The Heroin Epidemic in Northeastern Ohio
The Story of Addiction. from Kristen Anzuini on Vimeo.
Jeanette Kelly’s Story
At a point when using heroin, you don’t even want to try to get high anymore because getting the next high will never be better than the first time or your most recent hit. You’re sick and sweaty and you can’t sleep with withdrawals that are ten times worse than any flu. In between sickness, thinking that if you can 10 or bucks, you can get yourself well again. They call it chasing the dragon. You’re looking for that high that you first had. That absolute euphoria and you never find it again. It’s never the same. That was Jeanette Kelly’s life for a decade.
Kelly grew up on a farm in Ashtabula, Ohio, the youngest of five kids. As a young child, Kelly was the victim of sexual molestation, a secret she kept for a decade. During her senior year of high school, Kelly confided to her best friend what had happened. Three months later, she lost this friend to suicide. This was the catalyst for Kelly’s downward spiral into alcoholism.
“I started drinking at 17 because it was the first time in my life that I forgot about my best friend killing herself,” Kelly said. “Every day I woke, I thought about what could I have done, drinking was the one thing that stopped me from thinking that. I asked for counseling, but my mom didn’t feel like I needed it because I could talk to her about it.” Instead of discussing how she was feeling with her mom, she kept to herself and kept on drinking. She needed a knee surgery and was administered Vicodin and became addicted to it. She thought Vicodin was better than drinking since you can take it and you don’t have a hangover the next day. Prescription addiction is unfortunately a common gateway for people to later turn to heroin, but to Jeanette it was not a gateway to a bigger high it was a door to forgetting the past.
Kelly later became an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), where she witnessed horrific scenes on a regular basis. Drinking was an acceptable coping mechanism for Kelly and her co-workers.
“The time that I started in the early 90’s, women were just breaking into the field,” Kelly said. “You were never good enough so you didn’t want to talk about how the stuff really bothered you.” That was expected of you to not talk about the bad calls.
“You didn’t talk about what you saw, you drank. My nickname was ‘body queen’ since I saw all the murders and suicides,” said Kelly. “My supervisors took me out drinking and let me drive home. None of us knew how to deal with what we were seeing. We didn’t have critical stress debriefing or sources that they have now.”
This drinking to cope with the traumatic events had started when her friend had committed suicide and escalating into her work as an EMT and then later as a nurse. Kelly perceived addicts to be people who lived under the bridge; dirty, homeless, pushing grocery carts. It was such a vast contrast from the small-town girl she perceived herself to be that realizing she was an addict took a while.
Starting the Chase
As nurse, she had access to all different medications and that become more enticing than alcohol for Kelly. She was working as a traveling nurse in California on the joint replacement floor of a hospital. Through that nursing job she started stealing and abusing Demerol and Oxycotin.
“I couldn’t control myself after that. I knew it was only a matter of time, I was going to lose my nursing license at that point,” said Kelly. “But I couldn’t stop. And I remember one night being in the bathroom at work shooting up and going ‘I’m like Dr. Jekkyl & Mr. Hyde here.’ I was a very well-respected nurse. I was really good at my job. But here I am shooting up.”
She decided to come back to Ohio after losing her nursing licence for stealing drugs. She had no sense of direction at that point. She started going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings looking for help with her addiction. There, she met a girl and they talked about their drug of choice. The girl told her “‘Well, if you like demerol, you’re really gonna love heroin.” So Jeanette decided to give it a try.
“I had nothing better to do. I mean, what do I got to lose?” Kelly said. “I already lost everything.”
Jeanette describes her first time doing heroin as a euphoric bliss. “I’ll never forget when I first shot up I was up against the wall and I just slid down on the wall,” Kelly said. “The best feeling in the whole world came over me. And I’m like this is everything and every feeling I’ve ever looked for in my life. It was like instant love and then there was the normal side of me saying what the hell did you just do? Because I knew from that day on I was in trouble. So that started my love of heroin and there was no going back. There was no pills anymore, there was no alcohol. It was just heroin.”
Her addiction was all she could think about day in and day out from that point on. She on the path of chasing the dragon as many other people who are addicted to heroin become, chasing after the next hit. This one track goal led her to doing things she never imagine and has repercussions she will never forget.
“I started burglarizing houses, taking money from my mom, pawning things that shouldn’t be pawned,” Kelly said. “I wound up getting an apartment and moved my dope boy in. I let him stay for free so I could get my fix every morning and then go about my business whether it be stealing or whatever to make more money so I can get higher. And it doesn’t seem to work. It was never enough. I got a student loan check for like $3,000 and you better believe that all went to my dope boy.”
She went in and out of rehab facilities and even went to jail. There would be times she would stay sober for a few months, but in total, Kelly relapsed four times.
“Every time you go back out things get worse. You do worse things. All those things that you said you’d never do are the things that you wind up doing first,” Kelly said.
The lowest point in her addiction for her was when she decided to break into her mom and her step father’s house and take a few things to sell for drug money.
“My step-dad forbid me to ever come onto his property again and he would call the sheriff. That broke my heart because he was like a father figure to me. He died and I had never had an opportunity to tell him I was sorry and I didn’t get to say ‘Good-bye’ to him,” Kelly said.
On the Edge
“If you could just spend the day in an addict’s head, just to know this is seriously is a disease. How can I be this super nurse and I have that knowledge there and I also have my addiction, that fought that won over my logic every time. I tried self-control, I prayed using prayer, I tried using all of that and I couldn’t win.”
