The Annoyingest Patient at the Methadone Clinic... (is me)

MY DRUGGIEWORKER is really pissed off with me because I cannot go more than a few days without using nefarious brown powder on top of my methadone. I told her I believe either methadone isn't holding me or else it is poisoning me. I brought in a bottle of Monday's piss saying, "I know this is unconventional but if you like you can test this and it will show I really had gone the best part of a week without using" (could have been anybody's of course; but that somebody would have to be on methadone and not using on top and I don't know anybody like that..!) And she said "When did you last use?" And I said "this morning" and she said why so I said it was because I'd been feeling exhausted, lifelessly depressed, flat, unmotivated and suicidal and she said "oh that's no excuse ~ everyone feels like that" (and she did seem to mean everyone, not just people unfortunate enough to be on methadone).

I could have channelled the conversation down a different route by saying "OK what about a person in severe physical pain. Would that be an excuse to use?" and she would have said the standard "but we're not talking about other people" answer. But I could also have pointed out that I'm labelled with the most serious mood disorder there is and that it is rather patronizing (not to mention dismissive) to label my symptoms as an "excuse". If I'd never been a depressive to begin with I cannot see how in a million years I would ever have got addicted to heroin to begin with, so excuses or not, it really was in a large part about self-medicating. Of course I also took it to get high (in the beginning) because I wanted to know what this legendary heroin high was like. That's what prompted me to try it. And the fact that cocaine-snorting was so in back in the day. Coke was cool and yet the people who were so open to that were closed to heroin and I wanted to try heroin so I went off on my own and I found it. (I never had a group of friends who led me into addiction. I made friends with the local junkies because they congregated at our local tube station every evening selling cheap used travelcards and because I liked to travel on the cheap I got to know them. It was through these people (who also seemed to be so much more accepting of who I was and how I felt than my "real" friends) that I got into hard drugs.

By the way my very first encounter with gear came after a night out when I met an acquaintance who said "come back to mine, I've got a bit of brown in a drawer". Why did he know I'd be interested in brown if I'd never tried it? Because about four years earlier, just before Christmas, I'd approached him asking for heroin and had actually given him £50 to get me a half gram (yes it cost £10 a "point" back then). But a few days later this person (who I barely knew) gave me my money back saying he couldn't get it after all. I only wanted heroin because I was depressed and wanted to die. Heroin overdose was the most painless method I knew of: you slip into unconsciousness and never wake up. But it wasn't to be. I took a bottle of vodka and a bottle of sleeping pills and tried to drown myself in the bath but obviously I woke up again... and the rest is history. By the way it took me YEARS to actually think back and join the dots. That heroin really HAD come into my life because I actively wanted to die. Doesn't sound good... does it?

As for methadone "poisoning me", my point is, I spent years on heroin feeling so miserable I just wanted to curl up and die. I tried to survive on methadone. Which is meant to be safer, better, legal, more respectable ... but misery on heroin translated to suicidal depression on methadone. I found it even HARDER to function in any meaningful way... methadone just didn't seem to work and I seem to have rewound back to that time. Now my worker is trying to tell me that if I will only stick with it and not use on top of the methadone then these feelings will eventually even out. I think this is based partly on the belief that any depression I feel is assumed to be "underlying". But what if methadone is actually CAUSING this low mood? Or making it even worse than it would be on no drugs at all? I've tried to moot this point so many times down the clinic and nobody ever listened. Until yesterday when I used the word POISONED. And her smartarse response was "well if you think methadone is poisoning you you could always go and detox". But as I pointed out, detoxing is sure to make a depressed person feel EVEN WORSE. That's why I don't do it. I've come down from over 120mg methadone a day right down to 15mg... lately I've gone back up to 30mg. I took the 120-15mg reduction better than anybody I know. So I do have some wherewithall. They might not be able to stick to a drawn-out reduction like that, but I cannot handle a 10-day complete detox. I just can't. (If you call not sleeping at all for days on end and wandering about crying, not being able to eat (because appetite-loss aside, food is repulsive to me in the detox state) plus intense mood swings and suicidal impulses being fine then yes I handle it well. I tried inpatient detox TWICE in 2003 and probably monopolized as much of the counsellors' time as all the other inmates put together. Neither time I lasted more than a few days. I'm just not interested in a quick-fix which is going to be very upsetting and probably not last.

