Soul to Take

As humans, we learn through experience. Pain is how we know what it is like to NOT have pain. Knowing sadness, allows us to know what happiness feels like. For some, pain and sadness are too much to bear so they turn to unhealthy options to take that pain and sorrow away.

Those! are the people we pray for every day. We pray that they get clean.

That dreaded day comes when we hear that they switched from using pills to heroin. That’s when we cry ourselves to sleep (or At least I did), and we pray even harder for them to get clean.

The stories of people overdosing and dying starts hitting closer and closer to home, until it hits your home.

That’s when you’re walking into a hospital, in the ghetto of a city, to see a site that will never leave your memory. A hospital room with a body laying in a position that looks unnatural. You know and understand that they are under sedation, so you hope that they are comfortable. But to the looks of it, no one can be comfortable laying like that! Laying on their belly, head facing to the right, a tube shooting out of their skull to drain the fluid that’s on their brain, and their head is partially shaved with a clear, wet-appearing bandage on it. Their eyes are swollen and crusted over; they’re intubated, and have saliva in and around the tubes, and you can see vacancies where their teeth used to be. Their right arm is placed near their head, with bandages on what may be…..an amputated right pinky finger. Their left arm is laying down along side their body, definitely an amputated left pointer finger; Both arms are swollen like a Macy’s day balloon. The gown is half hanging open, and their back has spots of dirt for everyone to see. Both legs are swollen and with devices to help prevent clots on them, and their feet have an uncountable amount of slow-healing needle holes and bandages on both heels.

It’s a site no one should ever see. A body that is almost lifeless, that has not been seen or heard from in months or years. The last time you saw them, they looked semi healthy. Possibly stoned, but healthy to say the least. So this body that lays in front of you, being kept alive by machines…..is far from what you remember. It’s a shock to the system! One that turns your heart and your stomach all at once. This is what addiction does.

It brings about euphoria to the person using, but it slowly steals their soul until one day, it steals it for good. You want to be mad at them because it originally was their choice, but eventually it was no longer a choice. Eventually their body was soo dependent on the drugs, that if they quit cold turkey they could suffer a seizure or die, and that fear prevents them from going to detox, so they use to stay alive. Only, it’s not a life worth living, it’s a life they continue to have because it’s the only one they can have after selling their soul.

There are options, you can get help. There are links at the bottom of places that can help you live a life worth living.

https://recoverycentersofamerica.com/lp/bbh/inpatient/?invsrc=MD_BBH_Addiction-Misc_BMM&utm_medium=c https://www.cityofangelsnj.org/