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Crystal in The Princess Bride has seen worse. I was 84 pounds and sported a hemoglobin count of two (AIDS patients die at four, I'm told), suffered 3 weeks on the burn unit as they ripped the dead tissue from my arms and my legs. I endured 31 operations and 13 weeks in the hospital and STILL found ways to sneak the one coke dealer I knew in Phoenix (after two good friends muscled me onto a plane home from Philadelphia to my parents in Phoenix) into the hospital and had saved enough carelessly tossed aside or unused syringes in a pillow case in the air conditioner vent of my bathroom to inject her product straight into the catheter running from my chest tubes directly into my heart. Life experience? In spades, though it was closer to death experience. It's a place I dare not visit again and certainly don't recommend it as the pivotal point in an aspiring writer's career or life-gathering experiences. I finally got out of God's way and told of the miracles He brought into my life. I wrote a book about it in two weeks last fall, a dozen years after my return to life, and published it two months later. It is called The Other Woman at the Well: a truthful accounting of addiction overcome. I have a website through the kindness of my chiropractor called www.judithannhillard.com or www.addictionovercome.com. I have begun to travel and speak about my book and my experience with addiction both professionally (some of the MS's after my name are advanced degrees, one of which is in counseling wherein I wrote my thesis on recognizing addiction in adolescents). This is actually working. God is using the biggest mess I ever made of my life and turning it into the most profound message I've ever delivered. Kids and parents, grandparents and teachers sit up and listen to me when I tell my story of certain death and divine intervention. That built-in, factory-equipped baloney detector kids arrive on the planet with understands that this is no D.A.R.E. officer who may arrest them if they tell the truth, nor is it a president's wife who just says no, neither of whom have ever tried drugs and are therefore relegated to the talk of all grown-ups in the Peanuts cartoons on television, "Wahhhh, wahhhh, waw, waaaaahhh" Me, they believe because I research what they're doing and I've been there. I explain about the "pharm" parties that are killing their classmates and advise the adults not to store any prescriptions that say on the label "Do not drive or operate dangerous machinery"

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