My philosophy is that if I can stick to methadone, reducing very gradually "in the community" then I am to all intents and purposes living life "clean". Then, providing it's handled carefully, the transition from 5mg methadone to nothing will not be a jolt (I will make sure of this by reducing something like 5-4-3-2-1-0.9-0.8-0.7mg and so on down to zero).

I felt so lousy last week that I basically lost all willingness to live without drugs at all. I only held out so long without using because I couldn't afford to use. But now I've got my mojo back (temporarily) and I know it is just the heroin because I'm still depressed. Binky thinks I look depressed. I'm just not so depressed I spend all day vegetating on my new couch. (In that state, Binky would never get to see me.)

I do so much want to be able to live free of ALL drugs. I do. I do. I really do. I just don't know HOW I'm going to do this. It's a hard nut to crack. All I do know is that in my case gently does it. Drastic changes tend to provoke drastic reactions. I'm going into the clinic again tomorrow for my MBT group ("mentalization-based therapy") so I can see my worker then, if I want to. I'm going to make sure I'm at least 24 hours heroin-free and hopefully suitably miserable. So then she'll see what I've been like lately. (I dare not hope for any rapid improvement in mood. It just won't happen...)

My poor Worker. I do feel sorry for her. She cannot have known what she was taking on when she took me and she finds me really hard work. She said I was verbally "belligerent" yesterday. Well of course I was. Days on end of stygian misery coupled with anger and then a drug that puts some fight back into my veins will probably come over as "belligerent". Without the drug I wouldn't have said half the things I said yesterday. Misery does not justify itself. It devalues its own experience and devalidates it, telling me that, no matter how bad I feel it somehow isn't real or doesn't count or it's just an excuse. You can't win against an attitude like that... (And how DO you win a war against yourself anyhow~??!?)

So... I don't know. Don't be surprised if I'm posting "I'm miserable" within a very few days. My focus right now isn't on how good or bad I feel. Or might feel. Or anything like that. It's that I really need to convert using heroin about one day in four to ... well, hopefully one day in never. I don't want to be using it. I'm bored of it. I tried the junkie life and it's far too narrow an existence for me. This world might seem hopelessly dark, (sometimes) but it is WIDE... and maybe if I move to pastures new, geographical, spiritual, emotional and psychological I will find something that makes this world not seem so dark and meaningless. If I don't seek I never shall find and I'm a born scavenger. (Sometimes the seeking is half the fun...)

I always told myself that after achieving 100% abstinence from narcotics of all kinds I should give myself two years ~ that means two years of really trying. Just not taking any more drugs is NOT enough... and THEN maybe I can dare to look back and see if it's all been worthwhile... Know what I mean?

Does this make any sense..? Anyone...?...??

Still deaf... and a post on drugs, addiction, heroin, crack and mephedrone (meow meow), psychosis, depression, bipolar and other aspects of post-addiction mental health ...

THE "MENTAL" SECTION starts after the ***asterisks***...


BECAUSE of my infected ear and continuing deafness, I have made a second doctor's appointment on Friday. Thursday was out becauseI've a hospital appointment with the Consultant who will hopefully explain to me why I am growing a left breast and turning into a woman. I found out last week that my regular GP is still in training. She told me my eardrum is most definitely not ruptured, but seemed surprised that I was not in pain due to the extent of the infection. My hearing in that ear is very muffled. I have tinnitus loud enough to hear when I'm out and about during the day ~ above the traffic and even above the hubbub of screaming little brats and foreign students who come into the library for the free internet. I remember a time when the only type of communication permitted in such places was stage-whispering and even then one was liable to being sternly shushed. I have to say, I find whispers ten times more annoying than murmured conversation. Neither of which I would probably be able to follow in my current state of decrepitude. I dropped the wallet containing all my plastic cards today and didn't notice. Thankfullly I found them all scattered across the floor in my doorway. Had I dropped them out of doors I wouldn't have had a clue. I definitely need this ear treated. The warning noticed on the products I have been using are doing my head in. Otex (peroxide drops) for breaking down my ear wax are not to be used in cases of ear infection, which stressed me because although I felt no pain, I did suspect an infection, but had no way of confirming whether or not this was the case. Gut feeling said I was infected, and the doctor of course confirmed this. The present antibiotic spray insists it is not to be used in cases of perforated eardrum, which the doctor says I haven't got, but instinct tells me I have. So I've goto to wait three days to find out whether I've been inadvertently harming myself all the more. A quick Google on the issue told me that use of the wrong spray can actually cause nerve damage! The doctor's first choice wasn't even available and won't be stocked anywhere for at least two weeks. The dark side is telling me I won't ever get my old hearing back, so I might as well learn to live with dropping crucial possessions, mishearing and not hearing, and the sensation that half my head is stuffed up with damp and putrefying worm-wriggling cotton wool.

