MANSFIELD, Ohio–One powerful image was burned in Dawn Beiser’s mind the morning she woke up in jail after overdosing on heroin: the thought of her son and two daughters standing over her casket.
“In my head I could hear my kids at my funeral saying, ‘Why didn’t my mom love me enough? Why wasn’t I good enough? Why did she love drugs more than me?’” Dawn’s voice breaks as she speaks. “I didn’t want to go out like that.”
This was Dawn’s reality as she struggled with her addiction to heroin – a reality that drove her to take the first step towards recovery.
“I was determined, I had to do this,” she said. “I knew it was now or never, I was going to die.”
A slippery slope
At the age of nine, Dawn caught her mother using crack cocaine.
She was living in a house in Cleveland with her mother, her stepfather and three siblings – two brothers and a baby sister. As her mother’s oldest daughter her role was caretaker of her siblings, too young to understand the gravity of the situation.
But Dawn understood. She understood when her parents started using in front of her after that since she already knew. Why hide it? She understood when people visited her home that they were there to buy drugs. And she understood that when the police raided their home multiple times, the rule was to sit down and keep your mouth shut.
“It’s all I knew. That was my normal,” said Dawn, now 40. “I didn’t know there was something different, that’s what I knew.”
Dawn’s life changed drastically at age 17, when her mother moved the family to the Mansfield area after learning she was pregnant, just after losing an infant daughter. Watching her mother detox was rough on Dawn, but worth it. Her mother was drug-free for 22 years when she passed in 2013.
Because of her upbringing Dawn described herself as “ridiculously anti-drug” for most of her younger years, never abusing a drug a day in her life – until the age of 28, when she was prescribed two pain-relieving narcotics.
“I have a lot of health problems. I’ve had 11 lung collapses, two upper lung removals, a blood clotting disorder, and I’ve had heart surgery already,” Dawn explained. “So I was put on 100 mg Fentanyl patches and Dilaudid right off the rip. I thought it was OK because it was prescribed to me.”
At first Dawn was taking her medication as directed and selling the medicine she didn’t need, a habit leftover from her childhood; Fentanyl patches went for $100 a patch. Three months later she realized she’d run out of medication after selling too many, and came to a startling realization.
“I woke up in the morning and I was sick. And I didn’t know what was wrong with me; I didn’t realize I was addicted to it,” she said. “As a matter of fact I called my doctor and said I woke up this morning sweating and puking, and he said I think you’re addicted to your medication.”
It was this wake-up call that put Dawn in rehab for the first time–at the insistence of her mother. But after her release, she went straight back to old habits – except instead of using prescription drugs, she substituted with cocaine and a bottle of vodka every day.
“In my eyes I was fine because it wasn’t my drug of choice,” said Dawn. “In my head that’s what I was thinking, because I still didn’t really understand addiction yet. But I still felt like crap, so I went back to the pills.”
Dawn tried heroin for the first time at age 38. All it took was one use for her to become hooked.
“I swore I’d never do heroin. That was my limit. But that happened,” she said. “You get so bad that it doesn’t matter anymore, you’re sick and you’ll do anything not to be sick. It was there and I did it. I fell in love with it the first time I did it, and I was off and running.”
Trying heroin soon turned into trying crack, which quickly turned into using both drugs at the same time. That habit was short-lived, however, because it got to be too expensive; Dawn stopped using crack in order to support her $60-per-day heroin habit.
“My drug of choice was heroin and I had to have it,” she said. “You get to the point where you’re so far gone, you feel like there’s no turning back. How do you get out of it, how do you do that?”
Rock bottom
Numbness was always the feeling Dawn hoped to achieve when she was high.
“You get high because your perception of reality is gone,” she said. “You don’t have to deal with things, you don’t have to feel, you just numb yourself. You’re not there.”
It was a feeling she craved most when going through a major emotional trauma, and a feeling tested most in the past year and a half. In 2013 Dawn’s mother passed away, motivating Dawn to seclude herself, detox and try to get clean.
She was clean for four months when her father passed away.
“Two months after my dad died, I went and bought a gram of heroin. I had been clean for six months,” Dawn remembered. “I held that heroin in my pocket for a good five hours, and finally used it. And I ended up going to jail that night, because I overdosed and someone called the cops. I woke up the next morning and thought, what did you just do. You just threw away almost six months of sobriety and you almost died. What are you doing?
“Me and God had a really deep conversation, I didn’t want to hurt anymore and I felt like He was trying to show me something, like there’s got to be a reason I’m here,” she continued. “I’ve died before and I’m still here, I’ve had all these health problems, my use was so heavy and I didn’t overdose, I’m still alive, and there’s got to be a reason. I feel that my reason is God wants me here to get this right, finally.”
