What if? The Ripple Effects of Addiction

Kristina Hawk writes about a sibling's addiction...

My sister and I grew up in the same home, with the same loving and supportive family, and the same middle-class opportunities.  We grew up dancing in our Mom’s dance recitals, twirling batons, marching in summertime parades all over Ohio, catching fireflies, and wading in the creek.  She should be 60 years old, about to retire, and soaking up the joys of her adult children and grandchildren.  But she died of a prescription drug overdose in 2003, at the age of 46.  What started as a beautiful life ended as a life filled with self-imposed loneliness in a filthy apartment in another state, estranged from her family, married to a man who was incarcerated for his seventh domestic violence charge. 

I was working in Columbus when I got the call from my father who had received a call from a police department in West Virginia.  My father said, simply, “Your sister is dead.  Your Mom is swimming and will be home in about an hour.”  I hung up and raced home, trying to get there before she did so I could be the one to deliver the news to my Mom in a slightly less direct way.  The rest of that day is a blur, but my husband packed up a few days of clothes for me and we headed to West Virginia to talk to the police and retrieve my sister’s personal belongings.

For as long as I live, I will never be able to un-see the condition of her apartment.  At first I told the detective that this must be a mistake.  This couldn’t be where my sister would live.  Clothes were strewn everywhere, the living conditions were dirty, and most heart-wrenching of all – there were no photos around of her family.  I found a backpack with her legal papers in it and bags of letters to and from her jailed husband.  I found a Bible with highlighting, a potted plant, and a wind chime.   We carried those things to the Jeep in a driving rain dotted by lightning.  I read the letters, every one of them, on the way home, sobbing.  At some point we chucked them into a dumpster because I was never going to let my family read those letters. 

  

We held a small funeral service on a beautiful summer day in July.  Since then, we all have battled our “what ifs,” but that was not the end of my family’s dance with addiction.

The ripple effects of my sister’s addiction- the addiction that caused her to leave her four precious young children and start off on a tour of bad relationships, bad jobs, and bad friends, that would be her final spiral- were not over.  Not surprisingly, growing up with a mother who is an addict has profound effects on the addict’s children.  Of her four children, one died in an unrelated motorcycle accident. Her second oldest son has struggled with addiction his entire adult life and is often lost to our family. Her oldest son has battled addiction and is in recovery with a beautiful family of his own, and her only daughter is struggling.   As their aunt, their grief crushes me, as I love them fiercely.

My parents, mostly my Mom, will never “get over” losing their daughter.  They were taken on an unplanned painful journey that began when my sister was in middle school. That journey included the dull ache of knowing a child is lost, the agonizing fear of your child’s dangerous friends, the searing guilt of knowing you can’t help, and the intense sorrow of loss.  As my sister’s only sibling and a Mom myself now, I cannot even begin to imagine the “what ifs” my parents think about daily.   I have struggled with my own guilt.  Her addiction has been with me my entire life.   I was there when she arrived home drunk or drugged up, throwing things around, screaming at my parents, lying to them, stealing from them, threatening them. I was there when she was unstable and unpredictable around her children. I was there when she left her husband and her children broken. Did I help her enough? Could we have done more?  What if I had tried one more time?  Would she still be alive?  Would her children be faring better? These are questions that no one can answer, but it doesn’t stop family who are left behind from spinning those questions on sleepless nights. 

We are coming up on the 14^th anniversary of her death on July 20.  In some ways, time has healed some of the wounds from that day.  But in many ways, watching some of her children struggle makes those wounds as fresh as the day she left us.   She had so many wonderful qualities.  She could make me laugh until it hurt, but she could also make me cry until it hurt.   As with most families who have been touched by addiction, I try to focus on the good memories, and try hard to stop with the “what ifs.” 

If you or someone you love is battling addiction, my oldest nephew is proof that you can recover and reclaim your life.   It’s not easy, but there is another way.  For help, please call the Muskingum Area Mental Health and Recovery Services Board at (740) 454-8557. 

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Kristina Hawk is an attorney for the Ohio Fourth District Court of Appeals and co-chair of On The Same Page Muskingum.  She is a graduate of Ohio University and the University of Cincinnati College of Law.  She is also the owner of Kristina Hawk Consulting, LLC, a grant writing and fundraising consulting firm.   Kristina serves on the Board of Trustees of Eastside Community Ministry, an ecumenical ministry seeking to help people transform their lives.  She has served as President of the Ohio Justice Alliance for Community Corrections and as the President of the Muskingum Area Mental Health and Recovery Services Board, where she helped shape policy, administer funds to public behavioral health agencies, and advocate for behavioral health clients.   She and her husband are the parents of two young children who keep them on their toes.

Precept #2: Addiction is a disease.

