Every once in a while, we read news accounts of people stealing legal drugs, or forging prescriptions because they are addicts. For example, in January 2002, President Bush’s niece, Jeb Bush’s daughter, Noelle, was arrested for trying to fill a false prescription for the drug Xanax, a tranquilizer. Later that same year, a bold headline on the front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer read: “Xanax case highlights a growing drug problem.” A thirteen-year-old student at a Philadelphia middle school had pillaged a bottle of anti-anxiety pills from a relative’s home and passed them to her friends, twelve of whom had to be hospitalized. Some people sell Xanax on the street for ten or fifteen dollars a pill. They call them Xannies.
I shudder when I read stories like these because I was once addicted to the prescription drug Librium. I had been having dizzy spells. My internist ordered a glucose tolerance test to see if I had drops in my blood sugar level. The results were negative. Unfortunately, no other tests were ordered. My doctor said, “Ginnie, it must be emotional.” He prescribed Librium, and the vertigo ceased.
I took the medication for years. Every time I tried to stop, I became extremely shaky, so I was advised to keep taking the drug. I didn’t know that Librium belonged to the family of drugs called benzodiazepines that included Valium, Xanax, Ativan and Klonopin. I didn’t know that at least 50 percent of the people who took a benzodiazepine drug became physically addicted to it, a more severe problem than psychological dependency. When I learned from newspaper and television reports that the benzodiazepine medications were addictive, I was horrified! I thought, “I can’t be an addict! I’m a woman of faith. Besides, God wouldn’t let that happen to me.” So, I decided to taper off the Librium over a period of several weeks—and I began a journey to hell.
I suffered from seizures. My whole body shook in uncontrollable spasms. I hallucinated. When I watched television, images jumped out at me from the screen. I experienced bouts of extreme vertigo. My room spun around. I was so dizzy I couldn’t walk around the house without holding on from one piece of furniture to another. I had insomnia. Night after night I tossed and turned until four or five in the morning for just a few hours’ sleep. My appetite was gone. When I tried to eat, the food got stuck in my throat. And the level of anxiety I experienced was horrendous. Day after day, with tears streaming down my face, I cried, “God, heal me, please.” It took a long time for Him to answer.
I went from one counselor, psychologist, and psychiatrist to another, trying to find someone who understood my problem. After all I had been told, “It must be emotional.” I finally found an astute doctor at a rehab who said, “We didn’t know until recently that people could become addicted to a prescription drug if they did not abuse it.” Gradually, my symptoms, except for mild vertigo, subsided, and I embarked on a long, arduous road to health.
My painful journey was filled with hard lessons. First, I had to learn to accept the fact that this nightmare of pill addiction and withdrawal happened to me. Whenever I pretended that it didn’t, my shattered nerves reminded me that it did, and I found that denying this experience left me angry, frustrated, and full of self-pity. I looked at other people’s lives. Many of them had greater problems than mine. I recognized that life is difficult. Bad things happen. They happen to all of us. Placing myself in the big picture of the human race with its severe challenges helped me to accept what I had considered a monumental tragedy.
Second, I learned some things about myself that I didn’t know before. I had never totally accepted myself as I was. I was never good enough. And now, I was an addict. At the beginning of my recovery, I would look at myself in the mirror. Not having the energy to fix my hair and apply makeup, I didn’t look like the person I used to be. I saw a strange disheveled woman with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. I shook my head and said, “You are an addict.” I was so ashamed.
Eventually, I realized that being an addict didn’t mean I was any less a human being. Once I viewed my experience as a medical issue rather than a shameful emotional catastrophe, I was able to focus on my worth. I wasn’t able to work during this thorny path to health, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have past accomplishments. It also didn’t mean I wouldn’t have future accomplishments. I ceased allowing this one scratch to mar what had been a beautiful gift of life.
One reason it was difficult to accept being an addict was because I was a perfectionist. Apparently, I carried over into adulthood my father’s question when I got all A’s and one B on my report card: “Why didn’t you get all A’s?” Of course, trying to be perfect was setting myself up for failure because perfection is impossible. I could never reach that goal. But, I didn’t know that then. I gradually lowered my unrealistic expectations of myself. I also became less judgmental of people who did not live up to my standards by looking at their good qualities and dismissing their imperfections.
As you can imagine, accepting my addiction was most difficult from the spiritual viewpoint. I had always striven to be a good example of a kind, proper, and righteous woman of faith. Being an addict just blew that goal right out the window. At least in my mind. But I began to understand that God loved me just the way I was. He created me with the physical and emotional makeup that I was born with. If He could love me just as I was, then so could I.
I also learned it’s crucial to get a second opinion regarding a diagnosis, particularly if I’m told, “Ginnie, it must be emotional.” It might be. But it might not be, either. When I was diagnosed with Meniere’s disease, a disorder of the inner ear that causes vertigo, I told my ear specialist about the dizzy spells I had years earlier. “I believe you had Meniere’s disease back then,” she said. “The benzodiazepine drugs are very effective in treating the vertigo associated with Meniere’s disease, which is why your dizzy spells stopped when you took the Librium and returned when you discontinued the medication.” But she doesn’t prescribe the benzodiazepine medications because of their addictive qualities.
I was shocked! Why didn’t my internist test me for Meniere’s disease? (Would he have said, “It must be emotional” to a man?) The least he could have done was to treat the symptom and give me an anti-vertigo medication like Antivert. If he had, none of this would have happened.
Now, I was faced with accepting that this agonizing trial occurred because of a doctor’s misdiagnosis. But I chose to look at the good that came out of it. I concluded that this experience of misdiagnosis, pill addiction, and withdrawal changed my life. It turned me from a negative person into a positive person. I am no longer the perfectionist, judgmental woman that I was. Today, I can look at myself in the mirror and say, “Ginnie, you’re terrific. So are all the other women on this planet.”
Dearest sister, may you learn from life’s challenges the lesson that I learned from this experience: Negative emotions are powerful, but positive emotions are more powerful. God has created us with the assets of hope, optimism, strength, and courage to carry us through our rough times. And they do.
1. Lauren Slater, “Young, Successful and Addicted to Drugs,” Glamour, June 2001, 255.
Copyright Ginnie Mesibov, 2004
For more information on benzodiazepine addiction, see the following website: http://www.benzo.org.uk/
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