I'm Javier. I'm 43 years old. I work on an HVAC company on the warehouse department. I've been there for four years.
I am a full-time parent now. Before I couldn't even take care of myself, and now I got sole custody of my kids. I could, I've had a job for four years, the same job. I never had that before.
I now got a circle of friends where I could talk to them and express how my feelings or how I'm feeling today. I got a group of people that are in recovery that we go and we bring the message to other addicts and it keeps me out of self and it puts and it gives me an opportunity to show these other addicts that are suffering that there is a chance and that recovery is possible. And my life right now as a recovery person is that I no longer gotta wake up thinking about alcohol and drugs and I no longer gotta go to bed thinking about alcohol and drugs. That's not in my mind no more.
And that is, that's a miracle, so. I did have also good experience with healthcare. I remember one day, I went for, I had an accident in the car and I went to the ER and they saw my tracks, and the doctor was like, "Do you have a problem with addiction?" And she asked me and I was like, "Oh."
So I was like, "Yeah, I struggle with addiction." And she's like, "Well, there's this program right here that just opened." And she gave me the name of that program. And I went and called the program and did the outpatient program.
I didn't stay sober, but she still offered me that, and it felt good to have somebody that cared because like I said, I've been stigmatized before and I thought nobody cared. And this person showed me, and at least I did, she gave me that phone number, and I did call because it really showed me that somebody cared. So I gave it a try and probably at the long run it ended up working.
Javier cares for his children and works at an HVAC company. An ED doctor helped him connect with an outpatient program and start his recovery. He had “been stigmatized before,” he says, but he did call the program “because it really showed me that somebody cared.”
