From addiction, a path forward

Editor's note: This is the first of two articles exploring addiction and recovery.

Laura Townsend began taking her father’s prescription Percocet because it made her feel like a better mom and more like the person she always wanted to be.

“I thought, ‘Oh, ok. This is it,” said Townsend. “This is everything I’ve ever been missing my entire life.”

Percocet is the brand name of a prescription opioid painkiller that contains acetaminophen and oxycodone. Townsend explained that the painkillers energized her and made everything in life seem manageable – from having more patience with her son to cleaning the house and making a home-cooked meal for her family.

“It wasn’t that I wanted to be a bad person. I wanted to be a better mom and a better wife, and because of that, I wound up completely losing both of those things,” said Townsend.

A common misconception about addiction, she explained, is that it’s a choice, the result of people choosing to be lazy or immoral.

“Diseases can come from choices too. Just because you make a choice and it ends up like this, doesn’t mean that it’s not a disease,” said Townsend. “ Like we don’t call it a sexually transmitted choice.”

Nobody would choose this, Towsend said, noting that she did not realize what she was getting herself into at the time.

* * *

Townsend was 25 years old and living in Hawaii with her young son and army husband, when she found out that her father was going to pass away soon and promptly traveled home to Virginia to be with him.

After her father died, Towsend and her family moved to Colorado in 2010, where she continued to take prescription painkillers to cope with the move and her duties as a mother and wife. When she had difficulties obtaining prescription painkillers, Townsend began seeking out other opioid drugs, like heroin, to feed her addiction, unbeknownst to her family. She told herself that she didn’t have time to feel sick from withdrawal when she had to take care of her family.

Had Townsend known about suboxone – a drug used to treat opioid addiction – then she may have pursued treatment sooner, she noted. Suboxone is the brand name of Buprenorphine/ Naloxone, which is used to mitigate withdrawal symptoms for opioid users.

With the growing popularity of drugs like suboxone, or other brands such as Narcan, being used to treat opioid addiction, Richmond and Henrico Health Districts (or RHHD) now offers access to Naloxone and Naloxone training to community members as part of the REVIVE! Program – Virginia’s opioid overdose and naloxone education program.

For those living near RHHD Resource Centers, they can receive training from Community Health Workers or visit a center to obtain Naloxone. Online training consists of learning to recognize the signs of an opioid overdose and how to administer naloxone.

RHHD has already dispensed 553 units of Naloxone and trained 211 community members in naloxone administration from January to June of 2023.

* * *

Eventually, the family planned to move again, this time to Missouri. Wanting to leave her opioid addiction behind and move forward with her life, Townsend confided in her husband about her addiction and began therapy.

However, the move to Missouri did not end up being the opportunity to turn a new leaf that Townsend had hoped for. Instead, she fell back into her habits and also began using meth. Townsend recalled an incident in which her neighbors found her syringes hidden in the woods behind their houses.

“I had gone from feeling like I was finally the mom that my son deserved, because I was high and could do everything, to just being like, hating myself and hating Missouri,” she said.

In 2012, Towsend went to rehab for the first time, but was kicked out for having syringes. Her husband then brought her home to try to detox and for the next couple years, Townsend struggled with her sobriety.

The final straw for Townsend and her family was in 2016 after they had moved back to her hometown of Roanoke.

One day, her husband found syringes in their car while driving their son to school. He asked to separate from Townsend and limited her contact with their son.

Townsend explained that once she lost her son, her addiction worsened and her only motivation was the desire to not have her son taken from her life completely.

“The most unnatural thing in the world is for me and him to not be together,” she said, describing her close relationship with her son.

* * *

Things continued to worsen for Townsend – she was arrested and spent time incarcerated, which did limit her drug-abuse to an extent. In addition, she attended rehab, but was kicked out because staff believed she was faking an illness when she complained of severe pain in her abdomen.

A visit to the hospital quickly revealed that Townsend was not in fact faking sickness, instead, she suffered from appendicitis and a ruptured kidney. Towsend’s liver had shut down and she had sepsis.

Towsend was put on a ventilator and stayed hospitalized for the next four months – a time in which her family didn’t know if she would survive. Townsend recalled that her son even had the outfit that he would wear to her funeral picked out.

Despite nearly facing death, Townsend did not stay sober during her time in the hospital. A friend and fellow addict would sneak drugs into her hospital room when her mother was not around.

By the time Townsend had been released from the hospital and went home to live with her mother, she weighed a mere 88 pounds and had to relearn how to walk. Yet within a week, Townsend slipped back into her previous drug habits.

“I’ve never been suicidal. I didn’t want to kill myself, but I didn’t give a sh–t about dying or not dying,” Towsend said, describing her mindset after being released from the hospital. “Like what is the point? I don’t have my son, I don’t have my husband. I can’t be happy without being high, you know. And I just stopped like trying to live.”

