Live Through This

FORMER ADDICT AND HERO OF THE YEAR SHARES STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPHS

Eleven years ago, Darlene Palmer was biking to her evening job after
working all morning and shooting heroin and cocaine all night.

Today, Darlene is driving to her evening job after working all morning
and has been clean for almost ten years. "I thought it was the drugs
that kept me going, but it wasn't," she says. "And it's not the
coffee, either."

The 47-year old Plateau resident spends her nights as an intervention
worker at the Centre d'action communautaire aupres des toxicomanes
utilisateurs de seringues (CACTUS), a needle exchange clinic on
St-Hubert St. that caters to intravenous drug users. During the day,
she coordinates SurvUDI, a research project on HIV/AIDS. She goes to
bed at four in the morning and is up and at 'em at seven.

Darlene was named Chatelaine woman of the year in 2003 for her work
with drug users. Last month, the Farha Foundation honoured her as Hero
of the Year 2004 for her work with HIV and AIDS patients. Those who
know her call her "le p'tit soleil," perhaps for her blond frizzy
locks or her balmy smile; but storms have often rocked Darlene's
tumultuous life.

Born in 1956 into a family of six children in the village of Iroquois
Falls, Ont., she was sexually abused for the first time at age seven.
Her uncles and cousins repeatedly raped her throughout her childhood
years. To block her feelings, Darlene started drinking and using drugs
at age 11. She was gang-raped at 13. Fearing her former aggressors and
looking for a protector, Darlene entered into a relationship with a
man, Larry, who was feared by the entire village.

In the summer of 1973, Darlene's protector turned against her. Larry,
who was also a drug user, came back from work one night doubting
Darlene's faithfulness. In a fit of jealousy, he set fire to the tent
where Darlene was sleeping. The 17-year old girl did not wake up in
time.

"That night they shipped me to Toronto by plane from the village," she
says. "The doctors thought I wouldn't live longer than an hour. I had
third-degree burns covering 62 percent of my body."

One year, seven skin transplants later and against all odds, Darlene
recovered the use of her arms. But the incident left her with
indelible scars and a pattern of abuse that would follow her until
late in her life. At 19, she moved to Toronto, and was raped again. At
25, she landed a job as a computer analyst in Montreal, where she fell
in love with a man who was "ashamed to be with me in public, ashamed
of my scars," she says. This man abused her for three years.

"It was like a vicious circle. In my relationships I was looking for
violence, because it confirmed that the person loved me."

In need of affection, plagued by despair and suicidal thoughts,
Darlene spiraled into an uncontrollable drug addiction. At 26, she
injected cocaine for the first time. Heroin followed shortly thereafter.

Darlene was still able to maintain her professional life depite her
drug addiction. Dressed in three-piece suits, she worked as a computer
analyst for several Montreal firms. There were times she would shoot
up in her cubicle while talking to her boss on the phone.

"At times, I could inject myself 60 times a day," she says, flicking
her cigarette. "I liked the feeling. It's as if the syringe replaced
my sexual life. It was my eroticism. It was my sensuality. That's why
it was very difficult to quit."

At 37, after having lost her job and resorting to prostitution and
dealing to pay for her escalating drug habit, Darlene hit rock bottom.
"I was dead inside," she says. "I tried all the drug trips and alcohol
trips possible. I had nowhere left to go."

Helping herself, helping others

On October 15th, 1994, Darlene quit drugs, abruptly and without
methadone or detoxification cures. Almost one year later, she began
working part-time for CACTUS, where she immediately felt at home. This
is where her healing process began.

"I started entering data at CACTUS," she says. "But I also got to do a
bit of intervention work during 10 or 15 minutes. I adored that. It's
like I was high, without having to use drugs."

The clinic doles out approximately 400,000 clean syringes per year in
exchange for used ones to help contain the spread of Hepatitis C and
AIDS among active drug users. When Darlene became involved, the clinic
was sharing space with the CLSC on Sanguinet St. In 2000, CACTUS moved
to St-Hubert St. and the ensuing personnel rearrangement offered
Darlene a long-awaited opportunity.

"Her objective was to get closer to the active drug users in the
context of her job," says Roxanne Beauchemin, CACTUS' coordinator and
Darlene's close friend. "So she had an opportunity to change her
position at CACTUS and that is what she did. She passed from
administrative assistant to intervention worker."

Darlene gave herself entirely to her new job. Along with the needles,
the syringes, the alcohol swabs and the condoms that she doled out to
drug users four nights a week, from eight at night to four in the
morning, she slipped in a few words of hope, a smile and an
encouraging thought at times. Encouraged by Beauchemin and with
permission from CACTUS' general director, Marianne Tonnelier, Darlene
pushes the boundaries of her work outside the doors of CACTUS.

Darlene pioneered a new method of intervention by accompanying drug
users on the street to the hospital and to their methadone therapy.
She becomes their confidant, and sometimes their friend.

"She gave me her home number, her cell number and her pager number so
I could call her whenever something was wrong," says Karine
Vaillancourt, 24, who, with Darlene's help, quit drugs four years ago.
"I could even call her in the middle of the night, and she would be
there for me."

"If it wasn't for Darlene, I wouldn't be here today," says Priscilla
Fagnan, a 25-year old, who wears coloured bead necklaces and bracelets
and whose arms are lined with scars. Fagnan met Darlene in 2001 while
she was overdosing on St-Hubert St.

"She stayed with me until the ambulances came, and she reassured me,"
says Fagnan, who has been off drugs for two months now, and says she
owes this to Darlene. "I had syringes filled [with coke] in my purse
and I was afraid I'd get in trouble with the police. I asked Darlene
to take them [and dispose of them], and she did it, although she
wasn't supposed to."

Over the following three years, Darlene accompanied Fagnan to her
hospital visits, reassured her mother and helped her reintegrate into
society, always remaining only a phone call away.

"When I had cravings, I would have fallen back into drug use if I
didn't have a place to stay," says Fagnan, who just like Darlene has
lived through a tumultuous childhood and started using drugs at 12
years old. "Darlene rescued me. She always helped me find a place to
stay and she always listened to me without ever judging me."

Inevitably, some drug users relapse and fall back into the mire.
Others succeed in reducing their usage, without completely quitting.
For Darlene, the goal is not to bring all users to abstinence, but to
alleviate their loneliness--to make their conditions more human.

"The idea is to help them help themselves," she says. "I wanted for a
long time someone to hear what was wrong in my life. And what I can do
with all this pain that I've lived without ever having been heard, is
to make sure I'll listen well when somebody truly needs me," Darlene
explains.

"I can't save people. But if I take a moment to really listen to what
the person is saying, then what I lived won't be lost, because as much
as I'm helping the other person, I'm healing myself. I suffered, but
it wasn't in vain, because I gained the capacity to listen."

As she stepped on the stage this March to accept the Farha Foundation
award, with tears welling up in her eyes, Darlene is finally content.

"For all the void that I felt inside me for so many years, and for all
the time that I've tried to fill this void with drugs and
self-destruction, that night, [it] felt filled. It's not important how
long it lasted. I was filled with love. I was just filled with love."