A Former Addict's Story of Rebirth in the ICU

The Tanjung Barat flyover in South Jakarta was like a road to the gates of death for Tio (33) on a Ramadan night in 2025. An MPV overtook sharply from the right side of Tio’s motorbike. Through the rearview mirror, he caught a fleeting glimpse of a girl’s silhouette leaning against the open window before the car slammed into him. Bang! The world instantly went pitch black. Blood vessels in his brain ruptured. In the ICU, Tio lay helpless, enduring three critical days in a coma. Doctors warned Maria (63), his mother, that even if he survived, Tio would never return to his former condition. Outside the room, his close friend Angga (33) was overcome with deep pessimism; he was utterly convinced he would lose Tio forever. Yet fate still had another scenario in store. The horrific accident became a severe blow that pressed the factory reset button on Tio’s entire dark life, which had stretched back over a dozen years.

It started with experimentation. Long before the disaster on the flyover, Tio was a perfect figure in Angga’s eyes. They were childhood friends who grew up together from primary school through to graduating from a prestigious private Catholic junior and senior high school in South Jakarta. Tio was a cheerful child, clever in class, possessed a high artistic spirit for painting, and was skilled at playing football. In class, he was even someone Angga envied because he always stood out. Tio grew up as an only child raised by a single parent. His father left after a divorce when Tio was three years old. Tio frequently moved homes around Jakarta with his mother. After high school, he went to Bandung to study law. It was there that the loneliness of being an only child began to gnaw at him. ‘I just wanted to be a free person back then. Because I was alone,’ Tio recalled when met by CNNIndonesia.com in Jakarta on Thursday (18/6). To chase away the loneliness, he started experimenting with smoking marijuana, which eventually became a regular habit. Tio only lasted a year in Bandung. His studies fell apart. He was then forced by his mother to transfer to a university in Jakarta, taking a music major at an elite private campus in Tangerang. Instead of improving, this new atmosphere opened the door to deeper delinquency. From marijuana, Tio began to get involved with Class IV psychotropic drugs like Dumolid and Calmlet, until he finally tasted methamphetamine. Tio and his university friends often used these drugs inside a car in the campus car park. The intensity escalated from two tablets to six tablets a day. This habit destroyed his university career; for four consecutive semesters, Tio’s GPA hovered at zero point zero. He always tore up warning letters and parent summons from the campus. ‘As long as I was safe and kept getting my allowance,’ he admitted. Until one day in 2013, a phone call from a hospital in Tangerang rang on Maria’s mobile phone, who had just undergone surgery for stage two breast cancer. The hospital informed her that Tio had had an accident on a friend’s borrowed Vespa. But that was not the only news that made Maria gasp. The hospital also informed her that Tio had tested positive for drugs. Before Maria’s tears had dried, the campus called to tell her they intended to expel Tio. While enduring the pain of her cancer, Maria pleaded and begged the campus authorities until they took pity and gave him a second chance. However, Tio could no longer be controlled. His behaviour changed drastically, becoming very emotional. Angga even once witnessed a night when the situation at Tio’s house heated up for no apparent reason. ‘The fight went as far as threatening to kill his mother. He was angry, and I didn’t know what the reason was,’ said Angga. When Maria tried to address the change in attitude, Tio counterattacked and blamed his mother’s divorce as the reason he had no father figure. ‘So it was a lie, Mum. He said he loved me,’ Maria said, mimicking her son’s heart-wrenching cry at the time. Her ex-husband had indeed promised to love Tio before leaving to run for village head in Medan, a false promise without responsibility that damaged Tio’s personality. In 2014, Tio moved again to a third campus, a prestigious arts college in Jakarta for a film studies major. Instead of repenting, he fell further into a pit of acute dependency. Tio was isolated from social life, shut himself in his boarding room, and spent IDR 700,000 out of his total IDR 1 million weekly allowance just to buy methamphetamine. ‘If I didn’t consume it, I’d daydream in my room. Even though I should have been studying. I lost direction. I didn’t know myself,’ Tio said quietly. The impact was clearly visible in early 2016. During a meeting at a café in the South Jakarta area, Angga saw his childhood friend completely destroyed. Tio just sat with a blank stare, rambling meaninglessly, while his saliva dripped from the corner of his lips, gently wiped away by Maria. ‘I felt that, oh, I was going to lose my old friend. There were almost no words I could understand,’ Angga said sorrowfully. Facing a ruined life path and being increasingly shunned by an embarrassed extended family, Maria walked alone, dragging Tio in and out of rehabilitation centres three times. 2018 was their final effort when Tio was admitted to a well-known rehab centre in the Puncak area, Cianjur. There, Tio was thrown into a 2x2 metre iron-barred cell for the detoxification process. For a full week, Tio’s life consisted only of sleeping, eating, and raging with chaotic emotions. However, in the ninth month, Tio ran away because he couldn’t stand it. Maria finally resigned herself to managing Tio’s recovery process at home with tattered finances.