Am I a Drug Addict?

Raphael, is a tall, slender man with light brown skin.  He came to the U.S. from a small African country whose name I cannot spell.  It is on the Red Sea wedged between Ethiopia and Sudan.  He now works as chief technician at the dialysis center where I go three times a week, a job which enabled him to pay for his four children to obtain degrees from U.S. universities.     

On Friday he came to my chair and injected something into the tube of clean blood coming out of the machine and into my vein. 

“What are you giving me today?” I asked.

“EPO,” he said.

“That’s what Lance Armstrong took,” I said, “and they called him a drug addict.”

Raphael and I laughed.

I have been getting EPO shots, or the equivalent, for years.  My poorly functioning kidneys leave poisons in my blood, which must be cleaned by dialysis.  The kidneys also fail to convert proteins into hemoglobin, resulting in my becoming anemic.  EPO shots, which a nurse described
to me as “artificial blood”, build up the hemoglobin. 

Without EPO my energy level drops to zero, and I mope about the house like a zombie.  A few days after I have a shot, I feel great and zoom about town in my Hyundai like a 25-year-old kid.  When I went for my annual checkup, my primary doctor said that for an 83-year-old woman, I was “amazing.” 

I never thought of myself as a drug addict.  But I am totally dependent on those shots. My doctors agree that I will need EPO for the rest of my life.

During his treatment for cancer, Lance Armstrong received massive doses of chemotherapy, which messes up the blood the same way my bad kidneys do.  Armstrong’s cancer is in remission.  Do his doctors feel he still needs EPO?  If his doctors say that he needs EPO, then Lance Armstrong was right to say he never took illegal drugs.  But without doctors’ orders, then it was a “performance enhancing drug.”

Most people now condemn Lance Armstrong as a liar and a cheat.  As a person who is dependent on EPO, I see another way of looking at his situation. Armstrong is arrogant and a bully.  There is nothing illegal about that. 

Politicians make impassioned statements about lots of things – taxes, gun control, abortion – which deserve a closer examination.  Just remember: There are no simple solutions to complicated problems.