Chemical Health
The Voice of Mary

I enrolled in college when my child was one year old. I did well and earned a 4.0 GPA, but within a short time, to keep up with the work, I started snorting and smoking methamphetamine – I could get away with two to three hours of sleep a day when I did. Before long, I was smoking every day, and when smoking lost its effect, I learned to shoot up.

Within a short six months, everything in my life unraveled – I lost my friends, my grades slipped to C’s, D’s, and F’s, I quit school, and I sold boxes of stolen checks and wrote bad checks for cash. Finally, I was arrested. My son, then two years old, was placed with my mother. The courts and my mother told me that I couldn’t see him again until I got treatment.

HSI was there for me, offering me a treatment program, not just once, but twice – it took a relapse for me to finally surrender, and to understand that I can’t just fix myself. HSI coordinated the many people I needed to recover. Looking back, I remember laughing and swearing at every one of them – my probation officer, the child protection workers, the police, my attorney, my doctor, my chemical dependency counselors – but they hung in there with me, they are all necessary in my life. I am so thankful for them. If it wasn’t for HSI orchestrating all those people and helping me, I’d be dead

I am happy. I am living in my own apartment in a building with
several other mothers who are in recovery, and my mom is my
friend again. Best of all, I’ve got my son back who is now four
years old.


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