* * *

Townsend didn’t begin to see a path towards recovery until 2019, when she was court-ordered to do 3 months of intensive program with The McShin Foundation in Lakeside, after spending a year incarcerated.

Townsend was able to stay in recovery for a year and half before relapsing in 2021, after which, she returned to McShin and has been in recovery to date.

“The more access to recovery that there is, the better everyone is. Because you don’t have to be me in order to benefit from people being healthy and taking care of themselves and not using,” said Townsend.

Although she never thought sobriety would be possible for her, Townsend discovered that being surrounded by other women with similar experiences provided her with a sense of community and accountability.

“I never in a million years thought that it could work on me,” Townsend said. “I just thought, ‘ok, well they’re sick, but they’re not sick like me. You know, they’re not as bad as me. They didn’t shoot up in the ICU like me, they didn’t destroy a family like I did. They didn’t lose the sweetest human in the world because of their addiction like I did.”

However, Townsend soon realized that most everyone in recovery had done things that they weren’t proud of and she wasn’t any worse or better than anyone else.

Townsend, who is now a peer recovery specialist and recovery coach for McShin, explained that being able to witness other women in various stages of their recovery journey, motivated her to pursue a better life for herself.

“You don’t have to be good enough for them to love you. Like they love you just like you are one day off the street,” Townsend said, noting that connection is the opposite of addiction.

The McShin Foundation serves nearly 180 people on average each month in one form or another.

* * *

Addiction isn’t curable, explained 44-year-old Jesse Wysocki; like diabetes, you have to keep working to treat it.

Wysocki has been in recovery for nearly 12 years and still makes a conscious effort every day to stay on the right path.

“Many a times I surrendered and tried to get help,” said Wysocki, who has been the chief operating officer of The McShin Foundation for five years. “But I learned, I got to continue to do it.”

Wysocki described losing his oldest son to substance-use as the most challenging part about being in recovery.

“I couldn’t use and hide behind my addiction and mask it with that,” Wyoscki said, recalling the shame and guilt that he faced when his son died, shortly after he began working at McShin.

* * *

In high school, Wysocki played football and had dreams of playing at the collegiate level, but a knee injury during his junior year launched him into a 15-year addiction to opioids.

In 2022, Henrico County served 595 people with substance use disorders, 249 of which were opioid-related, according to the Henrico Area Mental Health & Developmental Services' 2022 annual report. In addition, the agency reported that opioids were the drug of choice for 33% of those treated between July of 2022 and June of 2023.

As his addiction continued, Wysocki ended up spending time incarcerated and dropping out of high school. He frequently asked his dad for money or stole money from his mom in order to sustain his drug habits. When his family refused to help him any longer, Wysocki lived in his car or couch hopped with friends.

As an adult, Wysocki’s opioid addiction and time spent in correctional facilities led to a strained relationship with his eight children.

He recalled a time when two of his children visited him in jail and told him that all he does is lie to them and continue to abuse drugs.

Wysocki explained that he used to take his two year old son with him to Richmond in order to obtain drugs; he would tell his son, “Daddy’s just sick, taking medicine.”

He recounted one such incident in which his son asked for some “medicine,” because he was feeling sick too. This moment ended up being the motivation Wysocki needed to seek help from The Healing Place –  a residential recovery program in Richmond.

Wysocki explained how he excelled at The Healing Place because of its disciplinary structure that kept him grounded. After about nine months there, Wyoscki began working there; it was the opportunity to stay under their “umbrella” that he felt made it a successful program.

While there are many recovery centers in the greater Richmond area, there is a growing demand for more resources and increased services to mitigate the growing opioid problem. One effort being made by Henrico County is the creation of a detox and recovery center in Eastern Henrico to be run by the Henrico Area Mental Health and Developmental Services alongside Pinnacle Rehabilitation Network LLC.

In order to discourage those who struggle with addiction from being incarcerated or using emergency rooms for treatment, the recovery center is part of county officials’ efforts to focus addiction resources on prevention instead of retribution.

The Henrico Board of Supervisors allocated $12 million for the new recovery center’s construction, which will include 30 patient rooms and six observation beds in a 20,000-square-foot-facility. The county will fund and own the center, while Pinnacle will ensure that the facility runs smoothly in order to best serve community members like Wysocki.

Today, Wysocki is not the same person that he used to be. Before entering recovery, Wysocki said he was self-centered and wasn’t mindful of the world around him.

“They say, life shows up, but the truth is, I just started showing up for life. Like I started being present,” Wysocki said, noting the major difference between himself in recovery versus who he was when he had an active substance-use problem.

In his job as COO of The McShin Foundation, Wyoscki can see others turn their lives around in the same way that he did – an experience that he finds incredibly rewarding.

“I’m in a position where I can watch a cactus turn into a rose,” he said.