- April 18, 2024
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All the statistics in the nation can not tell us what it is like to live in the world of addiction.
Here is Gracie (her real name is withheld), with her story of how she became addicted in Virginia, and how she is working hard to recover from that addiction in Volusia County, to be a healthy, happy, productive person in our community.
Gracie started out with a bang. In eighth grade, responding to peer pressure, the first drug she ever did was acid, a hallucinogen. She still has post traumatic stress syndrome from that experience.
She progressed from acid to ecstasy in 9th grade. She was with a group of friends who were into the whole club scene. She obtained a fake ID. At one point, she was in a car with others who got caught with marijuana. She went before a judge who dropped charges against her. During this time, she and her friends would shoot up ketamine, a tranquilizer and use other drugs, like PCP.
Gracie was a teenager out of control. Her unruly friends, behavior, and drug use led her to be in and out of the juvenile detention system. After several violations of probation, she was placed in a group home. During the time she was in the group home, she would have visits to her parents’ home, where she could find cheap highs by using inhalants and sniffing freon out from the air conditioner. Her parents did not know what she was doing. She had her first rehabilitation treatment in 12th grade. She was placed in an alternative school, from which she graduated.
Throughout her 20s, she used all kinds of different drugs. She smoked methamphetamine and crack. It was in her late 20s when she started with opioids. A friend of hers, with whom she worked, offered her Vicodin, which she really liked. She started using it regularly. During that time she dated a man who was a drug dealer. He found a pain management doctor, who would prescribe various opioid drugs used to treat pain. Gracie and her boyfriend would have as many as 120 pills prescribed for them at a time. When Gracie and her boyfriend broke up, she continued going to that doctor until that doctor was arrested for drug dealing.
The next doctor Gracie went to was even more crooked than the first. He would prescribe up to 160 roxies (Oxycodone) and dilaudids at a time, with never any kind of thorough physical exam. She would take handfuls of roxies. That doctor prescribed clonazepam, a tranquilizer from the benzodiazepine class of drugs. Gracie was a zombie. The doctor then put her on methadone. It was at this time, Gracie went into rehabilitation treatment again. At the age of 30, Gracie went to rehab for a second time.
Gracie was withdrawn from methadone at the second treatment center. She said, “That was the most godawful thing I ever went through. It got in your bones. I could’t do it.”
At the treatment center, she was put on seboxone. She stayed on that drug until she knew she was clean enough from the other drugs. When she got out of treatment, Gracie withdrew herself from the seboxone. Again, it was a harsh withdrawal. For a month, all she did was go from her bed to the bathroom. During that time, she was hospitalized for pancreatitis. Her fiancé broke off their engagement. He could not stand to see her like she was anymore.
By this time, Gracie did not care about herself. She used heroin, opioids, smoked crack, drank alcohol. She did not care if she lived or died. She had gone through the whole week in a drugged-out stupor when she called a “friend” to bring some more “stuff” over. The apartment she was in had a security alarm system. She remembers setting the alarm, then letting a man into the house. She doesn’t remember anything after that. The man threw her in the shower, turned on the water, then left. The alarm went off, which alerted the landlord, who called his daughter who lived close, to check out the house. She found Gracie unconscious and called 911.
Gracie was hospitalized and in a coma for four days. Her immediate family was at her bedside.
“That’s what did it for me,” she recalled. “By the grace of God, that’s what did it for me. To see my dad, who was so loving and kind, my dad was whimpering in pain, ‘Please, please, I’m begging you,' he said.”
When Gracie went home to her parents’ house, they tried to figure out what to do to help her. She did not want to go back into rehab. She knew what she needed to do, and the treatment center would just cost more money. She had met a girl in the last rehab who had been posting pictures on Facebook about how happy she was and how well she was doing at a sober house in Daytona Beach. Gracie wanted what she saw with that girl.
During the same time, she got in a huge fight with her mother. Her mother kicked her out of the house. Gracie had nowhere to go. She slept in her car that night. She begged her father to let her back in the house the next morning, long enough to make some calls. She contacted the sober living house and came to Daytona.
“Gracie, you lost your engagement, all your friends and family…something changed. Something changed from that night. I was finally, for the first time, hopeful and serious about getting better,” said Gracie.
Since she has been in recovery, her relationship with her parents has improved. Gracie has become patient, which is a huge change for her. She lives in a house with 10 other women, which requires a whole lot of patience, about which she feels positive. She is serious about the relationships she is building, especially with herself. She finally feels she is worth something. She is working to make ends meet, but money is not her priority. Living a sober life is. “I feel like I hit the lottery, but I never played," she said.
Her goal these days is to be of service to others. She wants to help those who cannot help themselves.
