Interview With Dora Sherry : Loss, Addiction, and Recovery:

Dora Sherry : In Her Own Words:
 A violent domestic fight with my husband March 28, 1978 ended with me going over a 3rd floor outdoor balcony to the sidewalk below. I crushed my hip, broke my lower back, and my right femur in 2 places. An angel doctor came into the emergency Room that night at 4 o'clock in the morning. They had me scheduled to amputate my leg and hip the next morning. He transferred me to his hospital and fixed my injuries.  He didn't think that I would ever be able to use the leg to walk again but at least cosmetically I was in tact. We never knew who called him. I spent 2 years in a wheelchair. When I was starting to walk, I left that husband and 2 years after that I became a black belt in Kenpo karate.1983 I broke my back again in a karate tournament and had to start on pain medication. Also started having terrible headaches. They said was a result of the concussion I had when I fell.I had remarried at that time.  I started taking the prescription pain medication for physical pain. But I also discovered the man I had married was not the man I thought he was at the time. He started beating me when another man would look at me. The emotional pain and SHAME caused me to start self medicating without even realizing it. After my son died in 1990 my marriage got worse.So did my opiate addiction. I just started realizing when I wrote the story for the collaborative authors book for Gloria that I never grieved my son for 30 years.  I just kept drowning my pain with pills I've carried all this chronic physical pain,  Without even realizing it was mostly emotional. Every time I would manage to get off those pills for a year or 2 something else would happen. I would get an injury or at one point I had a brain freeze type headache that lasted for 14 months.  I lived on 2 80mg. Oxycontins and 2mg. Dilaudid IV. I was admitted into the hospital 20 times that 14 month period. .