Clean Start
Brittany Shartz realized on her third day of detox at St. Vincent Charity Medical Center’s Rosary Hall that she didn’t know how to live sober without heroin or opiates such as Percocet.
Shartz had traveled a road of highs and lows for more than a decade. She was 13 years old when she began experimenting with drugs. At one point, she was snorting up to 30 painkillers a day, destroying her sinus cavity.
“I always tell people, ‘You can hit rock bottom, but there is a place that’s lower, and that’s when you’re broken,’ ” says Shartz. “Rock bottom is when you lose yourself physically and financially, and broken is when you lose yourself emotionally too — and that’s where I was at.”
Today, the 27-year-old mother of a healthy 1-year-old daughter inspires others to put their own lives’ pieces back together as a volunteer on the detox unit.
“With addiction recovery, you really have to give up your own ideas and listen to people who have been there before and do the things they tell you to do,” says Dr. Chris Adelman, medical director at Rosary Hall. “What makes Brittany different is that she was able to do what counselors advised to get better.”
Growing up in a suburban school, Shartz was no different than other kids who have some free time at home and get into some bad relationships too. But when she was 17, she dropped out and left home to live with a guy she was dating. He used drugs.
“It was an experimental stage,” she says.
When several of her own family members died that year, she took prescription pills from their cabinets. “At this time, I had never tried any of them, but I knew they were worth money,” Shartz says. “I remember doing 75 percent of those pills for two months straight. I really didn’t even get out of the bedroom.”
Shartz realized she liked painkillers. She eventually finished high school, and her mother encouraged her to move back home, live for free and attend college. Shartz decided to go off on her own.
She worked two full-time jobs, went to school and continued experimenting with acid and whatever else she could find. “I really didn’t think of the drugs as a problem,” she says.
That’s when she started selling them. Within six months, she and her boyfriend were arrested. Shartz was charged with two felonies.
During a yearlong probation, Shartz stayed sober. “But I knew when I got off [probation], I was going to use drugs again,” she says. “I wasn’t ready to stop.”
Shartz felt defeated by the felonies on her record — like she’d never get a job. So she didn’t try. Instead, she went to work at a strip club.
By then, she was 21 years old and entering another destructive relationship with a guy addicted to cocaine. During the three years they were together, Shartz’s opiate habit ramped up from three pills to 25, at $5 a pill. They lost the house they lived in and moved into a rental property. She was 24.
“Around this time, I wanted to get off drugs,” she says. Snorting opiates was taking a devastating physical toll on her body. Always petite, her 110-pound frame was down to a meek 80 pounds.
Shartz went through periods of trying to get off drugs. “I’d buy Xanax and think, Maybe I can sleep this [withdrawal] off and wean myself this way,” she relates. “It would work for a week or two, but then I would go back to Percocet.”
Her mom took her to the emergency room one time. But there were no beds available in that particular detox unit so she stayed in the emergency department until the pills were out of her system. “My mom had to come back and pick me up 12 hours later,” she recalls.
“I always thought if I can get past the withdrawal maybe I can get sober,” Shartz says.
But when Shartz’s boyfriend switched from pills to heroin, she decided to try it. “I told myself, I’m not doing this,” she says. “But I ended up doing it.”
Within six months of using heroin, Shartz had a $300-per-day habit. “I didn’t want to get sober when I was doing heroin,” she says, noting that her weight went back up and she actually looked healthier. She wasn’t.
She was at rock bottom. After running through all of her money, losing a rental property, becoming homeless and continuing to work at a strip club, Shartz decided to return to her stepfather’s house to get healthy.
She was determined to quit heroin for good. She got a hold of some Suboxone, a narcotic used to treat an opiate addiction. But the drug exacerbated her withdrawal symptoms.
“I remember being in the hot shower and it was turned up to the point where the smoke detectors went off and the water was burning me,” she says. “That was feeling better than the withdrawal.”
So she took a gram of heroin — then went to the strip club and took about 15 shots of liquor. She tried to drive home and got pulled over going 55 mph in a 25. During the field sobriety test, “I just lost it,” Shartz says. “I told the officer, ‘I need help. I just want to get help.’ ”
She called St. Vincent Charity Medical Center the next day.
“You have to give up control,” Adelman says.
He says that many people who suffer from addictions struggle to give up that control and return to detox time and again. “Unfortunately, the more people come to detox, the more disenchanted they become with the recovery concept because they feel like it didn’t work the last time,” he says. “So they don’t even try it.”
After five days of intensive inpatient treatment at Rosary Hall, five weeks of intensive outpatient treatment and three months of non-intensive outpatient treatment, Shartz is proof that it works if you have the will and desire. She is studying to be a drug and alcohol counselor and volunteers weekly at Rosary Hall in hopes of providing relatable insight to patients.
“When people in detox see someone like Brittany, it gives them a boost that they can do it,” Adelman says.
Shartz stresses the importance of using the medical help offered during detox. She addressed her depression and a range of physical medical issues related to drug use. And she’s honest about the reality that getting life back together takes time. “Things didn’t fall apart overnight,” she says. “They won’t get fixed overnight either.”
