I believed I was on the threshold of danger. I felt the impending of ruin. Though I had never experienced the sensation of an opiate I even found my body already crying for its comfort. I found myself struggling hour after hour with a desire to try myself. I alternated between a belief that I was strong enough for the test and the instinct that told me the blood in my veins was waiting like a wild animal to pounce upon a first form of self-indulgence.
At last I yielded.
“There is no harm in the proper use of this,” said the doctor, seeing my expression,—“by a woman of your type.”
I laughed in his face.
I hardly recognized the sound of this laugh; it was not my own. It was the laugh of a new personality. It was care-free and desperate at one time.
“There is no need of your suffering so terribly after each adjustment I make of these cords,” said the doctor a few days later, sympathetically.
“But I suffer so at night,” said I.
“I will leave you something,” said he. “Do not use it oftener than necessary.”
Why should I tell you the imperceptible steps by which, partly because I believed myself destined to become a victim, I fell an abject slave to this drug? I need only say that while my arm was still suffering from its injury I gave myself false promises from time to time. “When the pain is gone,” I said a thousand times, “there will be no need of this comforter.”
When I was obliged to admit that I suffered no more, it was a shock to find myself secretly procuring the opiate in order to continue its use undiscovered.