Broke my heart

I spoke to a girl today who was trying to get into a rehab for her addiction to prescription medications.

She had started with a prescription to Oxycontin for the pain of a back injury. That was nine years ago. She began to use more of it and the pain seemed to "just hang on". In a few years she was making doctors all over Southern California to keep up the intake.

At one point she was switched to methadone. Luckily she left that one before her addiction totally took of on methadone. She was back to the Oxy.

A couple of years ago her doctor put her on Norco to handle the problems with Oxy. Fat chance that'll work! Norco is also Hydrocodone!

When she called she had been mainlining Oxycontin for a few months and was desperately trying to maintain enough to keep working.

With no money, no insurance and no relatives who could help her enter treatment, her options are extremely limited. I am working with her to get her accepted into a free or low-cost program, but you get what you pay for.

Her personal fortitude and determination to improve are going to have to make up for the lack of wherewithal. I will continue to try to find a way to get her into a Narconon center; she needs a full rehab like Narconon to get through what she has coming.

I've started in this business in 1976, (see the first post in this blog), and the amount of suffering I've seen should make me hardened and able to shrug off this type of tragedy. But I guess it never gets easy. Her tears on the phone were too personal for me to keep any kind of professional distance. And on top of all that, I remember how I was when I entered treatment at the Narconon Center in St. Louis.

Hers was only one of twelve similar calls we got today, but it stuck in my mind and now it's out here.