“When I was 29, I guess it was, I had gotten pregnant. I didn’t know until I was like three-and-a-half-months pregnant. I didn’t know because it’s not unusual when you’re doing a lot of drugs not to get your period. And when you’re high all the time, you don’t really notice bloating and side effects and all that. I took a test at a local clinic–I found out on a Saturday. On Monday I went to the doctor, and all they did was verify that I was pregnant and make another appointment for me to see a doctor. And I told them I thought I should see a doctor right then–I really wasn’t feeling well, something didn’t feel right. Well, when I got home I started to miscarry.”
Though she never used drugs again, Anne went into a program for pregnant addicts, the Perinatal Center for Chemical Dependence at Northwestern University Medical School, where she delivered a seemingly healthy girl. Yet a fetus exposed only once to cocaine, especially in the early weeks, can have permanent damage that may not be apparent for several years. Anne’s daughter, who is now five years old, is one of the oldest children being followed by doctors at the center in a long-term study of cocaine babies.
“The thing with coke is, when you’re out of money and out of coke, it’s just like the end of the world. You feel so horrible, and you regret all the money you’ve spent. But then you want to get some more. I mean you really feel bad, but ‘Hey, if I get some more, I won’t feel bad anymore.’ And it’s just a vicious circle.”
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Her life twisted in a new direction when a friend was killed after a deal went wrong. “We didn’t trust the guy, but it was such a good deal, my friend just couldn’t pass it up. He went over to this girl’s house to do the deal–they killed her, too. The only one they didn’t kill was the dog. The thing was, they killed him and they didn’t even get the money.”
“He used to tell me every day he was going to kill me. If he’d go out of the house, I didn’t know if he was going to come home in five minutes or five days or five weeks–though I knew that when he did, he was going to go off on me. So that one day when he told me he was going to kill me, I just could not take it.” That day she had gone with her son and daughter to a Halloween party at the local drug-treatment center. “One of the drug counselors took it from there. She said, ‘You can’t go back there.’ So there I was, with a 7-month-old and an 18-month-old in Halloween costumes, all on my own.”
During the years Anne used drugs, she hadn’t always been able to hide it from the doctors and nurses she occasionally had to see. She says that rather than offer her help, they often treated her with contempt or hostility. She says many of her friends who used drugs were treated the same way. She says that once she went to a gynecologist for a minor problem, and that when the doctor saw that she was a user, he started screaming at her and called her a “junkie broad” in front of everyone in the waiting room. “That was it,” she says. “I didn’t care if I was dying. I wasn’t going to a doctor for anything for a couple of years after.” Then she was abused when she miscarried and the hospital personnel couldn’t get an IV into her.
