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Anaelle Montagne
Published on
Dec 15 2024 at 5:40 p.m.
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In front of the reception center for drug users on rue Saint-James in Bordeaux, Liam waits, coat on his shoulders, hair gathered in two small braids. At the age of 19she is one of the oldest regulars at “La Case” (named after the association that manages Caarud).
“I’ve been coming since I was 14”blurted out the young woman absently. His clarity and lucidity contrast with the stereotypes that stick to the skin of addicted and homeless people, but his pupils do not deceive.
Every day, Liam consumes 500 milligrams of Skenan, a morphine sulfate drug treatment classified as opiate. “Knowing that 200 milligrams, already, it’s a dose of cancer patients at the end of life… I’ll let you do the math,” she says.
If the Bordelaise has become addicted to opiates so young, it is firstly because he was prescribed it at very high doses from the age of twelve.
A path that seemed all mapped out
However, Liam’s path seemed clear-cut. She was born into a middle-class family, “everything more normal”: married parents, little brother, house in the city center. A classic childhood, until she suffered traumas, the kind from which we never really recover.
She then begins to develop psychological disorderswhich she manages to hide as best she can. A child prodigy in music, she took hours of classical guitar lessons at the conservatory after her days at school. A frantic pace that ends up exhausting him.
Little by little, the young woman falls into anorexia. And at the same time, a doctor diagnosed him with scoliosis which requires physiotherapy sessions and wearing a straightening corset. The body is loose and the head too.
“The pain was constant”
“I couldn’t keep up anymore,” Liam confides in hindsight, sitting in the warmth of a café in the city center. The young woman tells her story with a astonishing clarityalmost seems to relive the events as she recounts them.
She remembers precisely the date when she ended up being interned in a psychiatric hospital, at the age of 12: “It was in February 2018, my first stay in a clinic. »
When he arrived at the psychiatry department dedicated to children in Bergonié, it was impossible for the hospital to continue his physiotherapy sessions. She was also forbidden to wear her corset: “since I was anorexicthey were afraid that it would allow me to see if I had gained or lost weight,” relates the young Bordeaux woman.
Over the weeks and back and forth to psychiatry, his physical condition worsens : “I went from a 26° scoliosis to a 90° deformity. I was completely twisted, my shoulder was almost touching my hip. And the pain was indescribable, constant. »
Painkiller prescriptions
His psychiatrist, with the advisory opinion of the doctors at the pain center, prescribed him tramadol to ease his suffering. A opioidwhich the child that she was quickly ended up not being able to live without: “I was given huge doses: 600 milligrams of tramadol per day, even though I weighed 35 kilos. »
To save her back, she ended up being urgently transferred to a rehabilitation center in September 2018 and emerged six months later, straightened. “Visually I seemed healed but in reality, the pain had not gone away,” says Liam.
However, after two years of treatment, his doctor decided to suddenly stop tramadol prescriptions which he believes she no longer needs.
Hard drugs and abrupt withdrawal
During a week, then aged 14, Liam discovered the syndrome weaning. She is cold, feels sore, “rusty”, and suffering from a “huge flu”. And then, while the symptoms gradually disappear, the back pain returns.
Not to mention her psychological problems which, coupled with questionable relationships, push the teenager towards hard drug consumption. She dabbles in MDMA and heroin, which gives her “a calming effect similar to that of tramadol”. Until his parents realized it and forced him to sudden withdrawalconfining her to her room after school for six months, without any medical monitoring.
“It was awful,” Liam remembers, “especially since I didn’t choose to become dependent to that. » She describes the constant discomfort and suffering, vomiting, diarrhea, coughing, headaches and body aches. And once again, the return of back pain.
The street for home
As soon as she reached the age of majority, the young Bordeaux girl decided to leave the family home. While she had to embark on a CAP and was counting on accommodation from the Crous, the funding was ultimately refused to her: “That’s when I started living on the streets”. She discovers the nights in parking lots, the discomfort of the mattress floor, the cold… and the The rail.
This medication, based on morphine sulfate, relieves back pain that is made worse by life on the street. Liam buys the Skenan from dealers and injects it so that it takes effect more quickly. “With the cold, the fatigue, I can’t wait two hours for the effects to arrive,” breathes the young woman.
Unable to stop
Today, after finding an apartment for a short time, Liam finds himself on the street again. She lives in a tent in Floirac and goes every week to La Case to collect some sterile injection equipment. And for now, she feels unable to stop taking Skenan.
“If I had a solution, believe me, I would have taken it,” she whispers. But here I live on the street, I don’t have the courage. »
What frightens him is especially the withdrawal period that she would have to cross in conditions that are already difficult to live in. “We don’t realize how horrible it is,” says Liam. Already I must weigh 40 kilos because of the cold and lack of food, I have bedsores on my hip from sleeping on the ground… I can’t add that to myself. »
Whose fault is it?
For Liam, the doctor who prescribed tramadol to her when she was just a child “is partly responsible” for her addiction.
I blame him, because my life could have taken a different turn if he had not prescribed these absurd doses or if he had offered me gradual withdrawal.
However, Liam do not hold him solely responsible of his drug use. She is aware that her psychological state, her traumas, also pushed her to use.
Lucid, the young woman also wants to insist on the fact that pain and disability are therefore not more “legitimate” reasons than others to find an escape in drugs. Thus, “the important thing is not so much to fight against drug consumption but rather against what pushes people to use”, finishes the young woman, putting on her coat before walking away into the cold of the Street.
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