 Even if the infection does miraculously clear by Friday, I'm afraid the deafness won't. I'm wondering when it ever will.

 A drug-dealer called about an hour ago. When I said I didn't want his wares I'm sure he called me the c-word before hanging up. But even in my good ear, my hearing is so bad, I'll never know ...

Instead of wasting another £20 with him, I went round Morrisons for stuffed pasta and cheese, cod in parsley sauce with finely chopped broccoli, chicken saag (that's Hindi for spinach) masala and naan bread, Heinz baked beans and baby Hovis wholemeal bread and cloudy lemonade (contains acesulfame K and aspartame on top of sugar, but barely any soft drinks I know don't...) and so on and so on. Two full-to-the-brim carrier bags for £21.50.

Then into the library and a perusal of Christopher Ciccone's Life with My Sister Madonna, a memoir of unmatched bitterness. Starting off as her backing dancer, then "dresser", a job he says entailed little more than picking her sweat-drenched underwear off the floor, he went on to design interiors for her multiple homes and to help plan her world tours. The book is a catalogue of Madonna's inconsiderate behaviour. The biggest irony is that her marriage to the British film director, Guy Richie, that put the biggest wedge in their relationship, was all but over by the time this book was published. he took the money ~ and surely it was a six-figure sum ~ and any chance of a reconciliation with his sister was permanently scuppered.

This gradual methadone detox of mine ~ five days ago I dropped from 25mg a day to 20 ~ is going too fast. I have constant indistinct cravings for heroin and, contrary to my resolution, have used it after the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, twice. So I'll think back to this year as "the time I was giving up heroin", rather than the time I gave it up. Ho-hum...

I know I cannot use on top of such a tiny script . Any use of heroin now is helping me mess things up royally. I can't get my head round the fact that I can never take that crap ever again. True, I'm falling out of love with the "B", as we call it here, more and more as the weeks sail by ~ but the relationship is never over. Long ago I got my head around the fact that "your last hit is the one you never take" ~ meaning that for the rest of my life, heroin shall probably remain in the category of Unfinished Business ...







*******
Then again, I have an enormous collection of drugs relegated to the trashcan of times past: Ecstasy, magic mushrooms, ketamine, crack ... every mindbending substance in fact, bar heroin. Actually, if the druggiepixie could magic them into my hand, none of these substances, with the possible exception of crack, because I only gave up regular use three years ago, and because most of the dealers sell crack as well as heroin and because most hard drug addicts in this country are actually more into crack than heroin, if the truth be told... none of the old drugs are any temptation any more. The last time I took anything remotely like them was when a heavily personality-disordered acquaintance [he had borderline personality disorder] sorted me out a free sample of some candy-odoured white powder he declared to be a "legal high". If it's legal it can't be any good, I opined. Oh, this is great stuff, he assured me. But he was very vague when I tried to find out what it was called. it's like E and coke without any comedown, was as much as he would say. Thee-and-a-half minutes after snorting a weighed fifth of a gram in two nose-burning lines, I was already high with a euphoria that climbed and climbed for another twenty minutes, plateauing out for three hours, then gradually diminishing to leave my feet back on the ground. it was like Ecstasy, except with a real kick to it that MDMA lacks. Incidentally, it's this quick kick that tends to make drugs more addictive. I felt weird for days afterwards. Then I found out it had been 4-methylmethcathinone ~ mephedrone, which is a chemical cousin of the intoxicant in the Somali chewing leaves known as qat (or khat) ~ hence the media-invented street name "meow". Mephedrone was banned by the British government in April 2010 ~ too late for the man who had supplied me. Trapped in a cycle of escalating compulsive self-administration, he'd developed a florid paranoid psychosis. Allowed out of the psychiatric ward for "a walk", he'd ended up at the King's Cross tube station where, following a suicidal impulse, he flung himself in front of an underground train and died. Crippled by loneliness and a dearth of mephedrone following the ban that April, his best friend (my friend "Perky") who had a history of speed psychosis and post-opiate withdrawal depressive psychosis, locked herself away and took all the psychiatric medication and all the methadone she could get her hands on, all at once. And she was found dead in her room.

