FORMER ADDICT SHOWS OTHERS PATH OUT OF DRUG NIGHTMARE

Desiree McCormick knows precisely what induced her labor.

It was that last hit of cocaine -- the one she took inside a portable
toilet during a break from her day-labor job.

So she hobbled to the hospital, gave birth and passed out from
exhaustion.

"When I finally came down from my high," she recalled, "I was like:
'Where's my baby? What happened to my baby?' "

The authorities, it turned out, had taken baby Jonathan away. That's
what they do when they find cocaine coursing through a tiny body.

So the new mother wept. And left the hospital. And got high
again.

The scene is nightmarish. And yet, 12 years after it happened, she is
able to recall it more comfortably now. She is, after all, a different
person.

McCormick got her baby back. (He's 12 now and has two brothers and a
sister.) She's been clean for nearly 10 years. She's even up for a
promotion at the Burger King in Winter Garden where she works.
"Assistant supervisor," she said with a wide grin.

And twice a week, she volunteers at the place that turned her life
around: the Center for Drug-Free Living.

She was helped by the center's program for pregnant and postpartum
women, which is funded in part with a grant from the Orlando
Sentinel's Family Fund.

The program is a place where women are steered away from the drugs
that could kill them. But just as important as learning how to avoid
an early death, these women are taught how to live -- how to get a
degree, be a mother, land a job and manage finances.

The women stay in the 26-bed facility in northwest Orlando that has
motel-like rooms surrounding a playground where their kids can play --
if the state allows the children to stay with their mothers.

There, they learn from teachers, counselors, nurses -- and from
Desiree McCormick.

She counsels the women whom statistics say are likely to relapse. She
unfortunately knows about that first-hand as well.

In 1998, a few years after she finished her first stay at the center,
she was arrested again for cocaine possession and went to prison. But
she served her time -- with her saint of a mother watching Jonathan
and her other children for more than a year -- and then tried again to
clean up her act.

This time, with the center's help, she made it.

Now, 43, she is an inspiration to the other women who are still
struggling with the problems she left behind.

Joyce Bruton, director of the postpartum program, said McCormick
allows these women to see light and hope at the end of their dark and
often lonely tunnels.

"They trust her," Bruton said. "Some women do make a clean slate and
live clean, healthy lifestyles. And Desiree is one of those."

McCormick is proud of herself as well. But she knows she couldn't have
done it alone. On this Wednesday morning, she was wearing a T-shirt
with the message "God has been so good to me" emblazoned across the
front. And she credits the cash-strapped center -- which always has a
waiting list of drug-addicted women eager to turn their lives around
- -- for teaching her about the importance of self-worth.

"Some people really can change," she said. "I just had to learn to
love myself in order to love my baby."