Free Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict by Joshua Lyon

of weight,” she says. “I had no appetite because of them and I lost about fifty pounds. For the first time in my entire life, I was skinny.”
    When Heather’s lung was finally able to function properly on its own without the chest tube, she was psyched to get home and show off her new body. She also wanted to know what she was going to get to bring home with her. “It was the first time in my life when I hadthis fear that my drugs were being taken away from me, but I didn’t recognize that I needed them. My mother had been tripping out that I’d been on so many painkillers to begin with, what with our family’s history. Once I was home she said I could have Tylenol or Advil, but that was it. And I just knew that wasn’t going to do it.”
    After Heather got home from the hospital, she fell into a deep depression. “I was detoxing from all the medicine I’d been given and I still had no job. I had quit smoking because I was terrified my lung was going to collapse again. I felt awful. Plus my anxiety came back, which really sucked because all the drugs in the hospital had quelled it while I was in there. So I started going out and drinking every night.”
    This self-medicating solution got Heather through the next few years, but in 2003, her panic attacks returned worse than ever, despite (or because of) getting engaged and scoring a great job as the national sales manager at Fresh, a major, high-end skin and body care company. “I was responsible for four hundred employees in thirty states and trying to plan my wedding at the same time, and I started having a nervous breakdown.”
    Heather, who now finally had great health insurance through her job, had been on Celexa, an antidepressant, for some time, but felt it did nothing for her panic attacks. A childhood friend named Tracy had the answer. “Go see my doctor,” she said. “He’s Dr. Feelgood. He’ll give you whatever you want. Ask for Xanax. It’ll calm you down and you’ll feel so much better.”
    Xanax (alprazolam) is a benzodiazepine prescribed for the management of generalized anxiety disorder, anxiety associated with depression, short-term relief of symptoms of anxiety, and panic disorder. It can also be very addictive. Some people respond really well to it for panic attacks.
    At first Heather avoided calling Tracy’s doctor. “I was freaked out by the idea. For some reason I was a little scared of him.” But a week before her wedding she put her back out. “I was literally walking like a hunchback and I had an event the next day that I had to look great and feel great for. So I went to see Dr. Feelgood. He gave me Xanax for stress and Vicodin for pain, and the combination wasjust magic. My anxiety was gone, the pain was gone, and everything felt awesome. I felt like I could do everything. I needed less sleep, I didn’t need to eat, which was great for helping me get into my wedding dress. And I had more personality. Normally, I’m kind of a shy person. I’d think to myself, ‘That person wouldn’t want to talk to me anyway. I’m not going to bother.’ Suddenly, I didn’t care. I felt cuter, smarter, and funnier and I could talk to anyone. The night before my wedding, I had all my girls and my gays in a hotel room, and I just handed out Xanax and Vicodin left and right along with the champagne. It was a total pill-popping party.”
    At that point, Heather still had enough self-control not to take any pills on the actual day of her wedding. “I remember thinking, ‘It’s my wedding day and I want to be clearheaded.’”
    After the wedding, Heather continued on her normally prescribed dosages, but after only a month or two she noticed that one of each pill wasn’t working, so she began to take more. “That freaked me out a little. I hadn’t really ever been abusing the pills before, except maybe the night before my wedding. So I let my prescriptions run out. And I woke up feeling like I had the flu. These were totally normal