That's two people I know who were killed by a "harmless legal high". Just knowing that has been the final nail in the coffin of my Chemical Mystic Years. It's no coincidence that I think that if anything kindled the full-on psychotic episodes I had last year, it was the psychedelic and Ecstasy-type drugs with which I experimented in my 20s that caused the damage ~ not the heroin and crack to which I was addicted in my 30s. I believe the psychological damage caused by heroin takes the form of an acquired weakness. Just as a healthy person who confines themself to a wheelchair for ten years will gradually waste away, eventually becoming unable to walk; so a person who relies on heroin to survive life will become psychically vulnerable, so that predisposed individuals put themselves at risk of psychotic episodes in the months after heroin and/or methadone detox. I went psychotic after the switch from heroin to methadone (proof, if any more were required, that methadone is no true substitute for heroin). My late friend Perky, spiralled down into psychotic depression after giving up the methadone ~ several years before she finally killed herself, having relapsed and  ended up on methadone yet again. I've haerd of a lot of people who developed psychotic illness after coming off opiates. This seems to be because bipolar disorder and schizophrenia tend to first become manifest in the late teens and early adulthood ~ precisely the same time a person is most likely to incline towards drug-experimentation. Opiates do seem to have some antipsychotic effect [see links below], meaning that in vulnerable people, the mental condition can remain masked for as long as opiate addiction continues. When the opiates are withdrawn, the severe mental illness ~ which was always there in the background ~ comes blazing to the fore, giving the impression that heroin or methadone caused this illness, when in actuality they held it back for many years.

Many of the life stories I've heard in NA talk about severe mood swings in the first few months lived "clean". But this doesn't mean every newly detoxed addict is "bipolar". Classic full-blown type 1 bipolar disorders involves swings from clinical depression, where appetite and sleep are markedly affected ~ not just mood ~ to clinical mania, which usually has psychotic features along with the other hallmark symptoms such as severely racing thoughts, extreme distractibility, physical agitation and/or hyperactivity (which means it's practically impossible to do a 90-minute NA meeting without constantly going outside to pace back and forth and smoke cigarettes) accompanied by great garrulousness, grandiosity and/or paranoia and a marked decrease in the need for sleep, so that many manic people can go for days on end with no sleep at all. A truly manic person is very obviously "high" and/or extremely agitated and irritable. If you turn up to an NA meeting in such a state, people will naturally assume you're on something. They certainly did with me much to my vexation!

There is a less extreme form of bipolar, known as type 2, where the patient never develops full-blown mania but instead has episodes of milder hypomania, as well as clinical depression. This is the fashionable type of bipolar disorder that celebrities like Catherine Zeta Jones go down with. It never involves psychotic episodes and, in America at least, is often diagnosed retrospectively, without the doctor actually witnessing the patient in a hypomanic state. It is this type of bipolar disorder that many critics suspect is being overdiagnosed.

Bipolar ii is still far more severe than the mood swings experienced by the average recovering addict. Many addicts, in my experience, do suffer from "emotional problems" which are frequently both the cause and effect of their addiction. When these problems are extreme enough to warrant psychiatric attention, they tend to take the form of anxiety and depression, not psychosis. In fact, anxiety and depression, with a touch of obsessive-compulsive behaviour, is what I suffered from in the early years. I've always been prone to paranoia, too. Of course cannabis-smoking never helped there. I only smoke ordinary cigarettes today since I got addicted to the tobacco component in spliffs ...

Is it true, by the way, that Americans roll their joints with marijuana only? Wouldn't this blow your head off? I remember finding a big bag of weed in a nightclub. It happened to be lying next to the Aphex Twin, Richard James, who was DJing that night. I told my friend Tommy Tired "I've got the Aphex Twin's grass!" Of course I don't know it was his, or even whether the Aphex Twin has ever been into grass. Suffice it so say that Tommy, a heavy smoker, had run out of fags. So we went for a walk from Hoxton through the City of London (the financial district), puffing on incredibly potent skunk-only spliffs. I was so stoned I heard my most private thoughts reflected and echoed off the great glass panes of the empty office buildings. We got so "mislaid" it took hours to get home. that was the last bag of grass I ever owned, and that was back in 1996 or 1997. I'd already given up smoking cannabis on anything like a regular basis back in 1993.

