- Struggling with the demands of a newborn daughter and a special needs son, today's guest developed insomnia.

Her doctor prescribed benzodiazepines, but dependency followed.

Melissa Bond shares the story of her journey of addiction and recovery this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(light upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with the Providence Journal.

- This week, we're joined by author Melissa Bond whose new memoir of addiction "Blood Orange Night" will be published this summer.

Melissa, thank you so much for being with us.

- It's an absolute pleasure.

Thanks to you both.

- We're gonna spend some time talking about the new book, but let's talk a little bit about you.

You are an author, a narrative journalist, a poet.

What drew you to the written word in the first place?

- So Jim, I've heard this incredible quote, but I think speaks to my experience, which is "writing is not a vocation, it's a condition."

(hosts laughing) - [G. Wayne] That's good.

- I was born with that condition.

My mom tells this story of me writing on my, I would pull back my sheet at night and write on my mattress.

So from the time I could write, it was my way of sort stitching myself to my experience and exploring my world.

So I've done it since I was little.

- When did you discover though that this was something that you could do for a living?

- I think for a long time I didn't think it was something I could do for a living, but when I discovered narrative journalism in my late 20s, I thought, "Oh, this is the place where I can marry the part of me that loves to dig deep into topics and create a narrative that will really grab people."

And that felt like the trajectory that I had planned on following.

- So you began writing, you began writing professionally, and then in 2008, you married and soon thereafter you had your first child who was born with Down syndrome.

Tell us about that period of your life 'cause that really is the beginning of "Blood Orange Night," which I just wanna say is such an incredible book, and just really astonishing, but go ahead.

Tell us about that period in your life and then we'll get into the book a little bit more.

- Yeah.

Wow, Wayne, I think it's important to say that I had never met anyone with Down syndrome in my life and we did not know, I had had a number of the tests, but I just was profoundly naive I think about the possibility of having a child who had any kind of genetic marker that was different.

So we didn't find out he had Down syndrome until the fifth day after he was born and I think there are two things that I will say about that.

The first is that we had those first four days to absolutely fall in love with him.

And I feel grateful for that because if we had known ahead of time, I think I would've latched onto the diagnosis and had a lot of fear and uncertainty.

But as it was, we had five days, four days, and I was so deeply in love with him that discovering that he had this that would make him a different human in the world just felt like it amped up my mama wolf energy tenfold.

So it was a sense of this is gonna be a different experience in the world, but I am so in love with this human that I will find out what he needs and I will make sure he has the best life possible.

- So this happened during the Great Recession and during that period, in addition to the birth of your first child, Finch is his name, a lot of other things happened, your career in terms of earning income from writing hit a wall, you lost a job, leaving your husband, a landscaper, as the sole source of income.

And also during this period, you became pregnant with your second child.

So this is a lot of, I mean, this is a of stress.

Talk about that.

All of this happening in roughly a one year, just over a year period of time, all these stresses, new motherhood, losing a job.

Talk about that.

- Yeah.

When they talk about life stressors, we really hit like a number of them in a really short period of time.

So it was amazing.

I had finally kind of settled into this career of being a narrative journalist and was really excited about moving forward.

I had sort of thought, oh, I'm following the footsteps of Malcolm Gladwell.

This is what I wanna do.

And as you said, it was the Great Recession we had hoped our magazine would survive, but there was one week where on a Wednesday, I just had this impulse and I took a pregnancy test.

I was in a yoga studio, peeing on a pregnancy stick, which it's a scene out of the book because it was so hilarious and I discovered I was pregnant that day.

Two days later on a Friday, we were all corralled into this room and the publisher's son told us that the magazine was folding.

We didn't have enough money.

So within one week I discovered I was pregnant.

I was out of a job.

My husband at the time was feeling a tremendous amount of stress for capturing holding all of us.

And I think there was no way for me to understand kind of the layers of stress and what was peeling away from me, this identity of being this professional and writer, I suddenly was kind of left with this sense of, okay, who am I now?

