It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [97]
Landing in the Northwest Hospital that day didn’t surprise me. In fact, the surprise was that I was alive at all in May of 1994. I had long thought I would die by the age of thirty—and I had just reached that milestone in February of that year.
You knew this was coming, I thought.
All you ever wanted to do was leave your mark on the world.
Get in, get out.
You’ve done that.
I figured as part of Guns, I’d left a big mark.
What else do you have left to live for anyway?
Then Dr. Thomas suddenly said, “Hang on a minute.”
My pancreas had expanded and then burst. But now it was starting to contract again. Once the expansion stopped and the blood started to coagulate, they decided not to perform surgery after all. I just might be able to survive with my organ intact—no dialysis necessary. Instead of wheeling me down to an operating room, they continued to monitor me in an intensive care unit.
They put me on really high doses of morphine and Librium. At first I had buttons to push to self-administer them. For the first two days, it was constant. Pushing the button, pushing the button. Then, at some point on the third day, I realized, Wow, I didn’t push the buttons as many times this hour. By the sixth day, they took the buttons away from me—because I was a full-on junkie. They switched me to drip doses.
I started to have withdrawal from the morphine.
I’ll never forget when my mom came to the hospital to see me. She was in a wheelchair, from Parkinson’s disease. There I was, her youngest son, with a morphine drip in my left arm and a Librium drip in the other arm for the shakes from alcohol withdrawal.
I saw myself in the hospital bed with tubes in my body and her in the wheelchair.
The order isn’t right here—I should be taking care of her. It’s not right.
You’re a fuckup.
You’re a fuckup.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The old adage about addiction is that the first thing you have to do is to admit you have a problem. In my case, I already knew I had a problem; the key for me was admitting how selfish I was being. Look, you’re hurting your mom.
I didn’t know whether I would survive during those first few days in the hospital, but I felt strongly that if I did live, I would be prepared to change. When I was released from the hospital, Dr. Thomas asked me to come talk to him in a consultation room.
“I’ve arranged for you to enter a drug and alcohol rehab facility near Olympia,” he said. “We can transport you directly there.”
I thanked him for all his help.
“I think I can do it on my own,” I told him.
I saw the look in his eyes change. Instead of expressing a helpful glint, they now betrayed skepticism hardened by experience. Frustration crept into his tone.
“Duff, if you have one more drink you will die.”
I thanked him again. “Two weeks alone here in the hospital has done as much for me as any rehab could possibly do.”
I believed that. The mental work had started as soon as I saw my mom in her wheelchair forced to tend to me, to worry about me—anxious she might have to grieve for me. I was done. Now that I had been granted this reprieve, it was time to turn my shit around.
When I got to my house, my yellow lab, Chloe, was waiting faithfully at the front door, just as she always had been whenever I came home between tour legs. I had brought her with me when I flew up from L.A. and Andy had taken care of her while I was in the hospital. Chloe seemed to sense my fragility; she stuck close to me at all times and nuzzled me even more than usual.
Thanks to the Librium, it had been a kind withdrawal from alcohol—at least while I was in the hospital. They juiced me pretty good in there. When they sent me home, they gave me a two-week supply of Librium pills. And there was a prescription—you know, take two pills six times a day, then two pills five times a day, and so forth, with the number of pills diminishing each day.