I really just wanted to get home as my methadone from the previous day was starting to wear off, and having to leave so early in the morning, I hadn't had time to sort anything before work.
That's the nature of the beast. Even if your up early, and want to score it's usually impossible to rouse anyone into action before midday. Nightmare if you need to go anywhere, your invited off on a day trip or such. Even the chemist doesn't open till 9.30am so this makes it even more difficult if your trying to hold down a job.
Even more complicated and awkward is the fact I am on 'daily supervised' pick up. Which for those who don't know means going into a packed pharmacy every day, standing in full view of all the other customers, and having to drink your methadone supervised by the pharmacist like a child at school with their milk. Which in a small town such as mine can be really exposing, not to mention degrading. It's so obvious that people then know what your business is, which can be made even more difficult by the stigma in which heroin is held.
I'm not feeling sorry for myself, or even knocking the service. My pharmacy and pharmacists are wonderful and we are lucky to live in a society where health care and treatment such as this is free, accessible and open to all. I just wish doctors and key workers would realise sometimes that not all 'smack heads' are unemployed and spend their days with nothing to do other than sit outside a pharmacy or a doctors surgery all day, waiting to pick up or sort out their script (prescription for the uninitiated.)
Another problem I have with this, 'supervised daily', is that doctors swear blind that methadone lasts in your system for twenty-four hours, but I know this not to be true. Their response to this is it must be psychological, in your head.
This is not true either.
I'm now well accustomed to knowing the signs of withdrawal that my body gives out, and methadone has NEVER held me for the full twenty-four hours.
A trick I used to use, before being put on 'supervised daily', is take half before I go to bed and half when I get up. This seemed to have a 'topping up' effect, and worked really well, carrying me through the day with ease. This is now impossible due to the present situation. So now, if I take it at five pm and have work the next day, by three in the afternoon the next day I'm sweating buckets, getting restless and wanting to go home. This can make working uncomfortable and often unproductive. Another bi-product of the controlling nature of heroin addiction.
This is what was happening today.
So I got in the car and put the air con on.
Too cold.
I switched it off.
Too fucking hot.
Heroin withdrawals make you so damn temperature sensitive. This went on for the duration of the journey.
I had a choice of two ways to get home. Both of equal distance/time. I chose the more direct route of 20 miles straight up the motorway. Then A roads all the way back. However when I got off the motorway...
Nightmare.
Roads closed. Grid locked traffic.
The sweat just got pricklier and pricklier. My patience got shorter and shorter. In the end rather than sit their with a pounding headache, gradually getting worse, I decided to do something about it. I swung the car round, drove 20 miles back and went my original way home.
The way I should have gone in the first fucking place. (Excuse my language)
Even then though I got stuck behind lorries and fucking tractors, all the way back. (My pet hate)
I eventually arrived back after a journey that should have took one hour ended up taking two and a half.
What should have been an 80 mile round trip was now 130, using a massive chunk of the petrol I'd skanked earlier in the day, and leaving me in the same situation as earlier, for tomorrow, with even less options...After all I couldn't do the petrol station twice.
I'll just put this down to karma.
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