First in a periodic series of stories on opiate addiction in North Central Massachusetts.
GARDNER — Patrick Flynn needed to score some heroin, even if it meant stealing his mother’s car to do it.
Drunk and “out of his mind,” his mother, Jayne Fleck, made a decision that only a few years before would have seemed unimaginable — driving her son to Fitchburg so he could shoot up.
She didn’t see him stick the heroin-filled syringe in his arm, but as he staggered out of the drug dealer’s house, she knew the poison had him in its grip.
As he struggled to get back in the car, Jayne was terrified he had gone too far this time. His eyelids grew heavy and each time he nodded off, she screamed his name to wake up.
Patrick made it through that night, like the hundreds before.
The next morning, he was off again to detox to make another of what would total 13 attempts to get clean.
The unimaginable choice Jayne made that night was literally forced upon her.
Patrick was in trouble with the law again, for shoplifting this time, and as he had done so many times before, he used checking into detox to sidestep having to face the potential punishment.
“For me, that was probably the lowest point,” said Jayne about that surreal night in October 2013, after struggling for over two years to get her son clean.
Living nightmare
Patrick is better today. But just today.
For Patrick, and every recovering addict, it really is one day at a time.
His story, and his mother’s forced education on how to navigate the legal, insurance and substance-abuse recovery systems, is, tragically, a typical tale of the struggles families around the state face each day when a son or daughter becomes an addict.
Both former Gov. Deval Patrick and current Gov. Charlie Baker have made battling the epidemic a top priority of their administrations.
Jayne can vividly remember the moment when the state’s opiate-addiction epidemic became more than a distant tragedy that other families must endure. Her family’s descent into living a nightmare “where you never woke up” began, unknown to her at the time, when her son, Patrick, then 16, fell off his bike and shattered his right elbow on June 17, 2008.
After the elbow was surgically repaired — 16 fractures were held together with plates and screws — he was prescribed Oxycodone and Valium to help with the pain after spending four days in a local hospital. While there, Jayne said, he had an intravenous morphine pump.
While she didn’t know it at the time, Jayne said “that was the beginning of the end.”
Patrick was a fairly typical child and teenager. He had what many would consider a privileged life, taking trips around the country with his family. He even had his own car.
“He was always very inquisitive and wasn’t the type to play video games. He was always outside and had a mind of his own. He was very strong-willed,” said Jayne.
On his first day of kindergarten, Patrick asked his teacher if she would teach him how to sing, because, as he put it, “I know everything else.”
He did carry some emotional baggage, however, after learning his biological father refused to acknowledge him after being born. He also struggled with a form of dyslexia that wasn’t diagnosed until his senior year of high school.
In the eighth grade, he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that inhibits the body’s ability to absorb calcium and leads to brittle bones. As a result, he broke both wrists three times and also his shoulder, and the Crohn’s was the reason his elbow shattered in 16 places when he fell off his bike during his sophomore year.
Change in appearance
It was during his junior year that his behavior and his physical appearance began to change.
Growing up, Patrick had always been “a little chunky,” said Jayne, but then he started losing weight and became moody.
Jayne and her husband, Jamie, became very worried.
During Christmas break of Patrick’s senior year, it became apparent that something was darkly different about him.
“I remember looking at him and thinking, he looks like a drug addict,” recalled Jayne.
She remembers studying her then-17-year-old son as he stood in their kitchen in January 2011. He had become thin and had dark circles under his eyes.
Despite Patrick’s physical appearance and the growing doubts about his increasingly erratic behavior, Jayne admits she was “naivé” about the warning signs of addiction. The family’s “normal” lives continued until April.
‘I borrowed it’
On the Thursday before Good Friday in 2011, the nightmare began in earnest.
Jayne was missing $400 from her purse.
While sitting at their kitchen table, she confronted Patrick about the missing money. Without hesitation, she said, Patrick admitted that he’d taken it, but said, “I didn’t steal it, I borrowed it without permission.”
Then he explained why. He needed it to buy pills to feed his drug addiction.
Patrick described to his mother how he was smoking pills — Percocet, Vicodin, Oxycodone. He would place a pill on a piece of aluminum foil and light it. He would inhale the vapors with a straw.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I think he was smoking pills,” said Jayne.
That openness with his addiction would serve as both a blessing and burden during the continuing struggle to get Patrick clean and keep him that way.
“Once he was confronted about it, he never denied it,” said Jayne.
He told his mother that nearly from the first day back from the hospital after elbow surgery, three years before, he began palming the prescribed 10 mg Oxycodone pills and hiding them in his bedroom to use at a later time.
“We didn’t realize just how severe his addiction had become,” said Jayne, who believes that he was at first just experimenting with the narcotics, and alcohol and marijuana, the year after the elbow injury.
Dark descent
Any questions about the severity of his addiction were answered as Easter weekend unfolded.
After being gone most of the weekend, Patrick arrived at the annual Easter dinner on Sunday afternoon.
“He was really sick. He was sweating and throwing up. He was in full withdrawals,” said Jayne.
The family discussed how to help, even entertaining the possibility of giving him a Vicodin, which was ruled out.
After dinner, Patrick left home again, after telling Jayne’s husband, Jamie, that he owed a drug dealer $230, which his parents reluctantly gave him.
He came home early Monday morning “high as a kite.”
That morning, Patrick told his mother how far his addiction had come. He was “smoking Perc 30s, drinking and doing cocaine to stay up and the only drug he had yet to try was Ecstasy,” said Jayne.
