My Drug Addicted Daughter Hospitalized and Won't Quit.

My daughter is 24 years old and has 2 beautiful girls; ages 13 months and 4years old and they have different fathers. She married out of high school and has been divorced twice by two different men. She constantly has a different man in her home and the only men she's interested in are drug abusers, thieves, etc.

I know that she has been "playing" with drugs since high school but now she is using more dangerous drugs in more dangerous ways by snorting and shooting up. She has recently been hospitalized. Around 1am in the morning while staying the night at my home she wasn't feeling well and vomiting so she asked to go to the hospital.

When we got there the doctor approached me and said "we're doing everything we can to save her"! I didn't know it was something that serious. I knew she had been running a fever off and on for a couple weeks but didn't think so much of it because an ear infection was going around with her daughters. When my daughter found out the news she began screaming “I don't want to die! I don't want to die and go to Hell!"

We had our preacher come in and pray with her and she said she wanted to get her life straightened out and she prayed for forgiveness. Later the doctor said she has a serious infection in her blood. Her oxygen level, blood counts, and blood pressure was very low with a fever of 102.2. When they were able to stabilize her they sent her to another hospital where they told me she has a 50/50 chance to survive.

That evening she started having withdrawals. They had her on different antibiotics, nerve medications, anxiety medication, pain medication, and nicotine patches. By the next day she was starting to be a little more like herself; loving and compassionate, which is a side I haven't seen of her for a long time now. The next day she started to get a little more irritable, but the doctor said her organs were still unaffected and the infection is getting better and in a couple days they might take the iv antibiotics out and start giving her a pill form.

I gave her her cell phone back and that night at 11pm one of her ex drug user boyfriends came to see her. The next morning her blood counts went out of whack again and they scheduled a blood transfusion. The same boyfriend came again to visit and she kept asking me to leave the room but I wouldn't and when the doctor arrived to do the transfusion she told him now wasn't a good time because she had a friend that drove a long time to come see her.

Later her and the ex boyfriend snuck out of the hospital and were spotted in the parking lot and found in the cafeteria. I then changed her number, disconnected her phone, and took it away so she couldn't contact anymore of her drug using friends. She was furious and made me leave the room. When I did she told the nurse she needed the phone so she could call me back in, but she called the ex boyfriend and begged him to come back and get her and she would sign herself out but he wouldn't.

She later convinced my mother to let her use my mothers’ phone and she called a different drug using boyfriend. When I went to see her later she took my phone and told me to give her her own phone back or she would break mine. I told her she was acting childish so she threw it on the ground and when I tried to get in she went after it as well so I turned my back to her to pick it up and block her and she ran into me and fell backward.

She started blaming me for pushing her down on purpose. She again made me leave the room saying that her ex boyfriend was coming back in the morning to get her and she is signing herself out and added that she wouldn't allow me to see her girls again. She is still currently in the hospital and I'm the only one here with her but I have to stay in the waiting room because she doesn't want to see me unless I give her the phone back.

My husband thinks I should, but I don't think I'm helping her any if I do. I need advise please. I'm so tired and desperate for some help for my daughter. I've asked her to go to counseling with me but she said she doesn't want any help. What can I do?

Alcoholism-and-Drug-Addiction-Help.com Answer

Your daughter clearly has herself a serious drug addiction, and unless you stand firm and start holding her accountable for her actions, she's probably just going to end up killing herself.

You did the right thing by taking away her phone - why wouldn't you if all she's doing is using it to phone her drug dealing boyfriends to come visit her in hospital so she can get a fix? And of course since you tried to stop that, she simply did what drug addicts do - manipulate the situation so she could get her way.

Counseling alone isn't going to help your daughter. She needs to get into a long-term drug rehab program where she can receive intensive treatment for her addiction, away from the temptations of the world, and get her life back on track. In your mind that needs to be a non-negotiable.

And the only way that is going to happen is if you do an intervention of sorts, using her children as motivation for her to agree. In other words you need to tell her that unless she agrees to go for treatment and commits to turning her life around, either you're going to get Social Services involved who are likely to take her children away from her because it's impossible to take care of them properly if she's high half the time, or you're going to look to take over custody of the kids until she proves she's kicked her drug habit.

Now that may sound harsh, but it's actually the most loving thing you can do for her and her children. Her children deserve to have a mother who loves and takes care of them no matter what, which is simply an impossibility if she's a drug addict. And unless you take a stand and insist that her getting help is a non-negotiable, the way things are going she's probably just going to end up killing herself.

Logic and reason simply don't work with addicts. They have to know that the consequences of choosing to continue with a life of addiction will be extreme unless they do something. And that's why telling her she stands to lose her kids unless she makes changes is probably the only thing that will get through to her.

She'll no doubt resist the idea, possibly even get aggressive, or make empty promises to change with no intention of keeping them. That's why long-term treatment needs to be a non-negotiable. Preferably 6 months or more. This is about saving a life, so you and your husband need to remain steadfast that the only way to help your daughter is to get her the help she desperately needs.

All the Best

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