Today we’d like to introduce you to Melissa Bond. Them and their team share their story with us below:
Melissa Bond was caring for two infant children — a newborn, and a year-old toddler with Down syndrome. It was 2009, and she had recently lost her magazine job as a result of the recession. Her marriage was disintegrating when she was hit with sudden, pathological insomnia. She spent night after night pacing her house in Salt Lake City, watching the hours tick by.
After her daughter was born, Bond was still crushed with insomnia. Bond had hoped that the persistent insomnia was just the pregnancy. But when her daughter was born in October 2009, her insomnia didn’t go away. “It felt literal like my eyes were being peeled back,” said Bond. She began hallucinating. “My physical body was starting to fall apart.” In late January 2010, she saw a physician specializing in hormonal imbalances whom Bond refers to in the book as “Dr. Amazing.” He scribbled her a prescription for the benzodiazepine Ativan. “You can’t beat it for sleep,” he said. “It’s an incredible drug.”
Bond’s new memoir, “Blood Orange Night: My Journey Into Madness” (Gallery Books), reveals how that prescription sent her into an abyss of benzodiazepine dependence that lasted for years.
“There were times when I thought, ‘Should I just go walk into a glen and take myself out? I don’t know if I can handle this anymore,’” Bond said, adding that after a year and a half on the drugs, she suddenly realized the drugs her doctor had prescribed had made her so physically dependent that quitting cold turkey could have resulted in psychosis or fatal seizure. “I did not know if I would ever be healthy again,” she wrote.
The Ativan worked — for a couple of weeks. Two months later, Dr. Amazing bumped her prescription from 2 milligrams to 4 milligrams. Within a year she was imbibing 6 milligrams of the stuff daily.
However, Bond was still only sleeping a couple of hours a night. Worse, she couldn’t remember things day to day. She had severe stomach cramps and couldn’t eat, eventually dropping close to 30 pounds — at her lowest, she clocked in at 100 pounds, the same amount she weighed when she was 11 years old. She smelled ashtrays everywhere. She constantly fell and had bruises all over her body. Any kind of loud noise — even her children’s cries — would make her feel like “my skin was getting pierced,” she said.
After just four weeks of using Ativan, the brain develops a tolerance for the drug — and that tolerance means the patient experiences withdrawal symptoms despite still being on it. And unlike other drugs, like opioids, you can’t just stop cold turkey, as there is a risk of seizures and death.
“It felt like I was in the Wild West of pharmaceutical drugs, you know, like, in another landscape that no one had documented,” Bond said.
Bond eventually found a certified addictionologist in Utah who specialized in helping people get off benzodiazepines. He switched her to Valium — a benzodiazepine that exits the body much slower than Ativan — and slowly reduced her dosage. Every time she dropped her dosage, she experienced the feeling of fire under the skin, nausea, muscle spasms, and rage.
“My guiding light, my absolute determination was to reduce the impact on [friends] and on my family as much as possible,” Bond would spend nights at a friend’s house to shield her children from her withdrawals.
A year and a half into the tapering off, her vision went black while driving her two children in the car. At this point, she decided to keep her daily intake of Valium at 5 milligrams, an amount that safely allowed her to function without causing further cognitive decline. She still takes this amount of Valium every night. “It’s not the Hollywood ending,” Bond says. “The Hollywood ending would be me completely off, rising out of the ashes with wings. But I’m functional and I don’t hurt every day now.”
Bond is now divorced, with a full-time IT job and a new home she shares with Finch and Chloe, now 12 and 11.
“There’s a long time of recovery and repair,” she said. But now, “my life is incredibly full and robust. I’m raising my children and we have a deep connection to one another and we play and there’s joy and light in the house.”
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
Getting off doctor-prescribed benzodiazepines was, as Bond says, “like the Olympics of drug withdrawal but with no one in the stadium, the lights off and my husband slipping out the back door.” This drug’s impact on the brain is just beginning to be understood. Many doctors still don’t understand that it takes months if not years to successfully withdraw and for Bond, the lack of understanding meant she had to research and put together her own long-term rehab. No insurance companies would pay for a withdrawal that can take a year.
Additionally, many of Bond’s friends and family did not understand that benzodiazepine dependence was very different from an addiction that was driven by an impulse and compulsion. Bond struggled with the shame that came from a cultural narrative of addiction, though she felt no compulsion to use the drugs. She simply knew that if she didn’t take her doctor-prescribed dose, she’d have muscle seizures, tremors, and possible psychosis.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Bond is a poet and narrative journalist. She’s written several chapbooks of poetry and has performed in Poetry Slam nationals in both Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon. She was Associate Editor and Poetry Editor for the Wasatch Journal, a long-form, glossy magazine serving the Intermountain West. During that time, she won awards for being the Gutsiest Spoken Word Poet, Best Poet in Motion, and Best Profile Writer for the Western Publishing Association’s Maggie Awards.
In addition to the printed page, Melissa loves playing around on the stage and on the radio. She’s written and performed her own work in numerous venues in Salt Lake City, including the Rose Wagner Black Box during the Sundance Film Festival. She performed in The Vagina Monologues at the University of Utah’s Kingsbury Hall (in front of her grandmother and hundreds of other folks) and spent several years writing and producing fictional shorts for KRCL, Utah’s only independent radio station.
Her short film, Googled, which is a love song to her special needs son, premiered at the San Jose International Short Film Festival in 2016.
Bond’s memoir Blood Orange Night was published by Simon and Schuster in June 2022.
Have you learned any interesting or important lessons due to the Covid-19 Crisis?
The crisis will either crush you or force you into a reevaluation of your life and your culture. Covid-19 forced me to develop a Wellness toolkit for both myself and my children. We accepted the things we couldn’t change and made sure to have the inoculation of play as our vaccine against despair and loneliness.
We also were reminded of how essential service to others is in our family. We supported others and made it a practice to reach out to others with food, time, and love as often as we were able.
Pricing:
- Hardcover of Blood Orange Night – $27
Contact Info:
- Website: www.melissaabond.com
- Instagram: @melissabauthor
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MelissaABond/
Image Credits
Josh Blumental
