gosney in a hospital for months. i was shot through the stomach. i was shot through the liver. my diaphragm was torn. my stomach had a was torn. had a collapsed lung. my spleen ended up having to remove my spleen. at first he turned to painkillers. i was on anti-depressants. i was on tranquilizers. i was on sedatives. then worse. and i started drinking and i started using elicit drugs, as well. he had gone back to work in a san francisco law office. when i look back on it now i don t even see how i walked around much less worked a full-time job. it was so painful for me to be conscious i just really i drank myself to unconsciousness every day. in 1982, gosney moved to the island of maui in hawaii with another commune that collapsed. when he lost one job, he applied for another with the maui police department.
a few weeks. i found some websites where you could order painkillers online and have them delivered, and i just kept taking them. how did the drugs make you feel? they make you feel like everything s okay and you can manage everything, which leads to feeling like they re necessary to get through your daily life. how hard was it to hide that from everyone? it was absolutely necessary, in my mind. i was worried about the shame of it, having this weakness. it s not so much the church putting it on people, but it s people getting that idea that there s a certain standard that they ve got to live up to. heaven forbid, if there s a problem in your life, you re not going to talk about it. you know, it s interesting because i didn t know the whole story until now. really? i never really talked about it. kathy kept her addiction a secret. and eventually, she added a few more drugs to her roster. methadone and tranquilizers.
her moment of truth came from a private embarrassment she still can t forget. i just remember there were some people that came over that were friends of my husband s. and i was so strung out on tranquilizers, and i just basically passed out on a chair. and i know that embarrassed him so much. and when i realized, you know, i was really ashamed of it. i went away for a few months. went to a treatment center. and i ended up staying there for almost three months. but while kathy recovered, shannon, a single mom with her own daughter, fell into the same trap, except she quickly graduated from pills to heroin.
like at least five doctors standing around my bed and they were asking me questions like do you feel dizzy, do you feel light-headed, do you have shortness of breath. i didn t know why they were asking me these questions. when the doctors checked his blood oxygen levels, they were way below normal, so they recommended a sleep study to find out why. the result was obstructive sleep apnea. obstructive sleep apnea, for example, afflicts 24% of adult males and 9% of adult females. the tranquilizers had not been developed. in fact the very first dr. william demint has been nicknamed the father of sleep science. he began studying sleep in the 1950s when few people realized how much there was to discover. dr. demint quickly learned that sleep was complicated, filled with patterns and problems. i had had enough interaction with people that had complaints about their sleep. i said let us open a sleep
i always feel like someone is going to shoot me. yeah, it scars you. for vern gosney, it could be walking down the street. i could see a man with light skin and black hair from behind and in my mind i thought jim jones was alive. the airport shooting left gosney in a hospital for months. i was shot through the stomach. i was shot through the liver. my diaphragm was torn. my stomach had a was torn. had a collapsed lung. my spleen ended up having to remove my spleen. at first he turned to painkillers. i was on anti-depressants. i was on tranquilizers. i was on sedatives. then worse. and i started drinking and i started using illicit drugs as well. he had gone back to work in a san francisco law office. when i look back on it now i