By the time I was 6, addiction had my mom gripped so tightly that her preferred method of prescription pain pill delivery was: tie off arm, crush pills, liquify and inject. Through the haze of my “convenient mental block,” which I now know is a side effect of PTSD, my child self remembers very little. Still, I do recall seeing Mom engage in the harmful ritual of prepping and plunging the needle in her arm, and the word Dilaudid being tossed around a lot at the time. Diaudid, as I would come to learn many years — and a lot of reading, research and therapy — later, is a semi-synthetic opioid derived from morphine. It is stronger than morphine, but doesn’t last as long (important words to remember if you get a prescription). For decades, I’d hear words and names for Mom’s other prescriptions, too, including Percocet, Vicodin, Percodan, Demerol, and later, Methadone and OxyContin.
That last word, OxyContin, is one I’ll never forget. Mom stopped using intravenously, but never found recovery and she met her match in OxyContin, losing a decades-long struggle with addiction at age 53. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, my mom was among 10,928 other people who died in 2005 from prescription opioid overdose in the United States. The official cause of death was an accidental overdose. I was 33 when Mom died and, to this day, the words accidental overdose don’t sit well. I haven’t found better words. It was accidental, and medically she did have an overdose, so while accurate, those two words don’t tell the full story of a loving, giving daughter, mother, stepmother, wife, animal lover and artist who never got the help she deserved, because of shame, stigma — especially for mothers — lack of tools and resources, and so many other reasons and words.
You see, words and names are important to me. Against every one of the odds, I grew up to become the first person in my immediate family to not only graduate high school, but also to earn a college degree. I became a journalist and, as a journalist, I know it’s important to call things by their proper names and that words matter. I’m a curious person and the word “why?” of the “five Ws and an H” (who, what, when, where, why and how) reporters learn to ask for every story is at the top of my list of words that are also questions. At work, I’ve enjoyed asking hundreds of sources over the years, “Why?” and learning their motivations or what makes them tick. In my personal life, there was one “why,” however, that haunted me for decades: Why did my mom become addicted?
I may never know the answer absolutely, but what I have learned is — as you might imagine — complicated. My mom was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her 30s. The more stigmatizing words used then were manic depression. I’ll spend the rest of my life asking: Why did she develop bipolar disorder? Which came first, the bipolar or the addiction? But even before that, in the ’60s, when she was barely a teen, my mom was date-raped. So, did the rape trigger the bipolar disorder, which then led to self-medicating with addictive opioid prescriptions? It’s a real chicken-and-egg situation, and as much as medical and mental health science has advanced, I’m coming to grips with the fact that I may never learn the answer to that big looming why.
All of this to say, that the words used to describe the once beautiful inside and out, vivacious person who was my mom, Deborah Ann Bitter Warner Houze, and the prescription opioid addiction that rendered her dysfunctional and neglectful and, ultimately, killed her are important to me, because using our words to bring the insidious crisis of opioid addiction out of the shadows and into our conversations — and using the right, humanizing words — reduces shame and stigma, which could mean the difference between someone having a long, intentional life or an early death due to accidental overdose. I believe my mom would have had a fighting chance against addiction if she weren’t afraid to speak the words, “I’m struggling and I need help.” In this space in the coming months, I hope to find the right words to tell the stories of people like my mom, me and our family who’ve been affected by this crisis. Because I know firsthand that words and stories can save lives. They saved mine.
