Methadone Maintenance Therapy
(How Methadone has Changed my Life)

I am a 29 year old male who is originally from Illinois where my opiate addiction began. I had been in a fatal car wreck in 2001 where my best friend had lost his life. I, on the other hand, survived but had a pretty serious back injury. I went through a lot of therapy, both mental and physical, but nothing helped the pain in my lower back. Eventually, after climbing the opiate ladder from Vicodin to Percoset, the doctor ended up putting me on Oxycontin, which worked well at a low 20 mg dose at first. After a while though I was moved up to 40 mg pills which I began taking way too frequently, causing me to run out of my script early in the month and having to chase the oxys until my next prescription.
After I went through this for quite some time, my then one-year-old daughter found an empty pain pill bottle and brought it to me and said, “Daddy’s num-nums”. That broke my heart and made me realize I had to get off them. I hadn’t held a job in over a year and my marriage and family life was falling apart. I went to the closest medical detox program to me which happened to be in St. Louis, Missouri. In this program they placed me on 40 mg methadone the first day, then 30 mg the next, then 20 mg, then sent me home. I had never been so sick as I was for the next few weeks. I literally wanted to die. I ended up giving in and taking the pills again. When I moved to Alabama with my family, I had no doctors so I obtained pills any way possible, i.e.: all of the area emergency rooms, family, friends, etc. About a week before Christmas of ’06 I had exhausted all my resources. I knew from past experience that I would be deathly sick by Christmas if I didn’t either get some pills or some real help.
Since I didn’t want to spend Christmas with my kids watching me vomit all day long, unable to get out of bed and eat or watch them open their presents, I decided to get some real help. I knew from previous experience that short-term methadone detox treatment did not work and this was going to take a long-term methadone maintenance treatment program to work. To my surprise there were several such treatment programs in my area. I began calling, already in the beginning stages of withdrawal and started methadone maintenance on December 23, 2006.
Since starting treatment, I have grown tremendously as a person, father and husband. Walker Recovery Center not only provided me with the medicine I needed to stay off pills and not be sick, but with all the information I needed about my addiction and treatment. Today I have my family back. We are all happy together now as opposed to broken apart and withdrawn when I was addicted to the pills. I have held a job the whole time I have been in treatment and I am happy to be the provider and role model my family needs. My whole family and myself are very thankful to Walker Recovery Center for giving me my life back. I spend a lot less money and time keeping my life on track through methadone maintenance treatment then I did in active addiction and it feels great to finally be in control of my own life again. So if you are at the end of your rope with opiate addiction, give MMT a try, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Written by: a client at Walker Recovery Center, Jasper, Alabama

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