the last time Linda was in the hospital, several of her nurses told us that they were recovering addicts.

Finally, I insisted that Linda go to the ER closest to our house, because we did not know what affect burning the inside of her lungs with hot metal would have, and we needed a doctor NOW.

She gave in, and we went, with her telling me that now she would never be able to work there, and it was all my fault.

Once there, the doctor was far less than gentle with Linda, and gave her a well-intentioned speech about getting off of drugs or I would leave her and she would be alone. The doctor ordered X-rays and several other tests, including putting a camera down Linda’s throat to see if there was any damage. Fortunately Linda was okay, and had only some minor burns.

Then, on June 16, Linda found a new way to finance her habit. Instead of stealing, she sold her jewelry. Linda had sold almost everything after her car accident to pay for getting the car repaired. But now, she pawned the few items she had left and her engagement ring. I paid $5,000 for that ring, and she sold it for $400. She had a grand old party with lots of people, if you want to call them people, sharing her drugs.

I was more hurt than you can imagine. I kept remembering the way she had stopped breathing when she put that ring on. I could not believe that drugs meant more to her than her ring or me. But they did.

Looking at our life, I had to wonder if what Linda really wanted from me was a ring and a party, not a marriage. Even while we were engaged, it was clear that Linda wanted the wedding much more than the marriage. She wanted to show everyone her ring, and she wanted her sisters to finally see that someone could love her.

A few weeks later, I went to the pawn shop and reclaimed the ring.

We tried to restore a normal life while still working to fight Linda’s addiction. Linda went to AA meetings occasionally. She made halfhearted attempts to find a sponsor, but once she had one, she would quickly lose contact with them, or refuse to do what they wanted her to do, so they fired her.

In August and September, Linda managed to steal our checkbook and have herself a party.

I do not know why but after September’s drug use, we entered the longest period of our married life in which I did not know when Linda used drugs, if she used drugs.

Christmas came and went without a drug problem. In February, we went to the Caribbean and had a wonderful time, despite having terrible weather.

March 2004 came and Linda was depressed, but she was not using drugs. In fact, I saw a hopeful sign. It was Saturday, March 6, 2004. We were out shopping when Linda told me that:

“The three biggest problems in my life are:

1. My weight.
2. Our living room,

and 3. How messy our house is”

I could not do much about her weight, apart from encouraging her to eat better and go with me to the gym in the mornings.

But the second item I could do something about. Linda’s complaint was mainly the sofa in the living room. She felt the living room looked shabby and uninviting.

I know that a lot of people who are reading this are thinking that I must be the greatest enabler who has ever lived. I may be. We were in debt up to my eyes. I had a wife who was only six months clean. But if I could fix one of the three biggest problems in my wife’s life by simply putting down some plastic then by God, I was going to do that.

We went to a furniture store and bought a new sofa, coffee table, end table and lamp. Then I stopped at a home improvement center and bought paint and rollers. Sunday I spent painting the front room a lovely shade of light, almost pink, purple. Linda’s favorite color was purple. By the next weekend, after the furniture was delivered, we had a new front room, and at least item two on Linda’s list of biggest problems was solved.

Items one and three of that list were not as easily addressed. I have never been a neat person and Linda was far worse than I was. Linda also did not like me cleaning when she was around. I think it made her ashamed that she was not cleaning as well, so she would constantly ask me questions until I would give up and just sit with her.

I think something about changing furnishings did change Linda’s attitude, at least for a while. Linda decided it was time to get back to her life, so she decided to go back to school. I was not pleased with the program she decided to enter, but the fact that she was finally starting to show some initiative was a big deal, and I wanted to encourage that.

Linda decided to earn her Medical Office Assistant certificate from a local private college, private meaning expensive. It would take her one year to complete and would cost $15,000. When she was done, she would have a certificate that no one in our area would recognized. There were no ads in the paper for someone with such a certificate; when we checked with the local hospital, they knew nothing about it. It would qualify her to do exactly what she had been doing for years. It was not even an associate’s degree.

But Linda would not be deterred, and I did not want too press to hard, as she was at least doing something. I did have to tell her one thing that she did not like. I told her that this would mean that we would now be so far in debt that my salary and her SSDI alone could not pull us out. She would have to get a job when she graduated.

She agreed.

I did what I could to help her get ready for school. I hoped that she would use this opportunity to make friends whom she would study with, so we set up a study area in our home with a computer, table, chairs, everything she would need to do schoolwork.

The weekend before she started classes, I took her away for a rest at a place we had read about in Best Places to Kiss in the Northwest, called The Boreas Bed and Breakfast. This was our first, but not our last, visit there, by any means. Linda fell in love with the place, its charm, its hot tub, and the wonderful breakfasts that were served there.

