DRUG HELPS JANESVILLE COUPLE OVERCOME ADDICTIONS

JANESVILLE-Lisa is sure she and her husband would be dead
today.

If it wasn't for a new drug and the doctor who administered it, she
may have overdosed. She may have frozen. Or her 88-pound frame may
have wasted away.

At the height of her addiction, Lisa didn't care enough to keep her
three precious daughters, let alone her own health.

Lisa calls the doctor who prescribed Suboxone a saint. She calls the
medicine, which continues to anchor her to sane life, a miracle.

Today, she looks around her tiny, rented home.

The family has heat, lights and a TV. The kids have beds. She's
working hard at a job.

She couldn't have guessed at this fairy tail ending a few years
ago.

Lisa has lived in Janesville for about 16 years. She doesn't want her
last name known because of the stigma attached to drug use.

Lisa, who is middle-aged, became addicted to opiates in 2000. Before
that, she said she had never even got drunk. Her only scrapes with the
law were parking and speeding tickets.

Lisa had been prescribed Vicodin, an opiate, for chronic neck pain.
But when her husband became disabled on the job, she sank into
depression and took more and more of the painkiller.

"Before I knew it, I was hooked," Lisa said.

Before that, her husband worked. She was a stay-at-home mom who doted
on her girls. But soon, she was lying to doctors and dentists. She was
scrounging the streets for drugs for her and her husband. Desperate
for money, she bounced checks. Her apartment was condemned. She would
wonder later how she lived in those conditions.

Social services took her daughters away.

Today, Lisa looks around her home and points out the few items that
came through the addiction with her: a floor lamp, some mirrors, her
girls' photos on the wall.

"That's basically all we had from the old life," Lisa said.
"Everything else is since we've been clean."

"It sneaks up on you," she said of her addiction. "You don't realize
until it's too late. One day, you wake up and look around and say:
'Where's my stereo? Where's this? Where's that?' It's all at the damn
pawn shop."

Lisa's doctor stopped prescribing drugs to her in 2001, when it became
evident that she was abusing them. So she lied and moved from doctor
to doctor. She bought drugs on the street. She graduated to OxyContin.
When she couldn't get that, she injected heroin. She did odd jobs and
was paid in drugs, sometimes a pill, sometimes half a pill.

She'd do anything to stop the pains of withdrawal.

It's like the flu, she said of withdrawal, but the vomiting, shaking,
cramping and diarrhea are 10 times worse.

"You don't know which end is going to explode," Lisa
said.

You can't eat. You're up and you're down. Your mind is racing. You're
sweating.

Once, Lisa tried going cold turkey. She made it five
days.

"You want to die, literally," she said.

"I'd go out and find something, anything that would take it away,"
Lisa said. "Mainly, you don't give a damn what you do. You're going to
find someone, something, to get that drug."

Some people are decent; some take advantage.

"They know you're hooked. They know you're sicker than a dog. They
make you pay triple. It's basically like selling your soul.

"It's really hard to explain it unless you've been
there."

Lisa and her husband had always been inseparable. It was the two of
them against the world.

But drugs were tearing them apart. They were at each other's throats.
Their fixes came first.

The family was living off her husband's disability check because Lisa
couldn't work. That didn't leave much after drugs.

In April 2003, their power was disconnected. Their apartment was
temporarily condemned. Social services took the girls.

"Everybody was dumbfounded," Lisa said. "One minute, we were this
whole happy family. The next minute, we were torn apart. Mom and Dad
were fighting. Mom and Dad were sick."

Lisa's in-laws got custody of the girls, and she couldn't see them
without an appointment.

Today, it hurts deeply when she talks about her daughters. It's the
only time her demeanor cracks. Her eyes fill, and a tear rests on a
sculpted cheekbone.

In August 2003, she hit rock bottom.

She overdosed, and her stomach was pumped.

She was in the hospital, and her husband didn't even
know.

"He had lost track of me," Lisa said. "That never happened to us
before."

