December 21: Broke My Jaw, but not My Habits

I've had better looks.

All of us have heard that drugs come with consequences. Many of us choose to ignore those consequences, however, because they often lie far in the future and we can totally quit before that happens, right? Well, one of my habits gave me a consequence that I would have never seen coming: a broken jaw. Many of you have heard that this happened to me, some of you know how it happened, and even fewer know the real story. In the spirit of honesty and self-reflection, I am going to detail the entire account to the best of my abilities, and explain the repurcussions of this incident, and the surprising lack of change that followed it.

It was a typical day in the summer of this past year, around early-August. I was hanging out with friends, and a drug got brought into question for consumption: mushrooms. For those of you who aren't familiar with what type of mushrooms I am referring to, and how they would ever cause me to smash my face in, you can read up on them here. I agreed to take a good amount of the mushrooms (about 2-3 times the "recommended" amount, as it turns out), and thought nothing of it having expirimented with them before. 30-45 minutes later I found myself in Drake Park, where we had re-located in the hopes of seeing some "super trippy shit". Well, I did indeed see some "trippy shit", but something felt wrong. The effects of the mushrooms had risen far past the peak that I had felt in earlier experiences. As my visual hallucinations grew more vivid, my mind began to lose touch. My sentences became scrambled, and my body movements became staggered and uncontrollable. I saw shades of pink in the grass, and the trees vibrated as if consumed with microscopic bugs. I had to get out. As I looked to my friends, their faces twisted and contorted. I told them that I needed to sit down somewhere else. We walked downtown and found a bench. I began to wolf down cigarettes in an effort to calm my nerves. It wasn't working.

The last thing I remember happening before "the incident" is looking down at my cigarette and watching it slowly tie itself into a knot. I remember beginning to feel sick, sicker than I had ever felt in my life. Too sick to throw up, too sick to even sit straight. I stood up from the bench and told my friends that I needed to go lie down, that the mushrooms had simply become too much to handle. As I walked away from the bench, I remember the insane sensation of being pulled down to the ground. I resisted, but something overwhelming was coming over my body, making it too heavy to hold up. Everything went black.

I woke up with the sidewalk right in front of my eyes. I felt myself being pulled up as one of my friends covered for me by saying "he forgot his medication" to the small crowd of concerned onlookers. I had blacked out in the middle of walking and smashed my face into the pavement. As soon as I stood up, I felt something warm on my chin, chest, and arms. I was bleeding heavily from the bottom of my chin. I can never begin to describe the amount of panick that went through my mind at that point, and even trying to revisit that thought process makes me shiver. For 10-15 minutes, I was convinced that I was hallucinating. This was just another cruel trick that the mushrooms were playing on me. This couldn't be real. However, as my friends led me to the parking garage I began to understand that this was no mind game. My mouth was full of blood and pain, and my friends looked worried.

They began to tell me that I had just "busted my lip". Nothing was wrong, according to them, and I just needed to be taken to a friends house to get cleaned up. In my state of mind, I didn't know whether to believe them or not. I was on the hallucinogenic drugs, not them. I agreed to stay by the car while they left to discuss what to do with me. I began to ask to be taken to the hospital. I told them that I was hurt, and hurt badly. They refused. They told me that I would get into trouble, that it wouldn't be worth it. After a lengthy argument, I told them that they could simply drop me off in the hospital parking lot. I made this offer because I had begun to understand that their primary concern was for themselves, and not me.

By my best guess, I had broken my jaw at 6-6:30 on a Saturday, and I wasn't taken to the emergency room by my so-called "friends" until 8-8:30. After getting a healthy amount of stitches and an even healthier amount of morphine (lord almighty that shit was a god-send), I was told that I had broken my jaw in 3 different places. I went on to have reconstructive surgery at St. Charles Medical Center, and was released a few days later with my mouth wired shut and my chin and lip in stitches. I spent 5 weeks eating out of a straw (I lost about 30 lbs), and a good few months after that getting intensive dental work done on my wreck of a bottom row of teeth. It is now December, and my jaw is just now getting it's full range of motion back.

As scary and disturbing as this story is, my main beef with myself isn't simply that it happened. I can't go back in time and change it, as much as I wish I could. My anger towards my decision making comes into play 5 days after I broke my jaw and was smoking cigarettes again. It comes a few weeks after I broke my jaw and was smoking weed again. Had I honestly learned nothing? What else needed to happen to me before I realized that my lifestyle choices were leading me astray? This, mind you, isn't even reflection. I was angry with myself right as I was sinking back into these habits in the first place. I didn't get how I could go right back to the lifestyle that had left me battered in such a horrible way.

The reflective revelation comes when I realize that I had really left myself no other option but to go back to my habits after my injury. During the period after my surgery, I often times felt depressed, lonely, and worthless. Not many people feel the shame of being on a liquid diet, having to be nursed to health by your own mother, and knowing that you could have prevented all of it by just saying "no" to a mind altering substance. I was in one of the worst phases in my life, and I had no way out. Except drugs. I swore off the mushrooms, but I still needed relief somehow. In my state of weakness, I hardly find it surprising that I relapsed as soon as I was given a chance. With each bowl, with each line or drink, I felt relief if only for an hour or two. Hell, it was more than I was getting sober.

With this little revelation, I can finally forgive myself for not "waking up" instantly after the incident. I was weak and confused, and turned to the most solid form of relief that I knew at the time. I wish it could have happened differently, that the accident had given me some startling new take on life that caused me to clean up. However, I find solice in the fact that if I had not broken my jaw, I might have never gotten to the point I am at now. The point where I have finally begun the much needed path to sobriety.