“I was numb. So many things go through your mind. I felt guilty. I was scared about him overdosing. Or what if he drinks and drives and kills someone, or himself?” she said. “It was like a bad dream that can’t wake up from.”
Like most parents confronted with the reality of a child addicted to opiates, Jayne didn’t know what to do next.
It was decided on the Thursday after he was confronted about the missing $400, that he would be taken to the local mental-health clinic, Community Healthlink in Gardner, to learn the family’s options.
They were told by a counselor on Friday that he needed to medically detox and they should take him to the local emergency room at 8 a.m. Monday to begin the process.
“I’m a mess. I can’t stop crying,” she said remembering those hours on Monday morning while waiting in the emergency room for a bed to become available at a local detox.
By 11 a.m., Patrick’s body was being wracked by withdrawals.
“He was literally climbing out of his skin,” she said, adding she didn’t understand just yet what was happening.
“I don’t know he’s withdrawing at this point. Because this is all still brand-new to me,” she said.
That first stay at the detox unit in Westboro in 2011 would be the first of what would eventually become 12 additional detox stays.
‘Just can’t stop him’
For Jayne, she, again naively, believed that after Patrick’s first detox experience, he would be better.
He wasn’t.
In fact, he confided in his mother later that he began using within four hours of leaving his first detox and never waited longer than six hours after leaving before using again.
“You just can’t stop him,” she said.
Despite continuing to use, he began what is known as an intensive outpatient program in Worcester.
Nearly all drug-treatment advocates believe that once addicts leave detox, they should immediately enter a short-term residential treatment program — usually for 28 days.
In Massachusetts, insurance companies have been reluctant to pay for residential treatment programs, as Jayne soon learned.
Because she had been told by her insurance company that the only way it would pay for a residential treatment program is if Patrick “fails at IOP,” the “roller coaster” of detox followed by IOP began and continued for the next three years.
Hiding the truth
Less than three months after his first detox, Patrick went back in, despite “looking good” and passing drug tests Jayne was making him take.
It was only later that she found out Patrick was testing negative because he was using urine from the family dog and from friends who weren’t using.
“He was playing me like a fiddle,” said Jayne about Patrick’s ability to test negative.
By this time, Jayne had become more aware of the signs of possible use, including household items going missing.
“I asked him straight up (if he was using),” when she approached him in June 2011 after passing every drug test she made him take.
He said yes.
Using heroin
The second detox for Patrick began his descent into using heroin.
He told his mother of his experience there, “I knew very little about heroin, but now I have a Ph.D. in it.”
Several weeks later, he shot up for the first time, but she didn’t learn that until several months later, after being contacted by a family friend that something needed to be done to help Patrick as soon as possible.
“He told me, that if something wasn’t done soon, Patrick might soon be dead (because he is now using heroin),” said Jayne.
Patrick, using his characteristic honesty, told Jayne, “Heroin is better, because it’s cheaper and is a better high.”
Even after four years, Jayne is still exasperated that an 18-year-old would be allowed to interact with adults that have been possibly using for decades and learning about shooting up heroin.
After Patrick’s second detox, he was prescribed Suboxone by a Worcester physician, which is a combination of a synthetic opioid and naloxone, which is the primary component of Narcan. It reverses the effects of opiod poisoning and is used to revive an addict who overdoses.
One of the drawbacks of using Suboxone is that an addict will test positive for opioids when it is being used.
But Patrick, Jayne believes now, was not taking the Suboxone but selling it so he could buy heroin.
Forcing treatment
With the warning from the family friend, Jayne began the process of what will be the first of three involuntary commitments into an inpatient treatment program, what is known as Section 35.
Using Section 35, a family member appears before a judge and requests an involuntary commitment if someone’s drug or alcohol abuse puts themselves or others at risk.
Jayne’s first attempt at using Section 35 to get Patrick help did not go well.
When Jayne appeared before a district court judge to request Patrick be involuntarily committed, the judge told her that he can’t proceed until Patrick is in the courtroom.
After getting Patrick to the courthouse, he realized what was happening.
“He takes off. He literally ran out of the courthouse and through the woods,” said Jayne.
Because Patrick wasn’t in the courtroom, the first judge didn’t grant the Section 35.
A week later, Jayne appeared before a different judge who didn’t require Patrick to be in the courtroom, and Patrick was ordered to be committed to the Brockton Meadowbrook Campus, an inpatient treatment facility.
While ordered to spend 30 days in the facility, Patrick was released only 17 days later.
And the roller coaster continued over the next two years with Patrick checking into detox or being involuntarily committed, getting out, using, and getting into trouble, usually getting arrested for shoplifting to finance his addiction.
He finally got his legal troubles behind him after serving time in the Worcester County Jail because he had violated probation when he left the state to check into a treatment center in Florida, which happened three years into Patrick’s addition.
Jayne’s insurance company finally agreed to pay for Patrick to spend a month in a residential treatment facility in Florida, where he pieced together the longest amount of time he had ever been drug-free.
“Patrick had had enough. For the first time, he seemed really ready to stop using,” said Jayne.
After leaving jail, he went back to Florida for another stay at the treatment facility and then moved to California, where he was living in a sober house until last week.
While Jayne has battled to save her son over these last four years, she now understands, like the parent of every addict, that there is only so much she can do.
The disease is strong and it must be treated like any other illness, said Jayne, but until the addict makes the individual decision to get clean, the roller coaster will continue to run.
Follow Cliff Clark on Tout and Twitter @cliffcclark.