Dr. Adedapo Oduwole, an addiction psychiatrist at Mercy Options,
visited Lisa in the hospital and offered help. He knew her from
before, when she was trying to scam all the doctors in town.

She hated him because he was on to her tricks.

"You're in a lot of trouble," he told Lisa.

Then, he told her of a new miracle drug that could help her if she
wanted it.

She didn't believe him.

Instead, she left. She got high to stop her withdrawal. But then she
started wondering.

"What if it did work, and I won't have to feel like this no more? .
Man, maybe I could get my kids back. My girls, they didn't deserve
this.

"I did not want to be like that no more. I really didn't have nothing
else to lose."

That was the last time she took a pill.

"Oh, I done hit bottom, honey," Lisa said. "I scraped my
knees."

It was Aug. 24, 2003. The day she went clean.

Sick, Lisa dragged herself to Oduwole's office. She literally begged
him to put her in his program.

He said she wasn't ready. She said she wasn't leaving.

"I told him . I want my life back," she recalled. "I want my
daughters back.

"Give me a chance, Doc. You'll never regret it."

It was what Oduwole was waiting for.

Later, he told her he helped because she had come to him. He could see
a fire in her eyes.

"That fire's going to get you places," he said.

Said Lisa: "I never looked back."

Lisa recalled the first time she took buprenorphine. That's the
generic term for Suboxone's primary ingredient. She was in withdrawal,
and it had taken her awhile to convince her mother to give her the $20
a day for the drug. Her mother had been scammed too often for drug
money.

"I'm like, in the back of my head, 'Please, dear God, let this be
true,"' Lisa said. "Within 10 minutes, I'm not craving . I'm not
sweating. I'm not shaking."

She didn't feel the buzz she got with narcotics.

"The man did not lie to me," she recalled thinking.

"I hadn't felt a calm like that in years."

More important, the craving for an opiate was gone.

"Since I've been on the program, I never, ever went back," Lisa said
with pride.

Lisa completed a 14-day counseling program. Her husband started, as
well.

"I felt like myself," she said. "It was the first time I felt normal
in a couple of years."

Lisa continues to meet with Oduwole for counseling every other
month.

The couple was paired with a wonderful social worker, and Lisa's life
centered on getting her children back. The youngest especially had
been hard-hit when they were taken from their parents.

Social services helped get the power turned back on at the apartment.
The landlord had been forced to fix the building.

She remembers the first, unsupervised overnight with her
girls.

They jammed twin mattresses together in the front room and piled on
pillows and blankets. It looked liked a Jasmine bed from Aladdin, Lisa
recalled with a smile.

They had a recliner from a thrift store and a little
TV.

"We just basically fired up the microwave and had ourselves some
popcorn and watched some really wavy TV that night," Lisa said.

But it was wonderful because the five of them were
together.

"The girls were hanging on us," she said. "We would move an inch,
trying to get comfortable, and, 'boom.' They're right there. Like,
'Don't you dare."'

The best feeling in the world is having your kids tell you they're
proud of you, Lisa said.

"They'd write me little notes. I still have those to this
day."

People trusted them again, and that was a big deal.

People who are addicted don't realize that there are people out there
willing to help and who do understand, Lisa said.

"That's one of the things that addiction does to you. It makes you
think you're all alone."

Nov. 17, 2003, is another date etched in Lisa's mind. It's the day
they got the kids back.

Two years later, the family moved into the rented home where they live
today.

Lisa is healthy again and works a full-time job. She does
normal-person things, such as shopping for food and paying rent. The
family has hot water, a big screen TV and a car.

Lisa and her husband are on track, too-back to being
inseparable.

The thing that stops her heart is the worry of feeling that familiar
craving.

It happened once, and she started to get sick. She got so scared. She
went right to Oduwole, who upped her medication.

Lisa can't even think of weaning herself from Suboxone. Oduwole said
Lisa may take it her entire life.

"I don't want to talk about that right now," she said. "Dr. O hasn't
mentioned it."

Lisa doesn't think she or her husband would be here today if not for
Suboxone.

"I get up every morning and thank God for another day," Lisa
said.

"I made it through."