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As Melissa Bond raises her infant daughter and a special-needs one-year-old son, she suffers from unbearable insomnia, sleeping an hour or less each night. She loses her job as a journalist (a casualty of the 2008 recession), and her relationship with her husband grows distant. Her doctor casually prescribes benzodiazepines—a family of drugs that includes Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Ativan—and increases her dosage regularly.
Following her doctor's orders, Melissa takes the pills night after night until her body begins to shut down. Only when she collapses while holding her daughter does Melissa learn that her doctor—like so many others—has over-prescribed the medication and quitting cold turkey could lead to psychosis or fatal seizures. Benzodiazepine addiction is not well studied, and few experts know how to help Melissa as she begins the months-long process of tapering off the pills without suffering debilitating, potentially deadly consequences.
Each page thrums with the heartbeat of Melissa's struggle—how many hours has she slept? How many weeks old are her babies? How many milligrams has she taken? Her propulsive writing crescendos to a fever pitch as she fights for her health and her ability to care for her children. "Propulsive, poetic" (Shelf Awareness), and immersive, this "vivid chronicle of suffering" (Kirkus Reviews) and redemption shines a light on the prescription benzodiazepine epidemic as it reaches a crisis point in this country.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 14, 2022 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781797141534
- File size: 268353 KB
- Duration: 09:19:04
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from September 1, 2022
Author and narrator Bond's story starts off so well: man of her dreams, wedding, pregnancy. But things soon start to change. Her firstborn son is diagnosed with Down syndrome; her job is a casualty of the 2008 recession; and her second child arrives soon after. Her doctor prescribes Ativan because she's stressed out and unable to sleep, and she still struggles, then bumps up the dosage. She collapses while holding her daughter and learns that she has a benzodiazepine addiction. Quitting is not going to be easy--if not managed properly, withdrawal can be fatal. Bond's story about the journey to sobriety and the challenges it holds is one that is not as commonly known but is very real for many. VERDICT This cautionary tale about dependence on and addiction to benzodiazepines (which include Xanax, Klonopin, and Valium) is very timely. Bond's voice is strong and real and the perfect choice to narrate the audio book. Strongly recommended for public libraries of all sizes.--Gretchen Pruett
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from March 28, 2022
In this raw and captivating debut, journalist Bond chronicles her volatile descent into a benzodiazepine addiction. During her pregnancy with her second child, Chloe, Bond developed extreme insomnia, sometimes sleeping as little as an hour a night. Struggling, simultaneously, to care for an infant with Down syndrome, she relied on Ambien to help her sleep, until she met “Dr. Amazing,” who, after Chloe’s birth in 2010, prescribed Ativan, a benzodiazepine. “ ‘Take these,’ my doctor told me,” Bond recalls. “Frantic for sleep, I took them month after month, my mouth wide-open like a hungry carp.” After her doctor began ratcheting up her doses, Bond realized she was in the grip of a full-blown addiction: “I was simply following my doctor’s orders. I was in a free fall.” In lucid flashbacks—one particularly haunting scene sees her blacking out while driving with her children in the car—she details the hellish recovery process (“a year and a half clawing in the underworld”) that counted her marriage among its casualties. Pairing her unsparing candor with the same deep compassion she finds in the physician who helped her level out, Bond’s narrative casts a burning light onto the hazards of overprescribing and the threat it poses to vulnerable people. This cautionary tale stuns.
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