Well, well, this has been a long post. If anyone happens to stumble across me at random, I'd love to hear from you. Please comment, even if just to say hi. You don't need to log in to comment; you can just click the name/url option, or go anonymous... Take care everyone.

And if anyone does know about ear infections, please tell ~ how long do they usually take to clear up? I haven't had one since the early 90s, and have no idea...

Heroin, Methadone and other Opiates as Antipsychotics LINKS:~

Methadone reduces the need for antipsychotic and antimanic agents in heroin addicts hospitalized for manic and/or acute psychotic episodes

Methadone and opiate drugs: psychotropic effect and self-medication

Morphine as an antipsychotic







*******

MUSIC:


DJ SAMMY: HEAVEN, STEVEN FOSTER MIX
This is quite a nice bit of trance...

GRACE: NOT OVER YET, TRANCE MIX

I Must Give Up

I HAVE to give up drinking ~ yet again. Most day in the past week it had gone up to 3 half-litre cans of white cyder 7.5%ABV. That's 11.25 alcoholic units (112.5mls neat alcohol) per day. The days I didn't drink 3 cans, I drank 2. Today I've had one, and I'm leaving it at that. Three cans of that cyder amount to approximately 1050 Calories. That's way too much.

Last night  dreamt I was in my friend Rebsie's dank and derelict house. Possessions were strewn everywhere, or packed into boxes. Rebs is in rehab still, coming off a 30 year plus drink and heroin addiction. In the dream our other friend, Mother Hubbs was in the house, helping to pack up. In real life Hubbs is clean and thin enough to be unrecognizable.

Whereas I was once the one leading the way ~ the only person I knew even to have been to an NA meeting outside prison or rehab; and the only person who thought he wanted to stop, even if my outlook was delusional. Now only one of my old group of friends uses heroin ~ and that's only once a month. I know one other person who takes heroin every week and somehow seems not to be physically dependent. That person is the exception to numerous rules.

But anyway, they've all left me behind.

And here I am, trailing in the dust.





 OT QUARTET: HOLD THAT SUCKER DOWN 
BUILDS LIKE A SKYSCRAPER MIX

Old Mother Hubbard Came Out Of The Cupboard

YESTERDAY, quite by chance, I bumped into an old friend of mine ~ in fact, I considered her an ex-friend; now I'm not so sure. On my old blog I always clled her Mother Hubbard because she is a generation older than me and used to wash my clothes and feed me. At one point I was barely eating anything. So she did me a lot of favours, which I wasn't quite as grateful for at the time as I probably should have been.

I didn't even recognize her! I myself had calculated that she was drinking so much in alcohol back in the day that Calorie-wise at least, she didn't need to eat. She's lost FIVE STONE ~ that's 70lbs, 32kg. She came off all the heroin. Reduced the methadone to zero "in the community" ~ so at least I now know somebody who has achieved that feat. Most people seem to need a detox unit to come off it. What I have against detox units is that you usually have to clean up entirely in 10 days. That's far too quick for me. The quicker the detox, the bigger the jolt. Jolts and me do not mix. If they don't make me manic, they're almost guaranteed to make me depressed.

Mother Hubbs said she had bipolar problems earlier in life and for years used heroin knowingly as an alternative to lithium ~ and it worked for her! Just like it worked for me. Flattened the mood very noticably. (Of course it made both of us raving addicts, but...) That's why I'm not surprised that the end of my years of using heroin on a near-daily basis coincided with a manic-depressive (I was both) schizoaffective psychotic episode. I don't know whether she's on psyche meds now because I avoided that topic. In fact I said as little about my self as possible.

So she lost five stone, came off heroin, methadone, alcohol and cigarettes, looks unrecognizable with her dead straight white hair that looks professionally done. She is the only person I know who looks truly happy.

Our mutual friend Rebsie, who had a 30 year plus heroin-methadone-drink habit is still in rehab miles away. Rebsie's teenage daughter is living with Hubbs on a permanent basis...

I know someone who is happy ~ wow!













PS Syd brought up this issue in a comment on my methadone, heroin and mood swings post... for anyone who really is interested re psychosis and drugs, here's a digest of the available information. I long ago stopped trying to blame my problems on drugs. Partly because I went ON them because I already was depressed and because when I looked into drug psychosis after I became psychotic, it became apparent I didn't fit the clinical criteria for substance-induced psychotic disorders or substance-induced mood disorders. Anyway the link is here...