Who is this person now that is pregnant and has a child with a disability?

And my career has hit a wall.

And there didn't seem to be a path for me at that point.

- Yeah, Melissa.

So you talk a little bit about your work as a narrative journalist.

Did you ever think that you would be the subject of your own work?

- Oh my gosh, no.

Jim, a memoir is the last thing I'd ever imagined myself writing.

I was a fiction writer.

I loved, I had interviewed Jon Huntsman Jr., I was really, really interested in other people and their stories, but I'm a very private person.

And so to have myself as my own subject was literally the last thing I ever wanted to do.

- Well, and there's some profound courage in this because you don't really, I mean, we're with you in that lady's room at the yoga studio.

We learn a lot about you and a lot about the, some of the challenges that you faced.

Where does that courage come from to share that much with your audience?

- Yeah, I think any time people go through any kind of trauma, there's this sense of, I became to some degree background to my own story, I realized that my story, if it was just my story, that wouldn't have been nearly as interesting as the fact that I discovered that this was the story of hundreds, of thousands of people.

And it felt as though I was really the person to hopefully tell it and make a difference.

And so somehow baring myself totally, even though it feels like an act of courage, it to me feels like the only gift I can give to help make a difference.

So that's where I get the courage from is the fact that, hopefully, it will really significantly impact some other people in a way that helps.

- So in terms of impacting other people, excuse me, the main subject, at least in terms of a chemical of a drug is benzodiazepines and addiction.

And so you became exposed to those, began taking those during your pregnancy with your second child, Chloe.

And that's because you had terrible insomnia.

I mean, mothers of infants often will go, with very bad sleep and some do have terrible insomnia, but you've seem to have like the worst possible case.

You were getting one to two hours of sleep and it was really affecting your waking hours, obviously, talk about that.

And what led you to get to become addicted?

- Wayne, it was the most, one of the most horrific experiences I've been through in my life.

And it came like a shot.

I mean, it was literally one night we were going to bed, Finch was six or seven months old, and I felt as though I had taken an adrenaline shot to the heart, I sort of, you know, gasped and sat up in bed.

And I felt my body flooded with this adrenaline.

And pregnancy is a bizarre experience to go through, and amazing, but your body does all kinds of things.

And I was up the entire night and I remember thinking this doesn't make sense.

This is not what the body is meant to do.

And you're right, it was night after night of getting one to two hours of sleep a night.

I did research on what CIA interrogation, enhanced interrogation techniques are, and they qualify 48 hours without sleep as being an enhanced interrogation technique.

And I did this for, it was probably a year and a half before we were finally able to kind of get it under control.

So there's a sense of the body almost coming apart.

My cognitive abilities were significantly impacted.

There was one day where I remember leaving Finch in his little, you know, he had this little chair that I would put him in with little dangling hippos.

And I couldn't remember where I had put him and I had just put him on the bed.

But that sense of any kind of being able to track what I'm doing as a mother or as a human, it was terrifying and hallucinations.

I mean, and with pregnancy, all the doctors that I went to, they said, you know, there's nothing we can do.

You're pregnant, so do some art.

You know, they were really at a loss, which was equally terrifying.

- So during this period, you began to search to find a way to sleep.

You went to a therapist, you went to a shaman, you went to a sleep clinic doctor and other people, and eventually you were prescribed Ambien, which is a benzo and a Benadryl booster.

And that does give you sleep for a little while.

When you were prescribed those, was there any discussion from the prescriber of the risks of addiction and the type of horrifying addiction that that is, which is different than opioid addiction?

And we'll get into that later in the show, it's an important distinction, but were you warned that this could be completely disastrous, might give you a little sleep for a little while, but the end result is gonna be horrific?

- Yeah, not once.

Absolutely not once.

And, you know, I remember very specifically that, you know, it was a very well intentioned nurse midwife that prescribed the Ambien, which is a Z-drug.

They call it a Z-drug.

I know that it's very similar to benzodiazepines, but it locks into the GABA receptors at a slightly different position, but very similar.

