Welcome back to the peripheral.

On this episode, we're going to be hearing two stories, one about prescription addiction and one about drinking.

Now they are two very different stories, but both of these

stories hit very close to home from me because of the events and details that happened. It reminds

me of my family, my brother, my friends. If you combine these two stories, you have a large portion of my life.

The first story is Jeremiah, who is in a difficult situation where he has serious back pain

because he's overweight. The only thing that gets him out of this are pain pills.

But the pain pills tend to be worse than the original problem.

Imagine sinking in quicksand, and somebody hands you a limb,

but when you reach out and grab that limb, it's covered with thorns,

and it's your only salvation, but now you're stuck to it.

Hello.

Jeremiah.

This is him.

Hey, Justin.

How you doing?

Good, man.

Good.

I grew up, uh, suburbs of Detroit.

You know, I had a pretty normal life, you'd say, uh, no, uh, in my childhood or bad things happening to me growing up, you know, for a, so that you could find a direct, uh, cause or reason. It's a pretty, pretty normal life.

You know, I went to college, got a decent job after college, worked a good 10 years, possibly, maybe. So we're talking early to mid-30s now is when my problem with opiates began to unfold I'm a some may say a large individual about six seven depending on the day four hundred fifty five hundred pounds you're a damn linebacker man yeah yeah so but at this point in time we're

probably talking 2012 2011 I had started to get dangerously like. Like, when I'm around 450 or five being as tall as I am, luckily I can hide it pretty well or at least deal with it and get around and do pretty much what I need to do without any obstructions.

...