My name is Chris and I'm 43 years old. Well, I tried heroin for the first time when I was 20 years old and wasn't long before I was actually dependent on it. My life has become so much more than I ever expected it would be. I have a sense of purpose.
I have beautiful relationships in my life. I have a relationship with my daughter which is the biggest thing to me. I have the respect of people, the respect of my community. Back in 2018, I went to the emergency department and I had a really bad abscess.
I went in to get treatment and the first contact with people that I had working there they were very professional, very nice to me. They treated my wound but they wanted to get blood work on me and I had no accessible veins on my arms anymore because they were so scarred up from injecting drugs. She was very hurried, and she seemed like she lacked compassion for me. The reason why I say this is because she had said, "well, you know, you did this to yourself," because I was complaining that it hurt when she was trying to get the needle in my arm.
And I was moving around and saying, ouch, or maybe I was swearing, but she's like, "you knows you did this to yourself." And then she said to me, "you know, maybe if you left me something to work with, I could help you." And, you know, I was at a pretty low point in my life. I was very reluctant to go to the hospital, anyway, to get help.
And then hearing that really pushed me out the door. I was done with them. Fortunately, there was a doctor that stopped me on the way out. He stopped me and said, "Chris your condition is pretty serious and that you could die from a blood infection."
We really want to get IV antibiotics into you. If you're not willing to stay will you please come back tomorrow? And I said, yeah, but at the time I didn't really know if I was gonna come back or not The way I was treated. The next day I did come back and I was admitted to the hospital for six days with an IV in my jugular because they couldn't get it anyplace else with IV antibiotics.
So that was pretty...
Like I said, being at a low point in your life, you wanna have some sort of compassion or maybe some empathy, you know, from the professionals that are supposed to be there to help you. And when you have that certain kind of attitude towards you, knowing that, they know that you're using drugs. They had taken my urine, they knew. You could see it on my arms.
I wasn't, you know, denying it. I just wanted some help. So that type of attitude is what keeps people away from getting help, you know, especially in an emergency department. That's the last place people wanna go and it should be a place of care and compassion and understanding, and that day, it wasn't for me.
So I would say having some empathy, remembering that we're human beings, and that we need help too, goes a long way. Recovery is beautiful. I don't know how to describe how happy I am in recovery other than, you know, on the bad days in recovery, because life happens, you know, you're grateful that you're not using and that you're alive at a minimum. You know, on the good days, you really, really sit back and for me, I'm so thankful that I have what I have today.
I have everything I need, not everything I want, but everything I need. And the most important thing is I have a sense of purpose in life. I have beautiful relationships in my life, and yeah.
Chris had a stigmatizing experience with a provider in the ED that led him to leave without treatment for an abscess. Another provider stopped him on the way out the door, showing compassion and encouraging him to return. He did go back the next day. Now in recovery from SUD, Chris says, “My life has become so much more than I ever expected it would be. I have a sense of purpose. I have beautiful relationships in my life.”
