At the age of 19 I was in a near fatal car accident and broke half the bones in my body. By the looks of the vehicle, anyone who saw it guessed no one could have possibly survived. Somehow I did. I was awake when they finally pried me out and I remember saying something about being late to my brother’s soccer game now. I had no feeling in my legs.

A few days later I woke up in the hospital with terrible stomach pain and I was unable to move. My head was cloudy and pumped full of morphine. From my waist down felt like the pins and needles of having you limbs fall asleep. My mother and father were sitting next to me. My mother began to cry as she told me I would be confined to a wheelchair for a while because my spinal cord had been badly damaged. I knew when she said, “a while” she meant the rest of my life. I told her not to cry, that it would be o.k. She kissed my forehead.

My father stood stoic in the corner of the room, with a fearful look that I had never seen on him. He sat down at the foot of the bed and told me how much he loved me and how relieved he was that I was alive. The nurse soon came in and told them to come back in the morning after the doctors did some tests.

The next few days were excruciating. The pain below my waist got worse and worse with each passing day. Morphine was my only solace.

I was released from the hospital after two weeks with a thick folder of prescriptions. The pain would never go away. I went back to school in a wheelchair, but soon dropped out because the drugs were too heavy on my mind. I collapsed into a deep depression and not long after, replaced my morphine prescription with heroin. Heroin, she was exactly what the name describes. She was my heroin. I no longer thought about life without legs. Or the things I could no longer do. The pain within me melted away with the mere sight of a spoon. I hid the heroin habit from my parents pretty well for a long time. They were so used to seeing me depressed and on drugs that they could barely notice the imposter in my pain medicine.

Heroin became my only reason to live. For years after I first got my wings, I would wake up from a nod and call my “friends” to come pick me up and take me to the park. I spent countless hours in the park panhandling, shooting junk, and watching children play with youthful legs.

One morning around three a.m., I woke up on my parent’s laundry room floor covered in vomit and a needle in my calf. My mother was on the phone and my father was sitting on the couch with his head in his hands. They thought I was dead. When I groaned, my father looked at me with the most defeated eyes I had ever seen. Heroin, my savior, the relief of all my pain and hopelessness, had become my death knell. The ambulance picked me up and I spent another two weeks in a hospital before being shipped off to a treatment center.

I have been off the junk for six months now, thanks to this place. If my mom and dad are reading this, I just want to say I’m sorry. I never meant to cause you so much pain or cost you so much money. I have disappointed you. But Mom and Dad, if you can find it in your souls to forgive me, I will do everything in my power to repair all the damage and become the son you once had. I love you.