This is Chapter five in a story about a girl we are calling Tessa. Her real name is not being used to protect her identity. She went through the Narconon drug rehab program and this is the story of how she came to go there and how she did once she completed the program.

Once Tessa’s mother found out about the fact that she had tried to leave with another patient in the detox she decided that Tessa needed to go to rehab far away from home. It needed to be a rehab with a good reputation. Tessa’s mother and the rest of her family decided that the best place for Tessa to go would be a rehab called Sierra Tucson in Arizona. The program was on a beautiful sight and one could tell from the surroundings that it cost a pretty penny to attend.

The program was a thirty day deal and Tessa was one of the youngest people in the program. The other drug addicts told her that she was not really a heroin junky because she did not use needles. By the time that Tessa left, she was less serious about trying to get clean than she was the day she arrived.

When Tessa went home, her boyfriend picked her up from the airport. She immediately went with him upon arriving home to go get heroin.

 

Maybe it was because the drug addicts in the rehab had told her that she was not a real addict, or maybe it was because by the time she got back some of her friends were shooting, but as soon as Tessa got home, she started using needles to inject the heroin she was using.

Pretty soon her mother began to notice that Tessa was not sober. One day when Tessa was not home, her mother decided to go through her room. She found spoons and old needles hidden amongst Tessa things. When Tessa got home that day, her mother demanded that Tessa show her her arms. When Tessa rolled up her sleeves, her mother immediately saw the needle marks that were covering her daughter’s arms.

 

When her mother found the needle marks she sent Tessa back to rehab. This time Tessa stayed longer and when she graduated from the program, instead of going home, she went to a halfway house. The halfway house, like many that are out there, was not well managed and Tessa smoked pot the whole time that she was there. After being there for a while her mother contacted the halfway house and informed them that Tessa needed to come home because her grandfather was dying of liver failure. Tessa flew back to New York to see her grandfather through his last days. Tessa said that it was absolutely awful to see her grandfather suffering so much. She said that he was in excruciating pain and it was one of the most horrible things she ever had to watch. His liver was making his body completely toxic because it was unable to filter out anything that was poisonous to his body.

By the time Tessa’s grandfather finally passed away she and her family were totally devastated. Tessa was always really close with her grandfather, even more so than she was with her father. She said that the loss of him was more than she could bear.

As soon as she could, Tessa went and got heroin. She did it as much as possible until she went back to the halfway house.

 

 

Once she went back to halfway house, they tested her urine for drugs. She failed and got kicked out. She went back home to New York and got a job and moved back in with her mother. She started using heroin again and she used the money that she earned from her job to support her habit. Pretty soon the money she was making as a cashier was not enough to support her addiction and she started stealing money from the cash register. She got fired from her job as soon as the management discovered what she was doing.

Tessa got another job and pretty soon it turned out that she was not making enough at that job either to feed her ever increasing need for heroin. She started stealing form that job as well, ending in the same result.

 

Once her mother found out about the jobs situation, she figured that Tessa was probably using drugs again. She decided, along with the rest of Tessa’s family that Tessa needed to go a really long term rehab. This time the family sent her to one in Hawaii that lasted for 24 months.

This rehab was not the same as Sierra Tucson at all. This was more like a military boot camp type of rehab. It was very hardcore and feelings were not taken in to account at this rehab. There were twelve step meetings, but there was a whole lot more than that. There were rules, and a lot of them. The punishments for the infractions of any of these rules were extreme and most of the time very embarrassing. Tessa said that one day she was thirty seconds late going to one of the meetings and for a week after that she had to wear an alarm clock hooked on a chain like a necklace. It went off every fifteen minutes. She was not allowed to take it off, even when she was sleeping. She said she was never late to another meeting again for the remainder of her stay at the rehab. She said that the place was a self policing center and people would tell on each other and get each other into trouble all the time. The people in the program were not playing around, and each one of them was very serious about achieving their sobriety and none of them were going to risk their success on someone else who was breaking rules.

Continued in Chapter Six