A Rough Path Toward Recovery

Hello friends,
I would like to continue my story and hopefully offer some encouragement. Let's begin. After I came home from the hospital, I begin to battle with the social stigma of Schizophrenia very badly, not to mention, it was a living nightmare. I began to turn to drugs and alcohol as a form of self-medication. I constantly stayed high, just to make this unnatural world, seem ok. I knew it wasn't healthy, but I "thought" it was making me better. I began dating my wife at this time and I thank God that she stuck it out through all of this mess that I was in. I began drinking cough syrup and indulging in various "legal highs", which are not any safer than their illegal counterparts. Trust me. Eventually, my parents and sister found the empty bottles and poured them out in my intervention. I denied it of course, got angry and stormed out. That didn't stop the abuse. I began having more seizures, and I knew the next dangerous side effect would be death. One day I went through a typical ritual to prepare the drugs, and I settled in for a regular trip. By this point, I had asked my girlfriend to marry me, and we were supposed to have the wedding in a few weeks. That night, while the drug was kicking in, we went to put the deposit down on our first apartment. That's when it turned ugly. I went home and didn't feel very well, so I lied down for bed. The next thing I knew, I was in a full blown, drug induced psychosis. I was in the hospital for three days, and for a full 24 hours, I was in a comatose state. I had a delusion that the rapture was happening because I put the final piece of the puzzle together... which was me doing the drugs. I felt that I was vital to Jesus coming back. Slowly I came to the erroneous realization (thank God), that I was in hell. I thought the hospital was a hallucination, and I was waiting for the demons to drag me away. I remember crying out in the bed, saying, "Oh God, I'm so sorry! Please give me one more chance! I'll quit this stuff! I promise!". My fiancee came in and I fully expected her to end our relationship right there. (I figured if it wasn't a hallucination, I might as well do what I could to make things better.) Part of me believed she was real, and the other half... well, not so much.  Amazingly she stuck it out, and although the wedding was postponed, we still got married. Unfortunately for me though, it took about six weeks for the delusions to completely disappear. I finally realized I was alive! Oh man, it felt great! This was the moment I knew I had to change. I had to help myself, not destroy my life. I could see the path to recovery, but I knew there was some very hard work ahead of me. Until next time.
-Will