Rehab

I HAVE FINALLY DECIDED TO ENTER A PROFESSIONAL DETOX UNIT to come off the remainder of my opiate habit. This should happen in 4-6 weeks. My prescribed methadone is at a flat 30mg daily (no longer tipping down on a 2-weekly basis) but I'm using a good 10-15mg (bought on the street) on top of that. Reason being I used heroin every day for over a month, giving myself a double habit that I now have to wean myself off. I didn't DARE tell the clinic about this. I trust them little enough as it is. All I'm doing is pouring out that extra juice in the early hours, and making sure I pour out less and less each day. Until eventually I'll be back to that flat 30mg. I cannot WAIT to get off this noxious gloopy crap as quickly as possible. Originally I wanted a "community" detox because I felt the longterm gradual reduction would suit me better. But what it's actually turning into is a type of ultra slow low-grade torture. I'd rather do 10 days of hell in the unit and come out squeaky clean than weeks and weeks of semi-suffering. My biggest problem previous attempts at rehab was that I didn't sleep AT ALL. Everyone claims not to sleep in rehab. Well I can tell you, they did. Because I stayed up all night watching them doing it. I was lonely and suicidal and couldn't even talk to the night staff, because the night staff had been working all day and needed the sofa to sleep on.

The difference this time is in the wonders of Seroquel (quetiapine) which I'm currently not taking because it didn't make me any less moody, didn't stop me hearing "voices" (which were mostly nonsense syllables and echoes; I only hear crystal clear voices when I'm ravingly psychotic) and basically made me ridiculously tired all the time, despite the fact that I took the entire dose at night. Well the advantage of Seroquel is it does make you sleep exceptionally long and deeply. So I've decided to stay off it until the day I go in (when you have to declare any outside medications you're on). Then I'll go back on the full dose, which should knock me sideways. Meaning I might, if I'm lucky, sleep like a baby throughout this entire nightmare they call "detoxification". My worker told me the entire thing should be over in ten days. Ten days to freedom! Imagine that!! I can't wait. I now have as full a plot as one can ever hope for in advance for the KIDDIES' BOOK I'm going to write. Because it's an animal story it really has to be for the 6-10 year old range, though it will be a proper novel, not a picture book. Novels in this category rarely exceed 15-20,000 words so I should be able to produce a workable first draft within a month. If only I can sit down, focus and WRITE THE DAMN THING. I know from past experience that self-discipline and routine are the key to producing any manuscript. Not inspiration. Inspiration is what you need to get yourself going. Discipline keeps you going. Currently I have the inspiration. In fact, I'm on a high. I'm planning my story to be one of a set of at least three, because children like serial characters. Of course if I could I'd write 20 or more books in the same series, but I'm planning on producing three in a row. That's only about 45,000 words, about HALF the length of an entire adult novel! I can't tell you what my tale is about. Except that it's going to be brilliant. (But of course.) I've been reading Michael Jackson: The Magic, The Madness, The Whole Story by J Randy Taraborrelli. I love Michael Jackson. For years he has inspired me to greatness. Perhaps some of that magic will rub off on my book? I hope so.

Oh and my friend Paddy Paddster gave me his Webster's. For over five years I have been dictionary-less after my old landlord threw half my possessions on the street and my beloved Chambers got stolen. My vocabulary has suffered no end. I used rarely if ever to encounter words I didn't understand. Now I'm coming across them all the time. I know Websters is an American dictionary, but who cares? I'm pretty sure I know the differences in spelling, which for a children's author are crucial. The matrons of Middle England would never tolerate their offspring being entertained by stories printed in transatlantic prose! Oh and last but not least I stubbed my toe so badly on a metal security door that my left foot is bathed in blood, the sock stuck fast and I could barely walk. The toe isn't broken, neither is the nail, though it does feel that way. So I'm in the wars yet again. Apart from that I'm in a really good mood today. Finally and at long long last an end to my drugs nightmare might be in sight! Wow!! PS WHY DOES THE NEW BLOGGER REFUSE TO RECOGNIZE NEW PARAGRAPHS? What do I do to paragraph out my work like an ordinary person? If anyone knows the answer PLEASE LET ME KNOW..!!