Idiot - Laura Clery Page 0,76

his Xanax away and was seeing things and shaking. She said that he was going through withdrawal.

Stephen had been abusing Xanax, and this particular drug forces your body to depend on it. If you quit cold turkey, you can have a seizure and die. You have to medically detox from it, especially from the amount Stephen was taking. I looked over to him, the twitching was getting worse. His heart was racing. I took his hand and led him to my car and sped to the hospital.

I was terrified that Stephen could have a seizure at any minute. What if he had one in the car while I was driving? What would I do? I couldn’t even think. We got to the emergency room and saw a doctor who didn’t understand addiction at all. He looked at us like Stephen was the scum of the earth. “Why can’t you control how much you take? What is wrong with you?”

I was enraged, and Stephen wasn’t even coherent.

“He needs help. He’s sick.” My voice was shaking with anger.

“He had a prescription. Just FOLLOW it.” This doctor was a piece of work.

“Please, just help us,” I said, trying my hardest not to punch this guy’s eyes out.

The doctor glared at us both and said, “I’ll be back.”

Where was he going, to take a fucking smoke break?!

Stephen couldn’t speak, but I could tell he was scared for his life. He was barely coherent but I could see him in there, trying to fight his way through this. Suddenly his back arched, his fists clenched, his body seized up completely. He had gone into a full-on seizure, shaking and jerking so hard he almost fell off the table. He turned blue.

I screamed as loud as I could for someone to get in here NOW. Stephen went stiff. The doctors and nurses raced in the room and put the defibrillator on his chest.

I was screaming. I couldn’t stop screaming. Two nurses grabbed my arms. “You need to leave, ma’am.”

“No! No!” I yelled.

The doctor rubbed together the sides of the defibrillator. “CLEAR!” I watched Stephen’s chest arch with the electric current as I was torn from the room.

They put me in an empty waiting room down the hall.

I begged and cried, but they wouldn’t let me out. I couldn’t stop picturing Stephen’s stiff body and blue face. I thought he was dead. I paced and paced, every minute felt like an hour. I was terrified that I had lost him. After twenty minutes a nurse came in the room.

“We stabilized him, but he needs to medically detox immediately. You have to take him to a rehabilitation center right now.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“We’ve given him some anti-seizure medication, so he should be fine for a bit, but you need to go right away.”

Wait, I had to drive him? In my car, which was not equipped with emergency medical equipment or personnel? How were we going to make it there?

I must have pulled out my phone and called some rehab centers, but at that point, I was on autopilot. My hands and feet were moving without me. I wasn’t in my body. I found a rehab center in Tarzana that would take Stephen, and I got him in the car. He was so out of it, he didn’t recognize me. I started the car, but I was so petrified he was going to have another seizure. I was so afraid he was going to die in the car, but I just drove. I had to get him there.

We made it there without incident, and he went straight into the medical detox program for thirty days.

I stayed in our two-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica for those thirty days. I talked to his mom every day about how he was doing. I went to visit him when visitors were allowed, but I still kept my plan to move into that Venice apartment. The thing is, I didn’t know if he was going to stay sober after he got out of this program. A medical detox safely brings you back to sobriety, but it was up to Stephen to stay that way. I didn’t know who he was going to be when he came out of this. He needed to get sober and get better, and I couldn’t be responsible for that. No one could get him sober except him.

At the end of the thirty days, I went to pick him up. He looked like himself again. He told me that he didn’t feel