- Alcohol
- Drugs
Patti has been on her recovery journey for 22 years, and it’s taken many twists and turns. As with many women, she switched from drugs to alcohol when she became a mom, although alcohol was always pat of her story.
As a high school student in the ‘70s, experimentation with drugs was the norm. It seemed like everyone did them. But not everyone took to them the way Patti did. She went from being in gifted classes and a cheerleader to being a dropout and a runaway at 15. Soon, she was hanging with drug dealers and criminals. She quickly grew tired of that and went home, but sobriety didn’t follow.
She received her GED and took some positive steps but she also became a bartender and was still doing drugs and drinking. She thought she could walk the fine line between casual use and addiction, but then tragedy struck. Patti caught the eye of a young man who turned out to be a stalker. When he kidnapped her from college at gunpoint, she was forced to go into hiding. The nightmare wasn’t over, though. Angry at being unable to find the object of his obsession, he appeared at Patti’s mom’s house. Patti was on the phone with her mother when her stalker broke in and bludgeoned her mom to death.
Those traumatic events catapulted Patti into heavy drug and alcohol use. Her addictions were fueled by ongoing fear. In the days before stalking laws and DNA testing, her mother’s killer only served six months, while Patti had to remain on the run. She felt no one could protect her so she hid her fear and pain in a haze of drugs and alcohol.
She continued bartending and became pregnant with her first child, managing to stop using long enough to get through the pregnancy and nursing stages. When she returned to the bottle, she found her drinking habits had changed. They were more intense and had progressed in a way she couldn’t have foreseen. She entered a marriage for the wrong reasons and found that it gave her even more of an excuse to drink. “I would wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and I didn’t recognize myself,” Patti recalls of that time. “I knew I was an alcoholic but didn’t want to go get help. Then I got very, very physically ill. I had arthritis.”
The doctors she sought treatment from never asked about her drinking, though. It wasn’t until a sister came to visit that Patti finally found the courage to go to a group support meeting for alcoholics. Her siblings sat in with her during that first meeting and, as Patti listened, she found that she identified with the feelings expressed by others in the group – the guilt, remorse and shame. She knew she belonged there.
That was January of 1991 and she’s been there ever since. Patti met her current husband in one of those rooms and she’s now a therapist. “I love this work. It’s very fulfilling for me,” she says.
She also uses her work to inform others. She went through some very horrendous things in sobriety, being diagnosed with Hepatitis-C after two false negatives. Fortunately, it was the most treatable type. “I love to inform patients about this disease, as so many suffer without getting diagnosed. You can get it from sharing needles or straws to snort. Doctors will often tell patients it’s dormant, but it can kill you,” she warns.