My mom took lots of drugs while I was growing up. Not street drugs....prescription drugs. It tripped me out how she would tell me over and over not to do drugs. Don't drink, don't smoke, don't do drugs. My mother was a chain smoker but her reasoning for smoking was that when she started smoking........they didn't know it was bad for you....so somehow that made it okay. And her pill popping......well, these pills were prescribed.
She would go to a doctor for her nerves and he would subscribe her valium, etc. After a while, the doctor would figure out that she was addicted so he would stop the prescription. Mom would move on to another doctor. After years of this, she even had to go to different towns because she ran out of doctors in my home town. It got to a point where she didn't even call the pills by their names. It was the blue pill, the pink pill, the green pill, etc. Though my mother would never admit it (and for that matter, dad would never admit it either) she had mental problems. She would go to a doctor for her nerves until the doctor started talking about antidepressants, etc. and at that point, she would switch doctors. This was a cycle that went on for years. And as the years went by, her mental problems got worse.
You know when you get a prescription filled and they give you that sheet with all the side effects? Well, she would start saying she was having all these side effects. Several years after I moved to Little Rock, I got a call from my mom. She said that she had been taking this particular prescription until she saw one day on Oprah Winfrey that if you took this medication.....you would hear animals. She said she immediately went off the medication for several weeks but she said that one day she just really needed it so she took one of them. She said she "heard ducks quacking for a solid hour". HOLY COW....I mean.....ducks!
No comments:
Post a Comment