Recovery
After being released from jail, Dawn spent two months clean before going to court and taking responsibility for her actions. She was sentenced to drug court and probation, which included random drug tests three to four times a week, attending drug court, and counseling at Three C Counseling in Mansfield. After trying to stay sober so many times before, Dawn discovered counseling was the missing piece.
“I tell everyone if you’re serious about getting clean you have to get help, you have to know why you use, learn how to cope,” she said. “Our coping mechanism was always getting high, so you have to find a different way. I just lost a brother in January and I was a wreck. I was freaking out because I didn’t know if what I was feeling was normal, I was breaking down and crying hysterically and losing it. I would come here and say is this normal? I wasn’t used to dealing with it. And not one time did I think about getting high.
“You’re numb when you’re high,” she continued. “Learning how to feel again is like, I didn’t know if I was losing my mind. I had to learn how to feel all over again, and that was hard but it was OK. I’m glad I was at a point where I was in my recovery, and it kind of tested my recovery. And I passed. And that felt great, it felt good to be like I got this.”
Dawn has been attending Three C Counseling since September, and has been sober for the past 10 months.
“No matter how many times I failed at getting clean I still kept trying, because I knew I was better than that,” she said. “I knew that mom, wife and daughter that I used to be and I wanted that Dawn back, I wanted that person back. I was just lost and needed to find my way back. And it was hard; it was a long road.
“I thought I was ready a million times before, but it took those million tries to fail to finally get it right.”
Family first
At 19 years old, Dawn’s oldest son can remember a time before his mother was using drugs. But for her two daughters, age 14 and 12, there was a time when a drug addict mother was the only one they knew.
“I felt hopeless. It was horrible, I felt like there was no out,” Dawn remembered. “I’d run and hide from everybody in my family, my children, my husband, everybody, because I didn’t want them to see me like that. I didn’t want to be like that, let alone them watching me do that to myself.”
The idea that she was putting her own children through what she had gone through at such a young age gnawed at Dawn also made her addiction that much harder to admit.
“I didn’t want to hurt my kids the way I got hurt, it was the last thing I wanted to do, but that’s what I was doing,” she said.
Dawn pushed herself to be a “functioning addict” during her days of heavy usage, working three jobs and always putting her children before her addiction – even if it meant suffering the symptoms of withdrawal in order to provide for her family.
“If my kids needed something they were going to get what they needed before I got high, even if that meant me being sick and laying on the couch sick,” she said. “They’d ask me what’s wrong and I would be honest with them and say, this is what drugs do to you. This is the side you don’t know about. I need drugs right now, I don’t want them but my body needs them to function.”
That honesty between her children continued into her sober months. At four months clean, Dawn asked her son to tell her how he felt when he knew she was out getting high. He broke down into tears.
“He said he was sad and depressed and he didn’t know if he would get a phone call that they’d found me dead somewhere. That hit me hard,” said Dawn. “But I need that reality, I wanted that reality. I wanted to deal with that stuff while I was clean. And I know it felt good for him to get that out and tell me how he felt.”
Now, Dawn’s relationship with her children is better than it’s ever been. She believes the open line of communication between her and her three children is what will save them from going down the same road she has.
“That fear has never crossed my mind,” she said. “Addiction is a disease and it’s hereditary. I sit and talk with my kids all the time and try to educate them because I wasn’t educated, there were things about addiction that I didn’t know until it was too late. I educate them as much as I can, keep them involved, and pray. And hopefully they don’t have to go through what I did; they’ve seen it enough.”
Looking ahead
Now at 10 months sober, Dawn only has her sights set on the future. Her goal is to someday become a drug and alcohol counselor, and help people with addiction problems come back from the brink.
“I want to let people know I was where they are right now and I’ve been there many times, but I’m standing here showing you it’s possible and it does happen, and it can happen to you,” said Dawn. “You have to put in the work and get all the way right.”
It’s a lesson she hopes will apply to her children as well – one that leaves her with a much more comforting vision.
“I want to go out with my kids saying ‘That was my mom, she overcame it.’ And I want to show them no matter what, there’s always an alternative,” she said. “There’s always a different way you can go. It’s never too late.”
Mental health and substance abuse treatment combined with healthcare reform is helping some local residents along the Road to Recovery from addiction. In the series, Road to Recovery, Richland Source shares their stories in cooperation with the Richland County Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Board.
“I want to let people know I was where they are right now and I’ve been there many times, but I’m standing here showing you it’s possible and it does happen, and it can happen to you,” said Dawn Beiser.
