Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict by Joshua Lyon

movie is obviously exaggerated,” she says, “but there’s this part in it where they say something about how it’s okay to smoke a doobie once in a while, but if you do it every day you should go hang out on the grassy lawn area with the kids playing hacky-sack. But the fucked-up thing is, the girls who felt that way, the Gucci-wearing bitches who would skip school to go to a Fred Segal sale, felt it was fine to steal Daddy’s prescription pain pills. And that’s because those drugs didn’t have the same stigma attached to them. We all saw our parents taking them.”
    Zoe’s own parents were divorced, and when she was seventeen,her stepfather died from a blood clot during a routine surgical procedure. On the day of the funeral, Zoe’s mother was having a melt-down and sent her to pick up her Valium prescription from the drugstore. On her way back home, Zoe was hit from behind by another car. Her car was totaled. An ambulance came, but Zoe refused to get in it because she needed to get her mom’s Valium back to her and make it to the funeral.
    When Zoe woke up the next day, she was in severe pain. She stopped by her dad’s house and mentioned it to him. He handed her a Vicodin, but she waited to take it until she got back to her mom’s house. Her body didn’t react well to it, and twenty minutes later Zoe was passed out cold on her mother’s kitchen floor.
    It was the last time she had taken Vicodin before being diagnosed with cancer. She had just turned twenty-three and had what she thought was the flu, but after she got better, her lymph nodes remained swollen. After a few months and several misdiagnoses, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her disease had progressed to stage 2, which means that the cancer is no longer confined to a single group of lymph nodes, such as those in the spleen, but has invaded two or more sites on one side of the diaphragm, the major muscle used for breathing.
    Her first surgery involved cutting open her left shoulder above the clavicle to biopsy the lymph nodes. When the pathologist’s report confirmed that cancer was present, she began five months of chemotherapy.
    “The chemo was the worst for me,” she says. “The nausea wasn’t bad because they give you a ton of pills, but my sense of smell became so heightened, I could only eat really bland things that had no scent. My hair fell out almost immediately, but I took control over that myself and had a friend shave my head. What was horrible for me was this thing called a Port-a-Cath. It’s this device that they have to surgically insert inside you to deliver the chemo. The chemo needle is incredibly thick, and I started having major panic attacks every time. I’d have to sit there with this giant needle sticking out of my chest for three hours. And then the last time I had chemo, theneedle didn’t go in far enough. It leaked and burned a hole through my chest.”
    Zoe didn’t realize it had happened until she got home and took a shower. She had noticed that the area where the catheter had been was looking red and swollen, and after her morning shower, as she was drying herself off, a chunk of skin the size of a silver dollar came off in the towel, revealing the catheter underneath.
    After that, Zoe switched to radiation treatments and eventually covered up the catheter scar on her chest with an orchid tattoo. You can barely see the chemo mark now.
    Over the course of Zoe’s cancer treatment she had several different surgeries. Besides the initial tumor removal and the insertion and removal of her catheter, she had to get part of her cervix removed because her doctors had discovered more cancerous cells there. She also had to have a bone marrow biopsy.
    With all of these surgeries happening in a relatively short amount of time, Zoe racked up a big Vicodin and hydrocodone supply. Her body didn’t react any better to the medicine than it did when her father gave her one as a teenager. She’d take extra-strength