Then Linda settled down to her first quarter of school. I was so proud of her. She threw herself into the work in a way I never expected. She studied every day and she was doing great.

During the quarter, Linda’s sister and her family came to visit us. We showed them around, taking them to Mt. St. Helens and the Coast to see the wonders of the Northwest. In the car while I drove, Linda would have her sister and niece quiz her in biology.

When the semester ended, Linda got 4 As and a B. Most people would think that is a wonderful report card, but not Linda. She was devastated, it seems, that somehow she forgot to turn in one assignment, and the teacher had not told her it was missing until it was too late.

As far as school was concerned, Linda never recovered.

During the break between quarters, Linda had a sleep study done to see if there was anything that could be done to help her with her sleep problems. They recommended that Linda use a CPAP machine to sleep.

Since Linda had problems sleeping during the test, they gave her a new medication to let her sleep called Ambien. Linda thought it worked well and asked her doctor to change her sleep med.

Linda took the first dose of Ambien on a Friday night and went to sleep. She did not get up, as far as I know, on Saturday or Sunday. Sunday night, as I was going to bed, I found the bottle of Ambien was empty. I then looked at all the other bottles of pills that Linda took, and they were all empty. Sometime during that 48 hours, Linda had taken every pill in our house.

I was shocked by this and tried to get her to go to the ER, but she refused. I spent the night monitoring her breathing and waiting to see what happened next.

The next day, we had an emergency appointment with her doctor and explained what had happened to her. The doctor gave us enough samples to replace Linda’s missing medications, but only after I had promised that from that time on, I would dispense Linda’s medication.

I purchased a fireproof safe to keep them in, so she would not get them. Each night and morning, I would bring her a cup with her pills in it. I also used the safe as a place to lock the checkbook and my wallet at night.

After the scare with the Ambien, Linda felt she needed more help so during the quarter break Linda returned to HAS. During this time, they dispensed Linda’s meds to me and I gave them to Linda.

One night, I noticed that the pills they had given me looked different than the pill she normally took, and they were not in the normal containers. But I gave them to her anyway. The next morning at the gym I noticed that something was wrong. Linda was moving in slow motion. I took Linda to the ER, and they found that Linda had taken Valium. It seems that HAS gave me someone else’s meds.

Linda also had a close call with the law at around this time. Her demons were still at work within her. She dropped by a local pizza place and had a slice using some cash I had given her. But she did not have enough cash to get a beer to go with the pizza so she simply stole one. The guy caught her. He told her pay up but she did not have any money left.

The pizza guy took her driver’s license information and told her to come back with the money. She of course did not. So the pizza guy called the house demanding payment and I, being a good enabler, cleaned up her mess and paid him instead of letting her go to jail.

During this time Linda developed a new addiction, or it got much worse, and that was to smoking. At HAS everyone smoked, so did Linda. But soon, she was a several pack a day smoker. I would not let her smoke in the house, so she would go into the backyard and smoke. It was truly disgusting and lasted several months. There were times when she even had to get out of bed a couple of times a night just to light up. And part of our porch was looking like an ashtray.

Linda continued smoking when she went back to school after the break. Her heart was just not into school anymore. She went through the motions but I do not think she learned much. She managed to get good grades but a school like that I think gives good grades so people will keep coming back.

It was around this time that Linda received a strange phone call. Drug dealers are not human beings and do not deserve to be wasting air or taking up space, in my opinion. One day Linda’s cell phone rang. She looked at it and I could tell by the look on her face that there was something very wrong. She answered and quickly told the person on the line that she was not interested.

She then told me that her phone had said that the call was from James, her old dealer. But she had seen in the paper that his girlfriend had recently killed him. That was why she was so upset when she saw the number.

The explanation was simple. One of James’ other dealer friends had stolen James’ phone after he died. This slime was now calling all James’ clients to let them know that he would be more than willing to sell them drugs. I guess Nordstroms is not the only place where customer service is king.

I called the police and reported the phone call, but they simply were not interested.

That year, for my birthday, I gave Linda a gift card from Wal-Mart so she could get me some birthday presents, and we took a trip to Bonneville Hot Springs. Several times, Linda had to leave our room on the 6th floor so she could go out and smoke in the middle of the night. She even had to get me up so we could go and get her more cigarettes at 2:00 a.m.

We had been having problems, but I was so proud the day Linda got her one year coin from AA. It looked like we might finally be getting things under control, or at least to a point where they could be controlled.

As the fall weather started changing to winter, Linda’s dependence on cigarettes decreased with the outside temperature.

Linda started bothering me about how we were going to handle Christmas, and how she would be able to get me presents. I decided that she was doing so well that I would give her $200 in cash. That was a mistake.

Next: Chapter 12 – Here We Go Again

Previous: Chapter 10 – Linda Loses Her Mind

If this writing has value to you, voluntary support is available.

Support the Author