IN MY SHOES: Some People Just Can’t Be Helped
Freelance writer Jacqueline M. Duda details her family’s harrowing and ultimately futile attempts to find a treatment program that could save their daughter from heroin addiction for The Washington Post. Here are the opening grafs:
We're a hardy family, used to weathering all manner of surprises as we've seen four kids through various stages of toddlerhood, childhood and adolescence. So when our fun-loving 22-year-old, Nicole, shocked us by admitting a heroin addiction and asked for our help in overcoming it, my husband and I froze only an instant. Then we leapt into action, firmly believing that with the aid of 21st-century medical treatment, we could help her reclaim her life.
Surely, we thought, college-educated suburbanites like us could locate professional help: drug counselors, doctors, therapists specializing in addiction. Surely detoxification centers would treat desperate addicts and work out a payment plan. Surely we could check her into some kind of residential treatment program with a minimum of delay.
We were wrong.
The next several months of trying to get her affordable treatment were like entering some unknown circle of hell. Then the world as we knew it came crashing down when two policemen showed up - two years ago yesterday - to tell us that Nicole had been found dead of an accidental overdose.
We're still adjusting to life in a reconfigured family that bumps along like a wagon missing a wheel.
Nicole had no insurance and was ineligible for Medicaid; her parents could not afford to pay the $15,000 to $25,000 cost for a 28-day live-in addiction treatment program themselves. One counselor at a taxpayer-funded treatment center told the Dudas that an addict can get enrolled in a public health department program faster if (s)he commits a crime.
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