Opioid use impacts more than just the person who is using.
This story is from a mother who has lost her daughter to this deadly disease.
Just when I got sober, my oldest daughter, who just turned 18, reached out to me and said, “Mom, I’m shooting coke and heroin and I want to stop, and I need help.”
And so I went up to Washington and I got her, and she was a ghost. She was about 98 pounds. Her body was just ravaged from the heroin. We had this battle just back and forth and back and forth and she’d, you know stop using for a couple of days, and then she’d go back to using.
It’s so brutally difficult to get sober and get off opioids. It’s incredibly painful. She’d withdraw, and I would hold her in my lap and just tell her that she’s got to fight through it and that she can do it, and she can make it, and I can remember her asking me a couple of times, “Mom, can I just, can I go to a clinic? Can I try Suboxone?” And at the time, it was, no, no, that’s just a substitute. I didn’t know anything about medication assisted therapy. I had no business saying no. I had no idea what it was.
Off and on, she would get a couple of days off here and there, and she would return to using. And I had found her contraband, and I knew that she’d been using intravenously in the house. We were having this huge fight. She’s yelling at me, and I’m going, “Brittany, this stuff’s going to kill you”. And she says, “Oh, mother, quit being so dramatic.”
And that was the last conversation I had with her. It was actually a couple of days before Mother’s Day. I got a knock at the door about 5:30 in the morning that she had overdosed alone in a bathroom on the floor. And she was gone.
I just, you know, working in the field and being a part of this culture of drug treatment I always knew that that was a possibility. I mean, that was the last thing I said to her was, “This stuff is going to kill you.” But when that knock came, you can’t describe the emotion, the thought. Nobody knocks on your door that early in the morning for good. Like, it just doesn’t happen. And I knew as soon as the knock came, I knew what it was. I didn’t even have to open the door. I knew what it was. I knew she was gone.
She was 22 years old. – For a lot of these people, the disease is profound. And if you don’t give them a treatment that works, you can run them through any kind of process. You can lock them up. But when they get near the substance that they’re addicted to, they cannot resist it. But if you give a person a medication that works, that helps them resist it, now they have a fighting chance.
I started with The Life Change Center after years of struggling. Even my childhood was about addiction – both of my parents were alcoholics. Brothers, sister, my uncles cousins…everybody. I felt different than the other kids in school, I was afraid all of the time. I remember feeling so alone and out of control. It ended up that I ran away from home, got married and started a family as a kid. I remember feeling some self-worth back then, but it was full blown drinking and partying. I lost my child, I had to give her up for adoption. As much as I still feel the pain of that decision it was probably best for her. My life really started to fall apart after giving her up, I starting getting trouble and went to jail God knows how many times.
My first counseling for this was because of the arrests. It didn’t work. I went through drug court, used pretty much the whole time and then started full blown again right when I got out. It seemed to me that the first sense of control I had was when I started Methadone in Las Vegas, but I was still so lost. In some ways it was great but I was using benzos the whole time, I was really just getting high then too. I pretty much just numbed myself from life. At that time in my life I had started a family and had two beautiful children and a loving husband. But I wasn’t there for them. It kills me to think about it. My daughter would plead with me not to use the benzos… but I thought I was in control.
Things started to work out after I moved to Reno and started at The Life change Center. They offer a lot of help for going into recovery… everybody is available to help. It is a comfortable place to be at, the groups and counseling really helps. I was ready and they were there to help. I just wanted to feel better about myself; I was so tired of being in a rut. What is amazing to me is that I have been sober for 37 months! My life today… it’s better, and I’m still working on it. I can honestly say that I feel happy. Wow, it’s weird to think about and accept. I’m working, I have a better relationship with my family and I’m a good mom. I can’t tell you how good it feels to look in the mirror and like the person you see.
If you’re thinking about it, I know how scary it is to be there. Just know that it’s easy once you make that phone call. I know what it is like to feel that hopeless feeling. You will start to feel Hope once you make that phone call.
