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My friend Tina has had serious issues with drug and alcohol addiction. Tina, had begun drinking when she was 13 to impress some of her friends at a party. She thought that it would be fun to prove how grown up she was to all of her friends by drinking so much that she had to be rushed to the hospital to have her stomach pumped.
Her mom and dad punished her by taking away her TV and phone privileges but that didn’t make Tina change any, the next party she went to she smoked Pot and drank.
Tina did the whole teen age rebellion thing. Her parents were divorcing and she used drugs as a way to cope with it all. She began getting into a lot of fights at school, and her grades began to drop, and people started calling her ‘Brown Bag” because she always had a 40 oz beer or other liquor. I remember clearly graduation night, she went out to a party with her friends to celebrate, and tried meth for the first time. She wasn’t the same after that.
She began living in flop houses, and selling herself for that next fix. Tina never stayed in the rehab centers. And over the course of a year and a half I got word that she was in jail on prostitution charges.
Atlanta is a large city with many places for people to get lost and stay lost. Tina had called me a few times, and she apologized and wanted to know if she could come for a shower and a hot meal. One night when I was driving home from work I saw Tina walking the street, I pulled over and had her get in the car and I took her home.
She looked like trash, and smelt like shame and cheap dollar store perfume, her her hair ratted and teased. My friend was nothing more than a dirty, ran down shell of a person. Her once long blond hair was cut short just below the ears, and was a tangled greasy and dirty. Here eyes were sunk in with dark circles around them. Her nose was slender and pointed. Her arms were long boney extensions of her withered torso, pocked marked with brown bumps and circles where she had used needles.
She begged and cried that she hadn’t eaten in a few days and wanted me to give her a place to stay for the night. Well she came back to my place and showered up and put on one of my shirts and a pair of boxers. I didn’t recognize her, she was so thin. We talked about what she had been doing, and how she didn’t know what to do. I suggested that she go to the Atlanta Drug Rehab center. At first she was offensive about it, saying that she didn’t need rehab, that she just needed time to get off ‘that stuff’.
I told Tina about Atlanta drug abuse rehab centers and how they weren’t like those other places that was run down and full of trash, that they were friendly people who were serious about helping others in her place.
The next morning we got in the car and drove to the rehab center. When we arrived, it was like coming to a resort. It was a very warm open space, with people who greeted you as you walked in. We were taken on a guided tour of the facility, where we got to see all the different activities that guests were able to participate in. They made it clear that the programs offered were going to be challenging and were designed to make people challenge themselves and push past self imposed limitations. They even offered her counseling that would provide her with the tools to understand how to deal with her recovery and to get back on track to being the woman she use to be, but only better.
After some deliberation, Tina checked herself into the center. When I went to visit her a few weeks later, I noticed that she had begun to look healthy again. Her eyes were not dark patchwork circles anymore, it looked to me as if she had gained some weight back. Her hair and nails were clean. She greeted me with a smile and open arms.
I attended one of her meeting, and when it came time for people to share their stories of addiction and their road to recovery Tina’s hand shot up, and she began to recount the long road that she had been down and the hard road to recovery. Tina has been clean almost 3 years now. I know that if it hadn’t been for the treatment center, my friend would have probably been dead by now.
She has since started school to become a Social Worker and is taking Addiction Counseling classes at Atlanta Community College and is working a steady job at Walmart and has a cute little apartment and has been doing well ever since.
