Welcome to McReality. Would You Like a Side of Heaping Pain with Your Newfound Sobriety?

WARNING: GRAPHIC PHOTOS OF DENTAL PROCEDURES BELOW

Stop doing drugs. Go to rehab. Get a job. Be a good dad. Be a good sister. Work out. Go back to school. Volunteer at the animal shelter. Gosh, just stop. It’s so easy, why can’t you just do this? Do it for your kids. Do it because I want you to do it. Do it because here is a book that tells you how. Stop being stupid and do it. Don’t you love me? Here is some money, go do it. You don’t want to go to jail, do you? Do you want to lose your kids? You love your grandma and this is killing her. If you just stop I’ll make everything easy, I’ll be there, I’ll help. You are so smart. You are too smart for this. Are you better yet? I hate you. You are a loser. You can’t do anything right. Are you better yet? I prayed about it and God told me you were going to be fine.

We don’t have drug problems. We have thinking problems. We don’t have drug problems, we have emotional problems. We don’t have drug problems, we have family problems. We don’t have drug problems, we have physical problems and spiritual problems. WE DO NOT HAVE DRUG PROBLEMS.

Removing drugs from the equation doesn’t fix an addict. They remain the same ill equipped human being that they were when they last got high. They will not suddenly become capable of making good decisions or holding down a job or fostering good relationships. Those skills come with time spent overcoming challenges, not just because you want it to be so. And the challenges, they are fierce.

I was sitting on a couch in the common area on my first terrifying day in Rehab. I had spent the weeks prior in the psychiatric unit, loaded up with Depakote, Thorazine, Flexeril and Ativan and this was my first full day without any of these medications to sedate my mania. I was a statue on the outside and a lunatic bouncing against the walls of my skin on the inside. My first interaction at the facility came as a ‘girl’ who was really much more of a monster in vaguely girl like skin than a real girl, looked at me, noticed my hands were purple and yelled, “Damn, that bitch is already dead!” and then let out a vicious laugh. The laugh was a wave that just kept coming and it was at my expense. I looked down at my hands and this was the first time I realized something was wrong. I had been in so much misery through withdrawals that I hadn’t even noticed something was seriously wrong with me. My hands were purple. It would be eight more years before I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition but the symptoms were already there and on day one of rehab I received this first dose of the harsh reality that every recovering addict wakes up to at some point or another. You are fucked up, you are broken, you have a huge mess to clean up and this is going to be the hardest journey of your entire life.

You can ignore a lot of things when you are using drugs. I once sat on a hotel bathroom sink facing a blood smeared mirror with a pair of pliers in my hands and attempted to wrench an infected tooth from own jaw. I didn’t stop because of pain, I stopped because I couldn’t get a good grip with the pliers. Take the drugs away and you feel the years of abuse to your body and spirit bury you in a mountain of pain like it had all been waiting for this moment of vulnerability to tackle you. On top of my undiagnosed autoimmune condition, I suffered prolonged withdrawals for well over a year (yes this can happen) and I suffered never ending tooth infections. This is the luck of the draw. The fact is, when you play this game with drugs, you do not know what you will have to face if you are lucky enough to come out of it to face it.

These are just a few things no one told me when I was getting high:

1. Drugs will ruin your pretty little face through a myriad of mechanisms.
2. If you ruin your teeth, Medicaid will only pay to pull them and give you dentures
3. When you pull teeth, your bone structure will reduce over time until it permanently changes the shape of your face (not for the better)
4. Dental reconstruction can cost many tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars
5. Dating with dentures or partials is pretty awkward
6. Dentures and partials are prone to causing agonizing ulcers which make it impossible to eat or engage in regular activities
7. Every year that you delay reconstruction, the cost goes up and availability of restoration options goes down
8. Private dental insurance covers very little to no reconstruction
9. Restorations can be incredibly invasive and painful. They can also be dangerous and very time consuming.
10. When you lose bone in your upper jaw, your sinuses can fall which not only changes the shape of your face but will require surgery before your can have implants
11. Shifting teeth can cause debilitating TMJ
12. Tooth infections can lead to brain, heart and blood infections that can seriously injure or kill you.
13. There are no free or significantly reduced rate services available for people who need full dental restoration. YOU WILL PAY OR YOU WILL SUFFER

