I think I have a responsibility to tell you what it is like to get a call on May 24, 2019 from your spouse telling you that your 23 year old son is in the emergency room and you need to get here right now.
I believe that sharing a story is the best use of a difficult situation. Our sufferings and our overcoming serve as helpers to others when they suffer.
We knew something was coming with Ian. We knew it in our bones even though we didn’t talk about it. We had taken steps finally to draw boundaries around our lives, saying aloud what we were no longer willing to tolerate. We couldn’t control him but we could control what we would allow into our home, into our heads.
We had been dealing head on with Ian’s addictions since 2017, though he’d been experimenting and using for a long time before that. He was really good at hiding it, or maybe we were just not willing to dive deep enough to figure it out.
In November 2012, Ian was 16, about to turn 17. He was speeding his dirtbike down a nearby side road and a car pulled out in front of him, the driver’s vision hampered by the Florida sun in a late afternoon sky. Ian was catapulted off the bike and he was thrown to the side of the road, bloodied and with multiple broken bones. His helmet saved him from any major head injuries.
He called me himself and we sped to his location only about a mile away from our home. I scooped him up, laid him in the backseat of our minivan, and drove him to St. Joseph’s Hospital while my husband stayed behind to talk to the police.
The first thing they did in the triage room was inject him with morphine.
And this was the beginning of Ian’s opioid addiction.
To be continued.
