Warning: this post is detailed and quite graphic. By now you would have realised that I am not scared to say things exactly the way the are. As I am getting deeper into the story, I have found myself going into more detail. I feel that this is necessary and I hope you don’t mind.
Around mid-2006 I was feeling much stronger and decided that it was time to start weaning down to the 37.5mg dosage of the Venlor again. I got my mind right and set a plan in motion to reduce the dosage even slower than before. I had my good and bad days.
The worst of the worst days was one Saturday morning. Exercise usually helped a bit when I was experiencing side-effects so hubby (Riaan) and I went to gym. I was on the stationery bike and taking it very easy, but the more I pedalled, the weaker I felt. I didn’t even make it to 10 minutes so I decided to just stretch. I went upstairs and lay down on the mat. My entire body became completely weak and lame and it scared me. I didn’t have the strength get up and when I tried I would just fall down again. A staff member came to me and I asked them to find Riaan. I lay there crying like a baby. I did not know what to do. Riaan took me home, ran a warm bath and made me some tea. I lay in the bath completely and utterly lame. Every single inch of me was numb and my skin was blue. I remember thinking that I belonged in an institution for drug addicts, because that is basically what I was. This is the type of thing I only saw in movies. I was totally freaked out because I felt completely out of control of my body and mind and it literally felt as if my body was shutting down. I felt dead inside I felt like I had no soul left.
There were days where I was seriously considering booking myself into a rehab facility so that they could look after me while I just got off these evil capsules of death (I was VERY angry at that stage – especially with the doctors that were ruining innocent people’s lives by prescribing these pills to them). I just wanted out, I didn’t want to do it slowly, I wanted to have nothing to do with them again. There were days I did not want to live anymore. Dying would feel so much better than this surely!
I felt completely helpless and was beginning to think it was hopeless even trying to get off the medication, but I was so desperate to be rid of it.
As time went by, the side effects tapered a bit, until I got to the next phase of the weaning. So I always made sure I felt 100% before taking it to the next stage.
In October 2006 I accepted a job at a fashion retailer. They had a very different approach to the way they recruited and trained their staff. For 3 weeks they sent us all over Johannesburg on all sorts of tasks. Just after I accepted the position, I had an upset stomach. After each meal I ate, I had diarrhoea. It wasn’t bad, but basically my food was not digesting and just going straight through me. I felt absolutely fine so I just left it. I carried on with my training for work and exercised normally. It carried on for 2 weeks and then realised it was time to go see a doctor (I do not like running to the doctor for anything as you should be able to understand at this point). I saw a different GP at the same practice as mine. I had to take whoever was available. He told me that I had picked up an e-Coli bacteria. He said you can contract it from eating raw veggies and meat can also be contaminated without you even knowing it. He put me on anti-biotics and by that stage I realised there was no other option. I recovered from that, however, going to the toilet for a number 2 was excruciatingly painful. I went to see my doctor and she told me that I had haemorrhoids. She gave me suppositories and I started using them but there was no improvement.
A few days later we travelled to PE for a friend’s wedding. On the day of the wedding I could not take the pain anymore and I was bleeding whenever I went to the loo. It literally felt like I was sh*tting razor blades. I went to the GP I used to see in PE. He was not there, but there was a locum who helped me. I told him what my doctor in Jo’burg had diagnosed and he said he would have to do an internal examination and massage the haemorrhoids in order to ease the pain. He gave me a shot of morphine and a muscle relaxant and got to work. That was one of the most hideous experiences of my life and I do not want to go into any more detail with this one.
Riaan took me back to our hotel room and tried to sleep but I was too traumatized. I lay there completely freaked out! We had to go to the wedding so I got ready and we got in the car to travel there. On the way Riaan had to stop the car and I vomited on the side of the road. During the ceremony at the wedding I had to run to the toilet to vomit again. I tried eating a bit of dinner because I was so hungry but that just came straight back up. Riaan took me back to the hotel at 8pm and I went straight to bed. It was obviously the morphine that was making me puke. I decided right there and then that something was not right and I had to see a specialist as soon as I got back to Jo’burg.
First thing on the Monday morning I called my doctor and told her to refer me to a specialist because I didn’t want to mess around with this anymore. She gave me the numbers of two surgeons. I made an appointment with the first one I could get hold of and went to see him that afternoon. He told me that haemorrhoids were not supposed to be painful. I informed him of the whole experience and he said that I had an anal fissure. Basically the diarrhoea had caused a tear in the lining of my rectum. Well that made a bit more sense now. He booked me into surgery the very next day.
Useless piece of information that the surgeon told me: if you are a smoker, the anaesthetic injection will more than likely burn and if you aren’t, it won’t.
He was going to cauterize the fissure and apparently I would feel instant relief when going to the toilet. I was so excited that this ordeal was going to be over soon.
