The Accidental Addict

creative nonfiction
by Ed Cohen

I just spent five days in the hospital.

On May 27, I had cervical spine surgery to remove bone spurs pressing on a nerve in my neck—the source of pain and weakness in my left arm. The surgery went well. I was sent home with Tramadol, a pain medication I was told was the “safest” option and not addictive at the dose or duration I’d be taking it.

🗓️ Week 1: It dulled the pain.
🗓️ Week 2: I timed doses to keep it away.
🗓️ Week 3: I felt buzzed.

I tried to taper. My body crashed.

Tremors. Nausea. Anxiety. My blood pressure spiked to 160/100. My surgeon said I’d reduced too fast and told me to take “catch-up” doses. His PA gave me a plan that would’ve kept me on the drug another 16 weeks.

With my history of heart attacks and kidney disease, I knew I couldn’t do it.

At 2 a.m., my wife Pris rushed me to the ER. I was shaking, drenched, surging with panic. The doctor said I’d “fallen behind” and sent me home with instructions to take more Tramadol. My BP hit 188/113.

We drove to a different ER. That doctor did what the first should have: admitted me.

Within hours, I was in a hospital bed, hydrated, monitored. They stopped the drug.

A nurse heard my story and said: “You’re an accidental addict.”

That sentence punched me in the chest.

My father was a violent alcoholic. His addiction and eventual suicide left scars I spent a lifetime trying to overcome. I thought I was nothing like him.

Now, here I was—being told I was one of them.

The hospital team managed each withdrawal symptom in real time: tremors, panic, nausea, BP spikes. I slept 15 hours a day. My body began to reset.

Today, I came home—drug-free but not yet free of symptoms. Rebound is real. I still wake up with restlessness, emotional spikes, and BP swings.

This happened because I trusted what I was told. Because no one warned me how fast this could spiral.

I’m angry.

This isn’t just about me.

It could happen to you or someone you love.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Ed Cohen is a global leadership coach, keynote speaker, and author of Vulnerable: One Man’s Journey from Abuse to Abundance. His writing blends personal experience with purpose. He lives in Southern California with his wife and two dogs. Learn more HERE.

 

Fashionable Hurricanes

by William Doreski

The most fashionable hurricanes prowl the Atlantic runway with their drapery swirling. Meanwhile we fuss over the frostbit garden, the withdrawn plants yellow as pyrites. You want to run off and join the circus. That’s a safe ambition because there aren’t any more circuses to join. I want to become a lighthouse keeper, but all the lighthouses are automated. I’m too old to become a meteorologist and cozy up to those hurricanes. I’m too old to do anything but sink into a mud bath at a trendy spa. You hate spas, prefer playing with the feral cats at the shelter. I enjoy that as well, but it’s difficult to overcome the cats’ fear of humans. We are indeed a frightful pair with our uncombed mops and wrinkled expressions. Meanwhile Congress is in disarray, war has soiled the Middle East, and our trip to Paris was canceled for lack of interest. The Eiffel Tower will have to swallow its disappointment. The Louvre will have to flash its wares without our awestruck gaze. The fashionable hurricanes would like to squelch air travel, but the big planes gracefully duck and dodge the way we do in our daily quarrels.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Cloud Mountain (2024). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

 

Communications Breakdown

by Melvin F. Gruschow

Avery Jackson was running through the streets of New York City, a copy of the Times crushed absentmindedly in his sweating hand. He had read through most of it, and was perusing the business section on his lunch break when it happened.

He could barely think, instinct was driving his dazed and swiftly paced march to his apartment. He shouldered the front door open, the doorman nowhere to be seen as the masses bumped, yelled, and churned behind him. He climbed up the stairs, the walls of the building slightly muffling the droning outside. He could hear crying and wailing from several floors as he passed. A door from a floor beneath him burst open, and voices, a man and woman.

“We just need to catch the train out of town, there’s time honey!”

The woman’s voice was breaking as she spoke, and Avery could hear the muffled cries of a babe.

“Darling, we only have minutes-” she wept.

Avery pushed on.

