Hal knows the strongest thing in the universe is (willpower) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-10-23 23:56:00 |
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Entry tags: | gwen stacy, prince charming |
Who: Sam and Dr Jack
What: A visit
Where: Jack's spa office
When: Very recent
Warnings/Rating: Talk of drugs
Sam showed up at Jack's office in the same clothing she'd worn to crash with Liam. Camo leggings, heavy Doc Martens and a white button down stolen from Neil's closet and reaching her thighs. Her hair was in two pigtails, and she carried herself like she had a very protective chip on her shoulder. She wasn't sure why she had agreed to this shit, and it wasn't like talking to some doctor was going to change anything for her. She was fucked up, and she was just going to stay that way until she stopped being scared of her own fucking shadow. Sam had never been scared of anything in her life, and this fucking weakness was getting really old.
But, as she'd promised, she was clean, which showed in the way she flinched at every noise from the left or right, and every quick look over her shoulder when something moved behind her. Yeah, she was a fucking mess. Diagnosis complete. Check, please. She had some Xannies in her pocket for immediate swallowing the second she walked out of this place, because no way was she walking home clean after this.
She slouched in a waiting room and gave the receptionist her name.
Jack was back in his office when he received the buzz from the front room that his one o'clock appointment was here. Sam. They'd spoken several times over the journals, but that was never quite like meeting someone for the first time. There was a small part of him that was looking forward to it, and a larger part that was looking forward to the chance to help her. Even if she decided against seeing him again, he'd count it as a win as long as she got help.
Rubbing Spot's head, the dog followed him out to the waiting room, quiet at his side. Dressed in an informal blue polo shirt and a pair of khaki's, there wasn't a white lab coat in sight. "Sam?" He took in the flinching, the dart of her eyes, everything, and wondered how long it had been since she'd taken something, but he knew from looking at her that she didn't have anything in her system now. She'd have been far more relaxed if she had. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you," he said quietly, stepping forward slowly -- no quick movements -- and held out his hand to her.
She looked at his hand, up at his face, and then down at his hand again. She paused, a second, and she stood without shaking. "I'm not a shaker, baby," she told him in heavy New Jersey, and despite the fearful flinching, she could still manage a teasing smile. The dog, on the other hand, got a scratch to one ear, as she looked over this doctor that thought he could fix all the Las Vegas basket cases for free. "Not bad," she added, giving him a cheeky grin and walking past him toward his open office door. The only giveaway that she wasn't as cool and collected as she pretended was the way she very intentionally avoided any contact with him on her way past him.
She walked into his office, and she dropped on the first flat surface and crossed her legging-covered knees at the ankles. Her foot shook with agitation, the movement more noticeable with that heavy boot calling attention itself, and she twirled a pigtail in her fingers and tugged on it at predictable intervals. She looked closer to twenty-one than to twenty-two, having just had a birthday that had gone without any fucking fanfare; Sam didn't do fanfare. "So, are we going to talk about my parents? I think these things always start with shit about parents," she offered.
He let her have her no-nonsense cheek and her distance. It wasn't worth it to find a chink in that armor, not yet. Smiling, he followed her back into the room and quietly closed the door. In this office there was no desk, nothing to separate him from his patient. There was a couch, his chair, but it was informal for the most part. as he preferred it to be. Most people found it harder to relax in a formal patient room, and that always seemed counter productive to him when he was asking them to relax enough to talk about their problems.
"If you want to talk about your parents, you can. Or how you'd rather have pizza for lunch than subs," he said, stepping across the room without coming close to her to sit in his chair, Spot following at his heels. "You can talk about whatever you like. I'm here to listen, occasionally ask questions. Sometimes a lot of questions. It varies."
The room reminded Sam of some massage parlor, and she reached back and slid a hand along the white at her hip. "Do I get a free massage when we're done?" she asked, bravado and no sign of the fact that something like that would make her run from the room in panic. There was sweat dotting the edges of her brow, and indication that she really should get her ass somewhere to detox, instead of trying to just go cold turkey all of a sudden like this. If he paid close attention, her breathing was slightly shallow, and the pulse at her neck was thrumming away.