This chase and this fight over heroin lead to her to cusp of losing her life for good, twice.
The first time she was at a friend’s house. She got knocked out. All she remembers is that her friends were taking the kids out of the house and one friend had the the phone in their hand. About to call 911.
Her friends laid her down on the floor and put ice all around her, trying to wake her up. She ended up flat lining then the ambulance arrived and the CPR brought her back to life.
But one dance with death would not be Kelly’s only near death experience.
Jeanette was living in this elderly couples’ house and she overdosed alone in the bathroom and fell on the floor. At that moment she knew she was done with heroin.
“I’m using alone, I didn’t know anybody else who used in Youngstown. I was always alone all the time and I was doing to die, for the first time in a long time, I didn’t want to.” That was the last time she did heroin.
Life Without Chasing the Dragon
Kelly decided to go into detox, but she had no idea where to start.
“I was in rehab last year because of reaching out of Facebook., I had reached out on a heroin support page and wrote ‘I’m at my wits end, I don’t know what to do I just want to die. Can somebody help me?’ Somebody reached out to her and told her about resources that she didn’t know about. She directed me to the Haven of Rest then later to rehab,” Kelly said.
This Facebook encourager, is now on her sober support team and they talk every day. Jeanette is now leaving in sober housing, the rehabs never taught her how to leave again after starting recovery, the day in and out ways to live life without addiction.
She feels like she is a new version of herself now. “What I went through sucked and the things I did I’m not proud of whatever so ever, but I don’t gravitate towards those negative people anymore. I run away from those people. I have a very good sober support system,” Kelly said.
The effects of her addiction are still in her face every day as a constant reminder of the life she just fully left only a year ago.
She received a brain scan that showed pinhole-like spots in her brain. The X-ray showed so much atrophy on the frontal lobe brain, that the medical report had said she had the brain of a 65 year-old. She now has to be shown visual instructions because her mind jumbles everything up when instructed only verbally.
She has permanent track marks on the inside of her left forearm. A watercolor tattoo of an elephant holding three balloons representing her deceased father, step-father, and a balloon for overdose awareness is covering the track mark. This tattoo illustrates her new life chapter of life.
Kelly has also been diagnosed with Heptatisis C from sharing needles.
“I did this to myself,” Kelly said. “The mental toil and the physical toil, it’s just not worth it.”
Kelly now can’t even entertain the thought of drinking. “I will never be able to drink, because it will lead me right back to heroin or meth or whatever is able.”
She now sees heroin stealing so many lives good clean cut people. “It’s not the heroin I started out with,” Kelly said. “It’s so absolutely scary. It’s the devil.”
Jeanette does plan on challenging the state to get her nursing license back. If she does get her license back, she wants to work in dialysis or teach nursing. “I finally have hope for the future and I never had that before. Half my life was medication and they took it away and I can live without it. If God doesn’t see fit to be a nurse again, then so be it I can deal with it. There are other career opportunities and I’m not that old,” she chuckled.
PROJECT DAWN
As overdoses among Heroin users has increased dramatically over the past 10 years and become more common, there have been efforts to combat the number of overdoses we see each year. Project DAWN, a community-based drug overdose education and Naloxone distribution program has been spear-heading efforts to distribute the Naloxone to families of heroin users and local police departments.
Naloxone, also known as Narcan, is a medication that can reverse the overdoes of an opioid user. Once administered, it can block the effects of opioids of the brain and restore breathing to the user in two to eight minutes. The only function of Naloxone is to reverse the effects of the opioids taken and the effect they have on the brain and repertory system to prevent death. If given to a user who is dependent on opioids it will produce withdrawal symptoms, which may be uncomfortable for the user, but will not harm the user.
Naloxone is not a product that can be abused and does not harm those who are given it and not overdosing on an opioid. To receive a Project DAWN kit, you must attend a 30 minute class to learn the signs and symptoms of an overdose, the different types of overdoses, do rescue breathing, call emergency medical services and give the intranasal Naloxone. The kit includes two needleless syringes containing Naloxone, two atomizers for nasal application, one face shield for CPR, one instructional DVD and instructions and referral information.
Every law enforcement agency in Portage County is Project DAWN certified and has Project DAWN kits. Kent State Police Department Lieutenant Lewis said, “The Kent Police Department just recently became part of Project DAWN. We have an outstanding full-time crew of paramedics through the Kent Fire Department, and they are typically on scene at overdoses within minutes to administer Narcan.”
The Kent State Police Department began receiving training from the Portage County Health District on November 9, 2016 to administer Narcan to overdose victims. The department is still in the process of joining Project DAWN so that their police officers are able to carry the Narcan on the road.
CHILDREN AND THE HEROIN EPIDEMIC
There are a large amount of people being affected by the deaths of those who overdose, but most notably it has been children of those who are heroin abusers. Due to the large amount of Heroin overdoses which have lead to deaths, child service agencies across Northeastern Ohio have seen a dramatic increase of children enter the system.
Beth Kinney, supervisor at the Substance Intervention Unit, said, “the biggest telling thing is the number of children in care. A little over a year ago, we had 500 children in the custody of the agency, now we have over 700.” According to Kinney, around 75 to 80 percent of the cases they see involves some form of substance abuse issues.
Dawn Boudrie, Summit County Children’s Services Intake Supervisor, said, “on average, most of our social workers probably have about four cases with heroin or opioid allegations.” The large amount of children being affected by opioid and heroin abuse continues to increase every year and is showing in child services departments.
