In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

84 Chapter 5 Gendered Risks Health and Infectious Diseases Dot I was waiting for Dot at the library. She was about an hour late for our appointment, but I was aware of her situation. She did not have gas money for her car and had to call someone to bring her a few dollars just to get here. I had offered to pick her up, but she said she would meet me. Perhaps she did not want me to know where she lived. A former methamphetamine user, she had started using opioid pills and had been on methadone for the last few months but could no longer afford the daily dosage. She was dependent on friends who would share their take-home methadone or other pain pills with her, and just about any other drug she could get to help ease her withdrawal symptoms. With little or no income, she could not afford private methadone clinics, and fully funded methadone treatment for the poor was not available without Medicaid. I was interested in the phenomenon of switching from methamphetamine (a stimulant) to pain pills and methadone (depressants), a pattern of use I was finding among many of the women. Dot was a good subject for this inquiry. She also needed help obtaining health and social services, and my study was designed to track this process. Born and raised in the two neighboring counties that made up the outer eastern suburbs of the metropolitan area, Dot moved often within these suburban counties when she was young. As she explained, “I’ve been to about every school in this county [laughs]. Yeah, moving around a lot. Maybe had a handful of homes on my own. We always lived with somebody. Always. So it was pretty rough.” She was an only child and spent time with both parents after they divorced. When I asked how that affected her, she responded, Horribly, because the two options I had wasn’t all that great. My dad was an alcoholic and my mom was bipolar. Diagnosed bipolar. She was also epileptic. It was always, she always came first. Her issues always came first. And she didn’t bond—she still don’t bond with children. So she Health and Infectious Diseases 85 didn’t bond with me. My dad did. And I was a dad’s girl. Usually if I was at home with her it was because I had to be not because I wanted to be. The effect of growing up with a mother who had untreated bipolar disorder weighed heavily on Dot as an adolescent. She dropped out of school when she was sixteen because she was pregnant. She married the child’s father, whom she loved, and had four children with him. While she was faithful to him, he was not faithful to her: Me and him were separated. And we had been separated a couple years because he had to go sow his oats. You know, he had to go out and be wild and fool around, and so we ended up splitting up. And I had got this little bitty junky house. And was trying to work as a waitress, at fact it was at the diner. And we get in this house, and my mother-in-law, his mother, was really good to me. She had brought me some new carpet— not new but some she had gotten somewhere—to lay. And the house hadn’t been put together yet and I was working, and the kids needed dinner and homework needed to be done, and I was just totally exhausted. And, um, a girl I had met from down the street come in with this little baggie and she said here chew this. And I’m like what is it? She said, don’t worry about it. Just chew it. This was Dot’s first introduction to methamphetamine, at the age of twentyeight . As other women who had children and worked told me, she liked it because it gave her energy: And I chewed the baggie. And before I went to work the next day I’d laid the carpet, cooked dinner, all the kids were bathed, the homework was done, and I still had energy [laughs]. . . . And I came home, and I was like where can we get more? And that was it. I mean, I don’t think I went another week without it for five years. I sure didn’t. I really wanted it. Really...

Share