He arrived at his door on the fifth floor, room 504. He was fumbling for his key, and turned the handle in frustration.

The door was unlocked.

Avery froze for a moment.

He’d forgotten to lock it on the way out. Probably absorbed in a meandering thought about work. On any other day, this might have had some sort of consequence.

He stepped into his small studio flat, and looked around.

The couch pointed at a small television set, his hifi against the wall with the apartments singular window. A framed photo of himself holding a diploma, his parents beside him, was sitting on an end table. Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was sitting out of its sleeve, ready to be played once he had returned from work.

Now that he had arrived into a familiar space, the fight was leaving his body.

Where could he possibly run in time? What would he bring?

He gathered some clothes, tossing them into his briefcase, but was slowing, and tears were muddying his vision.

After a minute his hands slowed their packing, and then ceased moving.

Standing there, he felt time ease through him, every second seemed to drag, creeping slowly, almost physically walking before his eyes. But it wasn’t slow enough. Not enough to cling to, to satisfy, to absolve.

He flipped on the stereo, watching the record spin for a moment before slumping onto his couch.

It Makes No Difference Now began to play, the piano tinkering and singing out through his speakers. There was an impossibly bright flash somewhere out of view, but seeing it didn’t matter.

The light was thousands of degrees as it hit his building. Avery Jackson and the newspaper he had held whose headline read Communications Breakdown Between US and Cuba, turned to fire, turned to dust, turned to atoms in an instant. The only thing left, a shadow, and a memory.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Melvin F. Gruschow is a 32 year old software engineer, father of two, and a scholar of curiosity. He likes to obsess over thoughts, his and others, and do his best to jot them down accurately. Bluesky.

 

Anyone Else Doing This Would Be Arrested

by Mary Anne Griffiths

Standing just outside the door I wait under the buzzing fluorescent lights, ear trained and listening. On the other side there’s footsteps against the vinyl floor. The sudden scraping of his jacket being hung on the hook somewhat startles me. It’s followed by clothes shuffling. I can imagine him grabbing at his fly…then block it out of my mind. No. Concentrate.

There—the purring of his zipper. I lean in a bit, anticipating. I can hear him breathing. It’s tense, almost panicky. I’m thinking that he’s beginning to perspire and is fidgeting. Maybe his hand is shaking. I’ve done this so many times I swear I can see through the door.

Again, there’s the soft sound of the zipper then clothing swooshing. His jacket buttons click against the door. I straighten up and get ready for him. The toilet flushes. I don’t hide. I stay right here, waiting.

The doorknob wiggles as he unlocks and then twists it. The snick of the latch separating from the strike plate does not break my focus. A sliver of light escapes the opening, gets larger and wedges onto the floor in front of me. His lanky fingers hand me the specimen bottle.

“Son, you think I’d fall for this crap?”

I pitch the sample in the washroom’s trashcan and hand him another bottle.

“Now piss in that thing and if it ain’t warm this time we’ll declare you dead.”

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Mary Anne Griffiths (she/her) is a poet and fiction writer living in Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada. She shares space with a husband, a tortie and tuxie and an ever evolving manuscript. Some of her work can be found in DarkWinter Lit Mag, The Lothlorien and Macrame Literary Journal.

 

Dead Again

by Thom Hawkins

When the night-shift orderly, on his way back to his quarters, told me that Mrs. Dunhill had died again, I knew I was in for a busy morning. Family is seldom present for a second death, so much of the burden falls to the admin staff to put the deceased’s affairs in order. In many ways, a first death is a much simpler affair, so those who opt for an additional death do so only when circumstances make it worthwhile. Mrs. Dunhill was one of those individuals.

It had only been six and a half years since Mrs. Dunhill arrived at our facility. Her daughter, Shelley Dunhill, herself in her early sixties, called rarely. Our residents are kept in a medically induced coma and communicate only through vital signs. On those few occasions, usually around Christmas, when Shelley did call, her speech was slurred, and she seemed less anxious about her mother’s quality of life and more about the quantity.

“Do you think she’ll live mush longer?” she asked one Christmas Eve.