No one chooses leukemia, heart disease, or depression. Abusing drugs, however, appears to many to be a choice, and a reckless and selfish one. It’s not.

 (David Sheff, Clean)

 Dr. Vicki Ann Whitacre, Medical Director, Zanesville-Muskingum County Health Department

“It takes about five years for the brain to recover from an addiction,” says Dr. Vicki Ann Whitacre, Medical Director of the Zanesville-Muskingum County Health Department for the last 17 years. Dr. Whitacre endorses David Sheff’s precept that addiction is a disease, not a choice or a behavior.

“Addiction,” she says, “becomes a chronic relapsing disease with the brain not able to make normal decisions and respond in the way it did before the addicting substance took over.”

A person’s response to drugs, Dr. Whitacre says, is due to genetics. “Some people do not experience the overwhelming pleasure feeling from opiates; [they don’t] like the way their body feels from drinking alcohol or using pain pills or opiates. That person can try a drug once and walk away from it.” 

Others, however, respond differently. “Those who get the pleasure feeling, and who like their body’s response to heroin or opiates, will continue to pursue the feeling,” notes Dr. Whitacre.  “As they use, it takes more and more of the addicting substance to get the same, or nearly the same, feeling. This is called tolerance.”

And then it’s not so easy to just stop using drugs. “If the addicting substance is not available, the person’s body experiences withdrawal, which can be very unpleasant.” Withdrawal symptoms, she says, include sweating, trembling, diarrhea, and pain.  “The person knows that the opiates or heroin will provide relief from these physically painful symptoms.”

Is there a cure for addiction? “As with other chronic diseases---diabetes, high blood pressure, etc.,” says Dr. Whitacre, “there is currently no known cure for opiate addiction. It can be controlled with appropriate treatment, but there tend to be relapses, just as there are in any chronic disease.”

The only sure way to avoid addiction is not to take that first hit. “The best way to fight it at this point in time is prevention,” Dr. Whitacre says, “starting with young children.” The education must continue as children grow older, affirms the doctor; young people need to understand the risks of using opiates and heroin so they never try them. 

“Once addicted,” says Dr. Whitacre, “the best way to fight this is with medication-assisted treatment and long term behavioral support and treatment, either at a residential treatment center or in a very intense outpatient treatment.” She adds that treatment for the addict’s family members, and strong support from those family members for their addicted loved one, are vital for recovery.

The Health Department is an active member of a coalition of community forces working to effectively address the opiate epidemic in Muskingum County. “Along with the local hospital, the Mental Health and Recovery Services Board, and many other organizations and community people,” Dr. Whitacre says, “the Health Department is trying to insure our community efforts do not duplicate each other’s, and that we are as effective as possible in helping people suffering from addiction.”

Prevention might prove to be the most effective,--and cost-effective,--result of the coalition’s work. “The Health Department,” says Dr. Whitacre, “is working to find best practice programs for preventing addiction.”

Dr. Whitacre notes that the disease of addiction affects everyone, in one way or another, in our community—and across the country. “We are facing a very complex brain illness where the usual drive for survival with food, water, and reproduction has been replaced with an even stronger drive to obtain a drug or substance that provides pleasure and prevents withdrawal symptoms.  The cost of it,” she says, “not only in dollars, but in the emotional stress of losing a family member to an overdose, or of having an addicted family member or friend, is becoming overwhelming.”

Key to turning the tide of this epidemic is accepting that addiction is a disease. “Realization that addiction is a chronic, relapsing disease and not a choice for those who are addicted,” says Dr. Whitacre, “will bring about an understanding of why an addicted person will lie, cheat, steal, and abandon children to survive to get their drug. That will help do away with the shame and guilt of addiction, and move our community to speaking up and working for treatment and recovery of our addicted family members and friends. A community that works to build compassionate tolerance and acceptance of those afflicted with this disease of addiction will move toward understanding and support of the recovery of their community.

 

“It will take everyone helping in positive, supportive ways that are not enabling addiction for us to make headway in recovering from this epidemic,” says Dr. Whitacre. “Prevention of addiction in the end may be our best investment. Recovery is a lifetime process for those who are addicted; their brains must recover enough to enjoy life again and avoid relapse.”

Before becoming Medical Director at the Muskingum Health Department, Dr. Whitacre had a 25-year career in emergency medicine. A graduate of the Ohio State University’s College of Medicine, Dr. Whitacre completed her residencies in pediatrics and emergency medicine at the University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington. She also interned for a year at Columbus’s Children’s Hospital.

A member of the planning team that brought author Sam Quinones to Zanesville in 2016, Dr. Whitacre is working with the Mental Health and Recovery Board’s coalition to bring David Sheff to the Secrest Auditorium on September 13, 2017. She is married to Arthur Moose and has three children and three stepchildren. Seven grandchildren round out her wonderful family.