And there was not only no discussion about addiction potential, but there wasn't, I think an awareness of the nurse midwife that these should not be taken long-term.

And this is, unfortunately, very, very typical to this day.

There's not an awareness of what the medical literature says as opposed to what our common prescribing habits are.

So I was under the impression I was given this prescription I had thought it was safe.

- Did it work for a time?

Did you get some relief from the initial prescription?

- I, you know, Jim, I got, the first night, I slept for about seven hours and then it would, the efficacy waned pretty radically.

So I think within a couple of months, I was getting, again, maybe three to four hours of sleep a night.

And with pregnancy, there are a lot of strange things that happen in the body.

And so I realize now, in retrospect, I was having a lot of side effects that were probably part of the interaction with the drug, but I didn't know because I was a pregnant mother.

- So can you walk us through that escalation from that initial, so the insomnia, the initial prescription, the waning efficacy, how does that lead to addiction?

- Well, I wanna make a really quick distinction here right now.

So when we talk about addiction, culturally, there's a sense that people are using whatever kind of drug to get a high or to escape their life.

And it's tricky because, culturally, there's a lot of shame around that- - [Jim] Stigma.

- Yeah, what I experienced was there was no desire to take the drug at all, but there was a desperation and a physical dependency that we now know happens within the period of five days to a couple of weeks.

So with that dependency, what happens is if you stop taking it, or even if you slowly, you know, try to reduce your dose, there's a radical uptick in symptoms, you can get rebound insomnia, you can have heart palpations, you can with the benzodiazepines, you can have a fatal stroke or a psychotic break.

- [Jim] Oh, wow.

- None of which did I know at the time.

- So Ativan and Xanax get added to the mix here.

And you've agreed to read a passage from the book, which is where the title of the book comes from.

And I'm wondering if you can read that for us now, this is like so many passages in the book, so powerful.

- Yeah.

Thank you.

So I'm gonna show the book just because my heart sings with what Simon & Schuster has done with the cover.

It's beautiful.

And I wanna give a little bit of context around the reading.

This is a period in which I've realized that the Ativan is causing tremendous withdrawal symptoms to the degree that I'm barely, barely able to function.

And so this is the night that I have cut my dose.

I've realized that I've gotta get off these drugs.

They're turning me into a disabled human being.

So I cut just a tiny, tiny bit off of the pill, and I wake up in the middle of the night to my daughter crying and I've run down her room to try to pick up her little bread loaf body out of the crib, because she's still nursing, and I have what we later find out is a stroke.

So this is from the book.

"The roar rises and fades.

Heat runs like a fierce howling wind up my back.

I don't know where my body ends or begins.

Colors explode in my vision, raging like a wildfire through my head.

The blood orange night turns red and screams through my eyes.

The room tilts around me, consciousness shuts again.

Velveteen black.

Silence.

Time stretches and disappears.

A dark figure hovers at the doorway, watching me.

I can feel the dark, like a cold fabric wafting.

I can feel death wait and then turn.

Hiss.

And then there's nothing.

A long time of nothing."

- That's incredible.

Melissa, can you put into words for us the desperation you had to feel realizing that there was something going wrong and how do you get out of it?

- Boy, I've tried to, I've tried to communicate this to people.

And I think the best way I've landed on it is if you have a medical diagnosis, let's say you're diagnosed with MS or a brain tumor or cancer, there's something you can point to.

You say there, we see what's happening, what's causing all of these things, and we know what we can do to treat it.

And you have a community that kind of comes around you and can support you and bring casseroles.

And my experience was this radical sense of exile from not only my own body, because I was just wrapped in the skin of pain all the time.

But from my family and friends, because no one knew what was, what was happening or what the problem was or how we could help.

And then from my own sense of self, because I thought there's also this sense of like, am I crazy, what's happening?

So it feels as though it was this sense of like traveling through the desert and having no compass and no sense of how I would get home, but knowing I had to.

- Did you become depressed?