After the surgery I woke up in my hospital room. The only way to describe the way I felt was that it was as if someone had raped me with a 2 litre coke bottle from behind. It was disgusting!!! It was night time and I needed to call the nurse to bring me pain killers. Only problem was that I could not reach the remote to call them so I had to lie there until someone came to check on me.
Riaan also eventually arrived. I was meant to stay overnight but he told the nurse to inform the doctor to please sign a release form he was taking me home. We got painkillers and liquid paraffin and went home. The painkillers were amazing. I felt like I was floating all over the place. I can’t remember the name of these painkillers now but I have since learnt that they have been taken off the market. It was good to sleep in my own bed that night.
When I went to the toilet again, the pain was gone. The surgeon was right and I was so relieved.
I carried on with what I could do as part of my training for my new job. I had to make a vision board of my life which I had so much fun doing and I went through a major process of introspection. I was still weak but getting better. My new company had recruited about 60 people and they had told us that they would be evaluating us on each task we did. We had to upload everything onto MySpace and we could all see each others work too. They were only going to choose 30 people from the 60 to go to Cape Town for further training and rewards. We didn’t know if we had made the cut until the night before we had to leave for Cape Town. I was lying on the couch reading the results online. I saw my name on the top of the list and I was shocked. I had been scored the highest out of everyone and I felt a sense of accomplishment and acceptance.
I got up to close the door that led onto the patio on the side of our house, which was in the lounge, and I went upstairs to start packing. It was Diwali so there had been fireworks going off during the evening. It was about 9pm and I heard three gunshots that sounded pretty close by. I knew they were different to the sound of the fireworks but talked myself out of the fact that they were and convinced myself that it must have just been fireworks. Then I heard screaming. I looked through the blinds on our bedroom door and saw my neighbour in the street screaming to me. I ran downstairs and she told me that our other neighbours in the complex (1 house down from us) had been shot.
What had happened was 5 men in suits had entered their premises while our neighbours were getting ready to go out with friends. It was a warm spring evening so their patio doors were open. Their young son was there as well as their friends child and the maid. The armed men had walked over the wall of our premises to get to their house. This had happened minutes after I was lying on the couch and had closed our patio door. The couple that were shot were a month away from getting married. They shot the guy through the chest. He survived. They shot his finance and she died instantly. The son was there and saw him mother lying in a pool of blood. I did not want to go near the scene because fear had set in at that stage. All the memories of my shooting came flooding back. As you can well imagine we did not get one minute of sleep that night. We found out that it was a hit of some sort and it was not just a random criminal act.
The next day I had to fly to Cape Town. I was like a Zombie. I landed in Cape Town early evening and we had to go straight to a cocktail party at The 12 Apostles where we were staying. I do not remember who I met and what I said to anyone. I felt like the walking dead and eventually just went to bed.
The following day we had a day of meetings and activities at a location in Franschoek. I tried my utmost to be present and be involved. I felt like I was in another dimension. A little later in the morning we were busy with an activity and my body went lame and I wanted to faint. One of the HR ladies lay me down on a couch and covered me in a blanket. I was shivering and blue and could not help myself from crying. They took me to the hospital and put me on a drip. I was too weak to lift my body from the bed to go to the toilet. A bit later I had sensation back and I could get up and walk. I joined the others again afterwards for the rest of the days activities.
I carried on the next 2 days and participated in everything, but then I crashed. I told them that I thought it would be best for me to go home so they flew me home. The week following that I would not open the blinds in our house. I was a nervous wreck. To take my mind off the actual event of the shooting, I drove around and did some investigating into the security in our complex. I have no idea what I was aiming to achieve, but I was trying to keep myself busy more than anything else. I think I just needed someone to blame.
I tried my best to deal with my emotions so I could get back on track again. I decided then that the best option for me would be to go back onto the Venlor full time because I was not coping with life in general which made the withdrawals a hundred times worse.
I had met some wonderful new friends at my new company but we all resigned after a few months because it was more like a cult than a company and all the managers were high on coke most of the time. I had had a conversation with the MD before I left and he told me that they were so impressed with my performance in the first 3 weeks but when I got to Cape Town I was like an “Ice Queen”. Pardon? Did you not listen when I told you what I had just been through? I don’t even remember meeting anyone that first night. It was like I was in an awake coma state. I am not going to go into any more detail because it is a time I would rather just forget.
I stayed in touch with quite a few of the girls I had made friends with. There was one girl, Lauren, who I will speak about at a later stage.
My whole family came to Jo’burg for Christmas that year and it was wonderful just leaving everything behind for awhile and spending time with them. I would look into getting another job in the New Year and start putting the pieces back together again then.
To be continued…
Chapter 3: Here we go again…