Below is a visual walkthrough of my dental journey which will continue on for many years to come. It began in 2013 when I had 11 teeth removed at one time with only local anesthetic. I had a tooth infection which makes local anesthetic not work, which means YES, I felt an entire tooth as it was being removed and YES, I was ready to die for those horrifying minutes. I also happen to be allergic to Novocain so the alternative anesthetic they use for me is short acting and must be injected very deep within my jaw repeatedly throughout any procedure. I’ve twice had a nerve injured which caused prolonged numbness, once to my tongue and currently to my lip and chin. In 2021 I had a severe blood pressure and/or blood sugar crash during a procedure which required I be put on oxygen and drink fruit juice, which I almost choked on because I was so numb I couldn’t swallow. I am never prescribed pain medications because I am very forthright with my doctors that I have a history of addiction. I have paid for all of my own procedures with the exception of my first major extraction which was provided pro bono via my amazingly compassionate dentist Dr. Dennis Coleman (of Davidson, North Carolina), who I can never thank enough.

In a future post I will explain how I’ve been able to pay for all of this work and much more. All work was completed by Dr. Dennis Coleman with exception to the extractions which were completed by his nephew, Dr. Michael Coleman and dental implants and bone grafts, which were completed by Dr. Dalstrup (Dr. Coleman’s business partner). To these three men I am eternally grateful. Through their partnership I have restored my smile, confidence and health.

When you ask someone to get clean, you should know what you are asking of them. You are not inviting them into some grand future full of easy days running through the meadow. You are inviting them to open a door to a bigger mess than most a human could ever imagine, look upon that mess and say to it, “Motherfucker, you are mine! I will destroy you!” You are asking someone who struggles just to do the dishes or pay their phone bill to dance with a hurricane and come out the victor. You are asking them to not only be stronger and more courageous than they have been to date, you are asking them to be stronger and more courageous than most people ever will be in their entire lives, because to tackle this mess, you must be a warrior. It is achievable, but it doesn’t happen the moment a person gets sober and it doesn’t happen without a tremendous amount of pain and sacrifice.

I didn’t get to this place because people expected me to have it all figured out when I got to rehab. Maybe they did expect that of me, maybe I let them down by being human, but I got to this place because I admitted that my journey would be hard and long and I accepted the challenge and I told myself that I would do this for me, no matter what it took and then I asked God to make that possible in a world where I was impossibly crippled.

If you are on this journey, take no prisoners. You and only you will decide how much you are willing to sacrifice to achieve your goals. It is up to you to design your future. You can have it all, you can. What will you give to have that? You can take shortcuts and shortcut your future or you can have it all. Does ‘today you’ matter more than ‘tomorrow you’?

If someone you know is on this journey, you need to let them grow or fail at their pace. You have absolutely zero control over their choices and you won’t be the one to face the biggest consequences that come with their sobriety, they will own that alone. The sooner you let them take ownership over their lives and the subsequent consequences, the faster you will all arrive at whatever the inevitable conclusion is to be.

Some of you may be thinking, “Rachel, this isn’t going to make anyone want to get sober!” But I will tell you, someone who wants a better life is better off informed. Anyone who is swayed by these photos was ready to be swayed away from sobriety before they saw them and they are better off relapsing now. You can be swayed by a McDonalds filet of fish sandwich. Reality. This way is not the way for Maybe-I-Wills or Half-Hearted-Harrys. This path is for the grit, for the great, for the grind. Anyone can get into rehab, I’ve seen it hundreds of times. But when it all comes down to just you, your mess and the God you probably aren’t too fond of, that’s where the warriors are sifted from the Fail-Fast-Freddies. I’m a proponent of fail fast. It works in technology development and it works in human development. Run that shit into the ground so we can learn lessons about what works and what doesn’t. When Freddy is ready, he will look at these pictures and say, “You are mine, motherfucker! I will destroy you!” and you won’t have to tell him that he needs to do it for you, or his kids, or that he is smart or any of that other manipulative shit we do to save lives that doesn’t work. He will already know because he will love himself enough to give anything to live and live well.