IN BLOG - WRITTEN BY RYAN ELLIOTT - PUBLISHED 08/08/17
Description: A story about our son’s shocking spiral into addiction, his multiple rehab stays, and the pain our family endured as a result. Drugs turned him into a thief and a stranger, forcing me and my wife to save ourselves in the end.
My Son's Addiction Made Our Lives a Living Hell
The night that would change my life forever started like any other. It had been a beautiful September day in southwest Florida, one I spent slaving away at my thankless job as a construction defect attorney.
As a pre-teen, my son was everything a father could want in a son. He was a terrific student and an excellent athlete; he accomplished things I was never able to accomplish when I was a kid. His future seemed incredibly bright. But something changed when he hit high school and started to struggle with depression - something I was not even remotely prepared for.
Having lost faith in doctors and prescription meds because nothing seemed to help him, my son decided self-medicating would be a good idea. He started off smoking pot, which shocked me, because I never thought my son would be a drug user. Then again, I had experimented with marijuana as a teen, so I chalked my son’s pot use up to “normal” teenage experimentation, gave him a brief anti-drug speech, and moved on.
My son also moved on - to other drugs. And my family’s life became a living hell.
After many more episodes of pot smoking - and some incidents of prescription meds going missing from our medicine cabinet - I knew my son’s drug use was spiraling out of control. One day, not too long after spending a few weeks in his first rehab for his excessive pot use, my son came to me and told me he’d tried heroin. “I just snorted it,” he told me, as if that made using heroin okay.
A Father’s Worst Nightmare
I was devastated. My teenage son, someone I had the highest expectations in the world for, just admitted to me that he tried heroin. I thought heroin was a drug street people used in dark alleys in the inner city. What the hell was my son, a teenager from a pretty well-to-do suburb, doing using heroin?
We started drug testing our son on a regular basis and were happy when test after test came up clean. After one of those tests, though, my son started crying and told me he was addicted to heroin and needed help. I asked him how he could be addicted to heroin if his drug tests were totally clean. It turned out he had kept a Mountain Dew bottle full of clean urine in his closet, and that’s what he was using for the drug tests. I felt so stupid. I didn’t know I was supposed to watch my kid pee in the cup!
I couldn’t believe my son had manipulated and deceived me like he did. At this point, I knew he was a full-blown addict.
A Tough Lesson on Enabling
My wife and I called a local drug treatment facility and made arrangements to have our son admitted immediately. On the drive there, he was lying down in the back of our minivan going through heroin withdrawal. Every once in a while, I would look back over my shoulder and glance at my son. It was like a scene from a movie and it broke my heart. He was crying, sweating, and writhing in pain. My teenage son had somehow been replaced by a junkie, and I was in the middle of the worst nightmare possible.
For years, my son bounced from rehab to rehab. He’d chalk up some clean time, relapse, get clean again, relapse, etc. It was easy to know when he was using again, because expensive things would start going missing fro our house. Unfortunately, my son wasn’t just an addict; he was a thief, too.
Eventually, my wife and I made the tough decision to kick our son out of the house. If we couldn’t save him, at least we could save ourselves. And we were tired of the evilness addiction brought into our world.
