Mother's Perspective from Cleveland, OH
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 06/01/2017 - 12:46
I wish I never had to say the words “heroin addiction” again. Now that my daughter is on the path to sobriety, I would like to put behind me the experience of watching her battle heroin addictions and all the feelings of fear, confusion, shock, hopelessness, anger, sadness and anxiety that go with it.
I still haven’t completely lost the vague feeling of dread that comes every time the phone rings, but there is peace in our lives again. No more visits to treatment facilities or jails or courtrooms or probation officers. It would so easy to never have to think about it again. But, I cannot do that. Every week, I hear about another death from heroin or prescription opiate overdose.
This past weekend, it hit close to home, the mother of one of my daughter’s friends made the tragic and sorrowful decision to pull the plug for her son; he was in a heroin-induced coma for five days, but there was no brain activity and she said she was ready to hand his soul to God. That could have been me having to say good bye to my own child – that was a possibility every time my daughter put a needle somewhere in her body, and yet it wasn’t. There by the grade of God go I.
So I cannot in good conscience put the experience behind me when I know there are moms who do get the horrible phone calls and do have to make those gut-wrenching decisions and do walk in a room and find their child’s lifeless body. And there is also the grieving and loss experienced by dads, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, sons, daughters, fiancés and spouses, girlfriends and boyfriends, teachers and classmates, friends too young to have to attend funerals for so many of their contemporaries. It is important not to deny that this issue exists in places where such things did not exist before.
It is important to train professionals that are tasked with managing this addict population – police, jail staff, Judges, attorneys, probation officers, assessment specialists, drug counselors, case managers, nurses, doctors, ER personnel. It is important to share information and collaborate- our time is not well spent in duplicating efforts and reinventing the wheel. It is important to train the professionals that educate and guide our young people- school administrators, principals, teachers, coaches, guidance counselors, school nurses. It is important to have a well-informed community. It is essential to make sure that our legislators, local, state and federal, know the scope of this epidemic. The must know about our urgent need for more resources for law enforcement, for treatment, for community control supervision, for prevention.
And it is important that the overworked and overwhelmed individuals that work with the addict population have a chance to voice their concerns, to share information, to receive relevant training, to brainstorm possible solutions, to receive timely feedback on the impact of our current strategies and protocols and the opportunity to revise and adjust those strategies and protocols when they do not produce the desired effect, to have access to necessary resources and to be given support and guidance to process the increased experience of loss that has become so characteristic of this epidemic.
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