Maury County Stories
Kimberly
Opioids have certainly changed the face of addiction and caused people to take a deeper look at the issue. I work with a local team in my county to make sure there’s a plan to divert those patients as safely as possible. As the director for our community’s prevention coalition, it’s my job to educate people about substance misuse and addiction. I am a “face” of the opioid crisis and this is my story.
We are sitting in the middle of an opioid epidemic and the death toll continues to rise. How we got here depends on who you ask, and the most truthful answer I can find is in the early 2000s the joint commissioner advocated for pain to become the fifth vital sign. By the way, pain is not a vital sign. It’s a symptom, and this made pharmaceutical companies like Purdue devise a clever marketing strategy comprised of false research to ensure all patients had access. This left prescribers in search of solutions for everything from sprained ankles and tooth extractions to cancer. In 2012, statistically speaking, there was a bottle of Oxycontin for every adult American.
In 2007, I begin taking some leftover pain medication from my dad’s surgery for severe headaches. Several months later, I was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder responsible for my pain so my doctor sent me to a pain management specialist where I left with my own full-time supply.
During this time, my husband was transitioning out of the Army. After 10 years of service with plans for 20, his last Afghanistan tour brought him home early for medical retirement. This was incredibly stressful for all of us. He adapted to his forced retirement through overseas government contracting; seemingly feeling more at ease in foreign countries than he did at home. The stress continued to mount, and the pills made it easier to escape reality and the thoughts of him not making it home alive. Although the pills no doubt helped my physical pain, they also seemed to be a cure for all the anxiety and depression I didn’t know I had. I recall feeling as though I’d found a miracle drug. I was loving and attentive to my family. I felt creative, energized and mentally alert like never before. I was leading a large software launch in my corporate job and remember feeling like I was at the top of my game. Within a few months I was taking double my dose, and it escalated from there. Soon I was running out of my scripts halfway through the month, leaving me to score them elsewhere and use them in ways they weren’t meant to be used. At this point I was using, not to get high, but rather to avoid being sick.
When my husband returned home from his last contract in 2012, life came to a halt. A culmination of my addiction, life after the Army, infidelity and bad business decisions left us counting our losses. The bank foreclosed on our house, and we were at a fork in the road. As fate would have it, Jason connected with a veteran’s service organization and began working to heal emotional wounds from combat in community with other veterans. This seemed to make all the difference in him and gave me the courage to look deeper into my own wounds. I sought treatment through my company’s EAP program and committed to whatever came next. Treatment for me was a time of reckoning and reconciliation as I took inventory of many deep-seated wounds. There I heard the stories of others…people just like me. So, I rolled up my sleeves and went to work to address the trauma that had gone unaddressed.
In 2018, I got the phone call that would change our lives forever. My son-in-law was being indicted for distributing heroin laced fentanyl, and our daughter was 7 months pregnant and seeking treatment for heroin addiction. I went on a search for her that felt like hours. We spent the next 48 hours looking for a treatment facility that accepted late term pregnancy. She was in severe withdrawals and 2 emergency rooms would not treat her because she posed too much of a risk and liability. Then God saw fit to connect me with TN Lifeline where they had a bed for her at a facility within minutes. Once she was secured in treatment, I began looking for answers and I quickly realized the toll opioids and lack of resources were having on our entire nation. The thought of someone wanting and needing help and the lack of resources haunted me. As I talked to others impacted by addiction, I learned many communities, like ours, were facing the same problems.
That very next week a neighboring county was hosting a town hall to educate the community about the opioid epidemic. I attended with every intention of bringing the information back to our own county in Maury. With the help of these other counties, we formed the Maury County Prevention Coalition. Law enforcement, public officials and treatment providers came together as panelists to describe the tragedies they were seeing on the front lines. Once the event concluded, a board was formed and the vision for substance misuse and addiction prevention in Maury County, TN was born.
All of a sudden, I became even more thankful for the people that had loved and mentored me over the years. It became clear to me that those people were probably the only difference between me and my peers in treatment. These past few months have been riddled with so much goodness. This work has made way for productive conversations with my 10-year-old son.
Our kids are the very heartbeat of our future. Engaging them early and providing the children and their families access to tools and services is critical to overall resilience. Together, we must explore the root causes of addiction and align policy and resources with an approach that includes a framework of prevention and trauma-informed care that treats the whole family. I’m always asking myself: how do we take what we know and grow? One thing is clear. When we treat the seed, we must treat the soil. No one heals alone. In every way, our Creator designed us to live life together in community and that starts by coming to the table. To date, my daughter is 18 months into her recovery journey. Both she and my granddaughter are doing well! Healing is definitely a family affair, and we are now figuring out this thing called life together.