REGISTERED NURSE LIVING DAY BY DAY WITH METHADONE TREATMENT

"So, do I look like an addict?" she asked?

She does not fit the image commonly cast for addicts on TV and in movies.
There are no black circles under the eyes. No needle tracks up her arms.
With well-kept, shoulder-length hair and freckles, she looks young for her
mid-40s. She's wearing a pink flowered shirt under white nurse's scrubs -
not exactly what you would expect for someone on her way for a dose of
methadone.

"Methadone makes me feel normal," she says. "It makes me get up in the
morning when I used to just take another Xanax and go back to bed."

This registered nurse, in the medical field since she became a LPN at age
18, has been attending Life Center of Galax's Tazewell office since June.
It's about a 180-mile, three-hour round trip from her home in Southwest
Virginia.

The things that led to her addiction are also not the stuff of TV and the
movies.

She says she is too big a "wimp" to ever sniff anything up her nose or stick
a needle in her arm. Fibromyalgia ultimately sent her to the methadone
clinic. The degenerative disease causes excruciating pain that leaves her
nearly crippled, she said.

"I hadn't been out of bed hardly at all for eight years because of the
pain."

To fight the pain she had a prescription for morphine. For chronic
depression and anxiety, a script for Xanax.

She calls the latter "Satan in a Bottle." It's a demon that snagged her soul
for 12 years, retracting its talons only after she checked into Life Center
of Galax's inpatient care services. After a week of counseling and methadone
there, she began visiting the Life Center's Tazewell branch daily.

"I was rock bottom," she says of life before entering the clinic. "I looked
awful. I had already turned gray. I was so close to dying. I walked in
agony. You would not have recognized me from then. I had no personal pride.
I didn't wear makeup or do my nails or anything. "

But all of that has changed. Methadone, she said, has changed her life and
kept her alive. The synthetic narcotic, which blocks neural transmitters in
the brain that trigger cravings and register "highs" from opiates, not only
manages pain from the fibromyalgia but pulled her from a Xanax stupor.

"The Xanax just made me cry - I didn't feel emotions like I should have,"
she says, steadily navigating her car along the twisting, mountain road. "I
just cried and cried and cried. I was hurting so bad I couldn't move. But
methadone gives you a chance to get your life back in order."

When she first checked in as a patient at the Tazewell methadone clinic, she
had to travel there seven days a week for her doses. Three months later,
thanks to a job, clean urine tests and stable home life, she's granted two
take-home doses a week.

And due to the long haul to the clinic from her home, she's given one travel
exemption a week. She chooses Sunday so she can go to church. On her
Saturday visit to the clinic she leaves with a metal locked security box.
Inside is her liquid dose of methadone for the next morning.

Driving a new sedan with wood-paneled interior, she says she knows the road
to the clinic by heart. Usually, she's traveling at 5 a.m. so she can be to
work on time. Today, she's making a rare afternoon trip.

"When I get in the car every morning I pray for the blood of Jesus over my
car, this road, me, my family, all the other people going to the clinic,"
she says. "And then God gives me peace about it. He pulled me out to not be
a statistic. And for whatever reason, whatever he wants me to do, I want to
be living to find out."

She doesn't have to look farther than the cover of a binder lying on the
back seat for the answer.

It's a heavy, three-ring affair, and she takes it everywhere she goes.
Inside are her dosage schedules, journal entries, inspirational poems, drug
interaction information and counselors' phone numbers. There are more than
80 pages in all, most printed front and back.

But it's the front of the binder that keeps her motivated to build a better
life. A 5-by-7-inch color photo slid behind its clear plastic cover reminds
her what she has to live for.

It's her son.

"That was the hardest part," she says, eyes tearing up behind a dusty
windshield. "Having to look at your son and tell him what you're going
through. He hugged and hugged and hugged me and said, 'Mom, I just want you
to get better.'"

About a mile and a half past Southwest Virginia Community College on
Steelesburg Highway, she flips the car's blinker with a pink fingernail.

"You would drive right by without noticing a thing if you weren't looking
for it," she says with a smile.

It's 3:30 p.m., and the two-story office building is nondescript in the
afternoon sun. Its most noticeable feature is the parking lot around back,
packed with nearly two dozen cars. License plates are from Virginia, West
Virginia and Tennessee.

Two of the Life Center's counselors are on a smoke break outside. A gangly,
pale-faced girl in a faded football jersey leaves the building and painfully
shuffles toward her car.

"Smile," one of the counselors playfully yells.

The girls replies "there's nothing to smile about" as she continues across
the parking lot.

The counselor hurries to join her. She interlocks elbows with the patient,
who has just received her methadone dose. She carefully nudges her head near
the patient's ear and quietly mouths words. A few seconds later, the young
woman is smiling. They hug. They'll see each other tomorrow.

Inside the clinic are what appear to be two bank teller windows separated by
a wall. A coat hanger is at the end of the wall where patients approach the
window. Above the metal hook a sign orders in bold, black letters that all
coats and pocketbooks be placed there before proceeding. Through an opening
at the bottom of the glass, nurses slide Solo cups of pink liquid to
patients.

This is where they get their methadone. Cherry flavored. Washed down with a
swig of water.

Almost 700 drug addicts are patients here. They come from 52 surrounding
counties and pay about $11 a day for methadone and counseling. Another 100
potential patients are on the waiting list.

After their dose, patients must speak to the nurse on the window's other
side, ensuring the methadone has been swallowed and not stashed away to be
spit out and sold. Methadone in pill or wafer form is not dispensed by Life
Center of Galax's Tazewell office.

Unless she requests a counseling session, the nurse/patient from Southwest
Virginia is out of the clinic in about 15 minutes. It's time for the
90-mile, hour-and-a-half trip back home. She says it's her quiet time, a
time to reflect. Still, she'd like to see a methadone clinic in Wise. It
would substantially cut her driving time and gas costs.

With Enya's soothing vocals playing over the car's CD player, she talks
about the importance of spirituality to her recovery.

"I couldn't make it without the Lord."

She talks about her goals.

"Short term, I'd like to start slowly cutting back my doses in the next
year. Long term, I want to do something as a nurse in the substance abuse
field."

What she doesn't talk about is the past.

"I just don't go there anymore. It's not conducive to recovery," she said.
"I don't tell war stories. You just learn to laugh instead of cry. I like to
think about the future and everything I'm going to get to do."