"My parents are cons. I have nine brothers and one sister, and that's not counting the ones they illegally sold. When I was fifteen, they married me off to the forty-year-old landlord for free rent. I'm still married. I just ran the fuck away. I stole shit for the family before I could talk, and I'm not traumatized by any of it." Which was, oddly enough, true in comparison to the shit with Micah. "And I don't like pizza or subs. It's all sushi these days. I mooch off my roommate." If she tripped up on the word roommate, well, she didn't seem to fucking notice.
"Spa formerly and there's nothing to stop you from going to get one afterwards if you want." It wasn't a service he provided here though, even if he fully believed that he had more than one patient who could benefit from it. Given her preference for not being touched, he thought that she might not be one of them though. The information about her parents, her family was noted, but given the matter of fact way that she got it out, he wasn't going to focus on it.
"Why sushi?" For a moment he simply watched her as he waited for her answer. The sweat on her brow, the shallow breathing, the thrumming pulse at her throat and the way her booted foot twitched, shook. Jack wondered when she'd taken her last hit. If it was last night, and he suspected it was, it was possibly the first signs of withdrawal. That it should happen so soon meant she was taking a lot, more than she should, but it was possible that he was also seeing the signs of her anxiety. Either way, it didn't paint a good picture. "When was the last time you took something, Sam?
She acknowledged the statement about the spa with a sound, but with no words, and she stared at him for a second, because she thought she misunderstood his question about the sushi. "Huh? Oh, I stay with this rich fucker in Aria, and I tried sushi for the first time a few weeks ago. I like it," she admitted, and her fondness when she mentioned the rich fucker faded into something almost defensive when she admitted to liking the sushi. People from shit New Jersey didn't like things like sushi. Liking sushi was like wearing dresses or liking romantic movies. It wasn't tough, and she had trouble admitting to it. Her head jerked up when he asked when the last time she'd had something was, and she considered lying to him, but the dark pupils in her inky eyes were pinpoint. She was tweaking, not in withdrawal, and she knew it, but she didn't expect this guy to know about that shit. "Early yesterday," she admitted. "I didn't want to smoke it in front of Liam last night," she admitted, and she had stopped shooting when Neil started getting worried about everything.
The roommate must have been the rich fucker, but the defensiveness when she mentioned liking sushi was something else entirely. She didn't seem the type to be defensive over liking something, so it must have been what she liked. There was something there, but it didn't seem as immediate as other concerns. Jack made a mental note of it, one that he would write down later, after their session in his private records. "How long have you been doing meth?" Then, in order to soften the question added, "If you don't mind me asking."
She sighed, and she considered not answering because her head was starting to pound, but she was sitting there, wasn't she? And part of her wanted this shit to stop. She was out of control, and she knew she was out of control, but she couldn't do anything about it. "A few weeks? I did some heroin before that, but I was afraid Neil would see the tracks. Some Xannies before that. Lots of booze and pot." She could have kept going, could have added a bunch of other names between. "It's been a long fucking time, ok? And I just want to go back like it was before. This guy, I have to get so fucking wasted to let him touch me. We've slept together once, and I was so fucked up I don't even remember."
He listened, the details slowly filling in. Sam had told him some over the journals, the catalyst that had brought about her drug usage, but there was more to the story than she'd told him last night. "Do you want to give them up?" He finally asked bluntly. "Because you can want everything, you can have the support system, and the therapists, and the medications that you need, but unless you want to give up the heroin, the meth, and anything else you've done, all of that doesn't matter."
"I want to not fucking need them," she told him. Because that was fucking it, wasn't it? "My ex-girlfriend dealt, and I used some then, but I didn't need them to get out the fucking door. It was a hit at a party, or a joint after a good fuck. This isn't like that. This is me needing it to get through the day without breaking someone's face," she admitted, and it was a testament to the night before that she could even manage that much verbal introspection. Fuck. She wasn't going to fall apart in this damn low-lit massage table room.