I mean, I don't know how you wouldn't.

- Oh, oh, I think depression is absolutely.

I was radically depressed.

I mean, the emotions, I was stripped absolutely raw, and it was a desperation.

I mean, there were times where I thought, why go on, I don't know if I can go on.

- So eventually you begin to do research.

I mean, in the fog that you were in, and fog, I think is probably a mild term to describe what was the nightmare, in the early stages, research didn't occur to, if you had not been there, you probably would've, but eventually it does occur to you.

And you begin to, you go online, you find Medline, you find a scientist in the United Kingdom.

And you begin to learn about benzos, talk about that discovery and how dramatic and horrible it was to learn what was really happening to you and what was really causing it, which were drugs that was supposed to help you quote unquote "sleep."

- Right.

I call them pharmaceutical hammers and I have a number of people that ask me, are you just totally anti-drug at this point?

And I say, no, we create tools.

You know, in Western medicine we have tools.

They are many of them incredible.

And unfortunately, we also have a system that slides past what is prescribed by the medical literature.

And we start having habits of prescribing that are extremely damaging, and for which we don't have any kind of clinical tests.

So what I had found was that the medical literature was all there.

It wasn't that hard to find, but the awareness culturally, and this includes with clinicians, doctors, GPs, they were prescribing far outside of what the medical literature recommended.

And the awareness of the dangers of that was not there, this woman in the UK that you referenced, Dr. Heather Ashton, who has since passed, she really has done more research.

You know, I don't know when she started, but she researched benzodiazepine withdrawal symptoms for 30 years.

And she really was the anchor and the only real strong research I found on what it was like to withdraw and how radically difficult it is.

- So you depict this correctly as an epidemic, and there's another drug epidemic and that's the opioid epidemic, which I think it's fair to say more people know about, have heard about, there's been more press on it.

There's been far less with benzos.

Why do you think that is?

I mean, obviously this is dangerous and can be lethal as you yourself said.

- Yeah.

You know, I think first of all, I'm incredibly grateful that there's so much awareness about opioids at this point.

And one of the things, that was one of the questions that I had was why didn't I know, why didn't my doctor know, why wasn't I informed?

And one of the ways I describe benzodiazepine epidemic as a shadow epidemic, because the impact that it has on the body, it is much more difficult to actually have an overdose with just benzodiazepines than it is with opioids.

So opioids became so terrifying because people were overdosing and it had a really radical quick lethality.

With benzodiazepines, there's a dismantling of the brain that happens over time.

So, many of the body systems start to become disabled.

People find they're having GI issues.

For me, I thought I had either a brain tumor or MS, because I was having all kinds of neurological disorders.

My balance was off.

I was falling all of the time.

I had bruises all over my body.

I couldn't remember anything, but what happens is a lot of people will think I have something wrong with me.

They'll go to a doctor, the doctor will say, hmm, you have some kind of GI disorder.

Let's do all these tests.

They get medicated for something else.

And they don't realize that what's happening is their brain is being disabled by these drugs.

So the terror is that people are sliding into disability because of the drugs and they're thinking it's something else.

- Melissa, we've got a little bit more than a minute left here.

I'm curious, how are you doing now?

- Oh my gosh, I would say anyone that has gone through a radical trauma, when it feels like life is possibly over coming out of that every day feels like spring.

I adore being a mother, I adore being an author, I adore the opportunity to help other people.

And my body for the most part is healed.

I still have, I think I will always have a more sensitive and nuanced system that I have to be cautious with, but I feel like one of the lucky ones, I've recovered and every day is like spring.

- Is there some, we got literally about 15 seconds here, is there some advocacy that emerges naturally from writing a book like this?

- Ask the question again, is there... - Is there some sense of advocacy that emerges from writing a book like this?

- Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I feel a sense of, if I can help one person or many people have an awareness so they don't go through this kind of suffering, it makes it worth it.

- Well, "Blood Orange Night" is a remarkable book and Melissa Bond, thank you so much for being with us today.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org.

We can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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