“It’s hard to say, Miss Dunhill. We don’t like to speculate.” I pulled up her mother’s vitals on my screen.

“I want her to live forever.” Mrs. Dunhill’s minimal brain activity plodded forward, showing no signs of abating. If someone asked me to draw a graph of forever, this is what I would draw. “I mean that,” Shelley added as if I’d challenged her. “Forever.”

“Have a good holiday, Miss Dunhill,” I told her, eager to get to the staff potluck before all the canned cranberry sauce was gone. “I’ll talk to you next year.”

“Next year,” she echoed. “That’s just a few days away. You think she’ll die that soon?”

“She’s already dead,” I pointed out.

I didn’t know how Shelley Dunhill would react to her mother’s second death, but I assumed she would absorb the news with her typical aplomb. After lunch, I made the phone call. The satellite line had a lot of static. Forever, I thought. Static is what forever sounds like.

A click, followed by a weak “hello?”

“Miss Dunhill?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry to tell you that your mother has just passed.”

“Again?”

“Yes.”

She was silent then, and the longer she was quiet, the louder the static became. When she did speak again, it was like the static had become an ocean, and she was drowning in it, filling her mouth with buzz and spitting it back out with words.

“What do I do?”

Fortunately, I am well-acquainted with death and all its niceties. I explained that her mother’s body would be disposed of according to the dictates of her will. That description was usually received better than telling the next of kin that the bodily remains would be incinerated and the ashes flushed down to the ocean floor beneath the facility.

“Do I need to …?”

I interrupted her before she had to say it. “No, Miss Dunhill. We take care of everything. As the police are fond of saying—‘nothing to see here.’” I omitted ‘please disperse,’ though I considered it an appropriate phrase to get her off the phone.

The buzz crescendoed like a wave.

“Your lawyer will be in touch, Miss Dunhill.”

“Okay.”

“Please disperse.” I hung up the phone before she could say anything else.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Thom Hawkins is a writer and artist based in Maryland. His stories, plays, and experimental fiction have appeared or are scheduled to appear in Always Crashing (Pushcart Prize nominee), Collaborature, Encephalon Journal, Excuse Me Magazine, Gargoyle Online, New Myths, Oyez Review, The Scop, Shoegaze Literary, Slippery Elm, Variant Lit, and Verdant Literary Journal.

 

You Can Have it for a Week

by Tim Law

“You can have it for a week.”

That’s what they told us and we were more than happy with that. Hiring through a local business and not some city mob we got a great weekend price made even better thanks to the fact that bouncy castle business was booming.

So we watched on with excitement as the air pump inflated the giant giraffe that rose so high its head could be seen by every passerby. I flagged with the owner that COVID cases in other states were on the rise.

“She’ll be right mate,” came the woman’s reply, quick as a flash. “We’ve closed our borders remember?”

“Of course,” I agreed.

At that stage there was nobody going out and nobody coming in. What could possibly go wrong?

That weekend we celebrated in style a joint birthday party for our daughter Boo (11) and niece Tilly (7). Eighteen candle flames flickering and then extinguished in two blows. Throughout the afternoon as the party merrily continued on flattery disguised as praise gushed forth from friends and family.

“Where did you get the bouncy castle?”

“We were thinking of hiring a castle for our next party…”

Nobody was the least bit concerned about a little thing like COVID…

And then in a flash, which some of us predicted, our state was in lockdown. March became April, then May, and still this giraffe towered over us. The kids loved being forced to stay home since the bouncy castle was still a novelty. As winter came and went, bringing with it the occasional windy or rainy day, it became more and more difficult to blow up and bounce on the giraffe after it got wet, that poor giant far preferred the drier days.

Eventually, the company returned to pick up a mouldy, bedraggled castle. We still laugh, my wife and I, when we think back on the deal of a lifetime. We had almost six months' worth of fun.

Not bad considering what they said….

“You can have it for a week.”

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Tim Law is from somewhere near the Murray River in Southern Australia. Father of three teens, he loves writing stories and poetry when he is not working at the local library. You can find his musings and views on life HERE.