"Okay." This he could work with. "If that's what you want, you have options, even if you don't want to see me. There are several outpatient clinics that you can go to. They're probably going to put you on methadone to get you through the worst of withdrawal and then they'll start weaning you from that. In the short term, you're likely going to need benzodiazepines-- Xanax, Ativan, Valium -- for your panic attacks, but you're going to need therapy. Those drugs are better for short term use rather than a permanent fix."
"Outpatient," she said carefully, wanting to make sure he'd actually said that. Admittedly, the offer of her beloved Xannies to keep the panic attacks at bay helped it all seem a little more doable, and she took it as permission to pull the bottle out of the pocket of her shirt and slide one onto her palm, letting him see that it was just one. She'd need it to get through the rest of this fucking conversation. "Ok. What do I do?"
"I'll give you the names of some places. You can pick whichever one you like best. They're going to urine test you to see what's in your urine, so it's in your best interest to be honest with them." Jack glanced at the pill in her hand, then at the amber bottle that she had taken out of her shirt and gestured for it. For other people, he would have waited for them to hand it over, but for her he pulled his hands back, cupping them so she could toss it. He doubted they were prescribed for her and on the off chance they were, he still wanted to check the dosage on them. "After this I'm going to weigh you, so I can make sure you have a dose that's accurate."
Pissing in a cup. Great. Her life had come down to pissing in a fucking cup. But she sighed, and she tossed the bottle at him. She didn't hesitate in letting the thing go, which was a sure indication there was more at home. And he was right; the bottle claimed she was Sylvia Gunther, and the pills were the 4mg each, the maximum dosage for an adult, and she sure took more than one a day. "You have a scale in this joint?" she asked, looking around for it and hopping down to the ground. She was small, soft and curvy, but she still didn't need 4mgs of anything, not really. "If I ever run for president, this is totally going to fuck my chances, isn't it?" she asked, making light. She considered telling him about Liam's stupid hotel plan for later, but she held her tongue. That was Liam's shit to discuss. Instead, she went with something more basic, as she waited for the scale. "I tried to set Iris up with this guy I'm into. Add that to the shit you need to shrink list."
"I do." It was not one of the old fashioned weight scales that he brought out from underneath one of the cabinets but a rather modern one. Simple, made of polycarbonate that one stood on to get the weight from and he stayed far to the side, giving her space to get on. "I'm going to put you on diazepam -- valium,once a day and something called oxazepam that you can take every 6 to 8 hours as needed. No more, but if you find yourself needing less, call me." He glanced down at the scale once it beeped that it had recorded her weight and finally pulled out that small notebook to make a record of it. It would go into her formal record later. He left the scale out to be cleaned, as he had it cleaned after every patient, and started going over the list of side effects for her. What things she needed to watch out for, what things were likely, and which meant that she needed to seek medical attention. "I can have Jackie print out a list of everything so you can have a reference. Do you have any questions about what I've told you so far?"
Ok, this was starting to sound really fucking medical, which meant she had absolutely no questions, and she just wanted to bounce. Oh, except for... "Do these have street names? I don't have insurance." Such was the life of a contract worker. She was antsy to get out the door, and it showed in the way she shifted from foot to foot heavily, hand out for the prescriptions. Prescriptions always meant GTFO at a doctor's office.
No insurance. Wonderful. "Yes, I have some samples you can take." Which also meant limited supply, something Jack felt better about. "And don't get them off the street. Come here if you need more." Opening up the door to his office, he headed out first to get the meds. "If you go to one of the outpatient clinics, they can provide you with methadone. And I want you to call me tomorrow, let me know which one you're going into so I can talk with your doctor." Jack trusted her to do that much. "I'll meet you out front." Meds first, then a copy of the drug information for her and a list for the clinics in town that provided outpatient addiction services.