Sweating Like A Swine: Methadone Problems

IT'S a boiling hot day and thanks to methadone I've been sweating like a swine. Or perspiring like a pig, if you prefer.

I'm reading a really good book: Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir. It's the true story of Lady Jane Grey, great niece of King Henry VIII and cousin to Edward VI and Elizabeth I who ended up in the Tower of London to be executed as a traitress in the days when being Catholic or Protestant could lose you your head when the wrong person was in power.

I've just been down the druggieclinic purely to get the time of Thursday's doctor's appointment in writing. I'm freaking out about some hiccup keeping me in limbo between the two services for weeks on end. After I fell foul of foreign-accented clerical staff and went all the way to the hospital for nothing this morning, when my rebooked appointment was actually on July 26th, I decided to leave nothing to chance.

Nobody who promised to write me proof of address (apart from my mother) actually has done. But I've been in luck thanks to unexpected correspondence from the Gas Board, the Council and The Support Worker Service. So I've now FIVE proofs of address. Surely that is enough for everyone..?

On Friday afternoon someone is coming from the mental health support team (which is an independent charity and not alligned to the psychiatrist I don't have) to oversee my "needs". So I might hopefully finally see the free bus pass I was promised a year and a half ago!

My methadone is in crisis. Ever since the 25-20mg drop it hasn't held me properly so I've been using on top, then feeling lousy when I try to go "clean". I might have to ask the doctor to put me up 5mg. Which feels like the biggest cave-in on my part. But otherwise I find myself drinking extra methadone bought on the street. And/or relying on heroin. And a person on methadone should never "rely" on heroin. That reliance is precisely what methadone is "supposed" to end! So what should I do? I don't know. I'm face-down in the dog-muck yet again. I just want this nightmare to end...

The new methadone doctor's appointment can't come soon enough. I never thought I could or would feel at home in a methadone clinic, but having been exiled to the London Borough of Crudsville for that awful year, I now see home is where the heart is ~ and my heart is here. (I'm in the methadone clinic's gardens as we speak.) Here hopefully to stay. (Barring other ****-ups...)

I even bumped into my old druggieworker who had left to have a baby. Her baby is now two and she says I have changed beyond all recognition although my voice remains the same (that is how she recognized me).

Changed beyond recognition...?

I HOPE IT'S A CHANGE FOR THE BETTER!



AND NOW FOR A MUSICAL BREAK...

SCIENCE LAB: FLESH AND BLOOD
I know this from the Reactivate 2 rave compilation, though I do remember it being played at one party I was at... The sample is from Shakespeare's King Lear:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!