I was chatting with an old friend online the other day. Like a few of my friends, he had been following my blog on facebook and so was aware of my current plight. What he didn’t know about until he’d read my blog; was that I had experimented with drugs during my late teens and early twenties and that that was the probable cause of my contracting Hep C.
He’d sent me a message asking how I was doing and when I thought that I might get a transplant, that kind of thing. I had given my usual answers as by now I’m used to this line of questioning. He then took me by surprise and said “You know Ian; I had no idea you were so bad when you were younger”. It knocked me ‘off-cock’ as I thought about that for a moment. I remember thinking ‘oh my God, is that what he thinks?’ Suddenly I wished that I’d never written so much about my past. I tried to answer with a kind of throw away comment “Oh, we all have our skeletons...” He replied “Jesus, Skeletons... You’ve got the whole bloody graveyard in there!”
He was making light of it, but I think when he probably read about my former life it would certainly come as somewhat of a shock to him. My friend had never been into drugs and I dare say that the nearest he’d ever been to them was kicking some kids out of his pub for smoking ‘wacky backy’. I suppose it made him sit up and think about how someone he knew so well had had any kind of drug-taking history.
Comparatively, my drug taking years was short lived however they were fairly intense. And during this time I would never have considered myself to be a
‘bad’ person, young and foolish maybe but never
‘bad’. Many people who start taking drugs and then get into the whole drug scene find that they then spend half their life trying to free themselves of the affliction. I on the other hand realised fairly early on that the life of a junkie was not for me.
OK, before I go any further, I want to apologise in advance to anyone who knows me. What I’m about to tell you will probably shock some people and it will probably be embarrassing for my family. Not that my upbringing had any bearing on what happened during my formative years. But what I’m going to tell you is just how it happened. So to all of those people who can’t handle this; stop reading now.
OK, if you’re still with me, let me tell you this story begins and ends quite well. It’s the bit in the middle that goes a bit ‘off-kilter’, my ‘formative years’.
My childhood was very happy. I was one of five children brought up on a farm in rural Yorkshire. My Father was a farm labourer on a modest wage; we lived in a ‘tied’, drafty farmhouse. Dad worked God knows how many hours to scratch us a living. My Mum stayed at home and cooked and cleaned and worked her fingers to the bone to bring up five children; four brothers and a youngest sister, in a strong and loving family environment.
I was born slap bang in the middle of the family unit and some of my very old friends teased me by calling me
‘the runt of the litter’. This was mainly on account of my brothers and sister was strong, healthy ‘farming-stock’, and I was just not! It did't bother me none, and as the saying goes “...but we were happy”, and we really were!
And so, being raised in this agricultural environment, you can imagine how it was when I told my family after appearing in a couple of small bit-parts in the school play; that I wanted to go to Drama School! I’ll never forget that look of “Oh my God, he’s a puff!” which, let me clear this up here and now, I am not. Not that I’m homophobic or prejudice in any way, I’m just ‘not’. I will say though, that for some bizarre and unbeknown reason to me and considering we are all very much ‘cast from the same mould’; I am in many ways very different from my siblings.
However, my family never faltered and supported me whole heartedly, and so off I went. As I said earlier, I was young and foolish, never bad but full of ideals and eager to meet the world outside of my safe rural family background.
My naiveté and my keen desire to try absolutely everything soon led me astray and within a few short years, drugs had got the better of me. It’s a long story but before you could say ‘jumping jack flash’, I was drug dependant.
My ‘experimenting had closed in on me and eventually I became addicted to Heroin and worse still, I was injecting. I was like this for two or three years, but before that I was into just about anything I could lay my hands on, as well as I had what they call ‘needle-fever’; I would ‘whack’ up anything if I thought it would get me off my tree!
But after a couple of Methadone scripts that failed, a couple of close mates who O.D’eed and a shit-load of dirty hits, I decided to get out and go and see some mates who'd gone to live in Chamonix, France. I had no money so I hitched to Dover, got on the Ferry and then 'jumped' the trains all the way there.
When I got there I'd done all my gear in, (in case I had to share it) and my friends, who were living in a Swiss style cuckoo clock chalet, locked me in a room with the shutters closed. They then left me to go 'cold turkey'. It damn near killed me but eventually, with them feeding me soup or cereal, I emerged 'clean'.
My head was ‘f**ked’ and I would say it took about a year before I stopped getting 'flashbacks', as my conscience re-installed itself, but I was determined never to go back.
- It was seven years before I dare go back to England and that was with my girlfriend (now my wife) and I still don't go back to my hometown unless I absolutely have to, twenty-five years on. I'm fine now considering but I did get depressed for a long time but eventually I rebuilt my life.
I got a job in a restaurant in France, I learnt to cook, which seemed to come quite naturally too me, and I learnt the language which did not! I honed my cooking skills in France and worked my way up to Head Chef; that was quite cool for a
'Rosbif en France’!
Then when I came back to England with Mandy, we got jobs in two local pubs in Nottingham and after several years, we were managing our own. Eventually we got sick of doing all the hard work for somebody else to take all the profit and so, with the help of Mandy’s mum, Anne, we sold our houses and bought our own pub. Nearly ten years later, we had three! I’d dug myself out of a hole and built a new life for myself and I was damn proud of that.
Then, January 2nd a couple of years ago, I got sick. I dashed to our toilet and started vomiting blood, bloody loads of it, I managed to call my wife and she and her mum dashed into the toilet. I'll never forget the look on their face as they saw me with blood everywhere, all down my face and chin and spewing out of my mouth. It was fare to say that the Hep C virus had had enough of being quiet all those years and I think we all thought I was going to die right there and then.
I was diagnosed with HCV, geno type 1a. The rest is history but after a biopsy it was clear that the only treatment available was a liver transplant and so eventually I've qualified and I am now on the transplant waiting list at St. Jimmy's in Leeds.
OK, pause for a moment, becuse here comes the real tragedy,
If we as a society would decriminalise and accept all drugs and our ‘need’ to sometimes use them, whether it’s alcohol, tobacco, dope or heroin. If we stop this crazy classification of them and accept that if heroin is class A then alcohol is A+. If we stop wasting money driving drugs underground so that drug dealers get richer and untouchable whilst drug users keep getting ill and clogging up our prisons. If our politicians can stop manipulating statics so that they can use hollow cliché’s like “the war on drugs” - which we all know has already been fought and lost. If we can do all this and use the proceeds to better educate and support anybody, drug user or alcoholic or even a naive farm boy, from getting into trouble, then maybe it would stop stories like mine from happening.
I have learnt so much about addiction over the years, from my own experiences and from my time in the bars and restaurants that I have worked in. And of late I have had more time than most to contemplate the answer to it. It riles me to think about it – not just that my story could have been so different if we stopped this madness, but it’s the futility of what we’re doing. I know that making a decision like this would not come without pain, that's why our ‘leaders’ would never do it. They would rather manipulate the stats instead of actually doing anything.
But I truly believe that if we just had the stomach to do this, it would empower us to tackle the real war which is addiction and ultimately our own health. Well, that’s my theory anyway, you can take it or leave it but you can’t deny that we’re not winning the way things are, and it will keep getting worse. And if we do something about it then you wouldn’t have to listen to me ‘carping on’ all the bloody time!
Keep well everyone.... Ian
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