She often sees people return to detox three, four or more times.
“I say, ‘I appreciate you coming back, that is what matters,’ ” she says. “I always ask them what we can do differently so we can come up with a game plan.”
A game plan is what is saving Shartz’s life. “Today, I can deal with things in life, and I don’t feel the need to use,” she says.
She’s enjoying time with her daughter and preparing for a health care career that she never thought she’d pursue because of her past. “I don’t feel overwhelmed,” she says. “I’m in a really good place.”
Matters of the Heart
After an evening out to dinner with his girlfriend, Bill Turovsky woke up around 5:30 a.m. with excruciating chest pain. The 44-year-old had pain between his shoulder blades and down the back of his left arm. His left fingers were completely numb. He was vomiting and sweating profusely
“I don’t think you have food poisoning,” said his girlfriend as she drove him to him to the emergency room at TriPoint Medical Center.
“I was having a heart attack,” he says of that November 2014 night. “I was fine one moment, and the next I was in serious pain where I was curling up in a ball in the fetal position.”
One of the three main blood vessels — the left anterior descending artery on the front of the heart — was 98 percent blocked.
“That’s what kills people,” says Dr. Timothy Doyle, a cardiologist at Lake Health for 30 years. “Forty percent of people who suffer heart attacks die because of an arrhythmia like this.”
Some people refer to the LAD artery as the “widow maker.” But Doyle says any heart attack can cause death, and the key to survival is rapid identification and medical treatment. Turovsky was fortunate to have arrived at the ER in time where doctors stabilized him and ran tests to figure out the best course of treatment.
After two days at TriPoint, Turovsky was transferred to Lake Health’s Cardiac Cath Lab. There, Turovsky watched as doctors placed a stent that acts like a strut to hold open the collapsed blood vessel. “This restores blood flow into the vessel,” Doyle explains. “The reason it’s closed is because there is a clot.”
The procedure was a success. Turovsky participated in physical therapy and went back to life with a careful diet and knowledge that this could happen again. But he didn’t expect it to happen almost a year later. Or, ironically after eating at the same restaurant.
This time, he recognized the feeling sooner. His friend drove him to TriPoint’s ER at about 2 a.m., and a team of 36-plus people took part in the effort to save his life.
Leads were attached to his chest to perform an electrocardiogram to monitor his heart. At first, the EKG did not show a pattern of a severe heart attack in progress.
But Turovsky knew the feeling. A nurse who remembered Turovsky from his first visit knew he did not look like himself.
Still, early lab results showed no specific evidence of a heart attack. In radiology, images also showed no significant abnormality.
But while Turovsky awaited these results in his ER room, the EKG patterns changed quickly. His heart began to beat rapidly, and he blacked out. “The next thing I remember, they were yelling at me to wake up,” he recalls. “They had to defibrillate me.”
This time, the same LAD vessel was 100 percent blocked at a different point.
Turovsky was having an extremely serious heart attack. He was transported by ambulance to Lake Health via a mobile intensive care unit. Again in the Cardiac Cath Lab, Turovsky underwent catheterization and a successful balloon angioplasty. The team opened and restored blood flow within minutes of his arrival.
At that point, Turovsky’s symptoms stopped.
The classic signs of heart attack include chest pain, shortness of breath and sweating, Doyle says. “What we find is that most people have some warning before, but they don’t recognize it,” he says.
Never ignore unusual symptoms, he emphasizes. If the feeling persists, consider: Is it while you are sitting? Waking? Exerting yourself?
For Turovsky, he says the heart attack caught him completely off guard, though he has a family history of heart problems. His father has poor blood circulation (and stents).
Part of staying well for Turovsky includes continuing with a healthy diet and exercise. He completed cardiac rehabilitation at West Medical Center, including light exercises and the stationary bike. Now, he’s back on his favorite bike, a Harley-Davidson.
In November, following the previous two years’ heart attacks, Turovsky admits he’s laying low. (Half joking, he says he will not be returning to the same restaurant.)
He continues living healthy and working in maintenance at Lakeland Community College.
“If you feel something wrong, get it checked out,” he says. “I’m one of those die-hard people who doesn’t like to go to the doctor’s. But after an experience like this, if something feels different on me, I get it checked out just to be safe.”
Laser Focus
“You are going to feel free now.”
Those words spoken during a laser treatment to stop Sue Hoffer’s smoking addiction stuck with her. Hoffer, 46, had smoked on and off for 30 years and was going through a carton of cigarettes a week.
She heard about laser therapy for smoking cessation on television — a news show she saw made the process sound so easy.
“Everyone wants something that is easy,” says the Parma resident. Her teenage son had been on her about quitting. “I knew I needed to stop.”
Hoffer wanted to be free of thinking about when her next smoke break would happen.
“Every morning, I’d wake up and go outside to have my cup of coffee and cigarette,” she says.
Hoffer remembered the last time she quit. She decided to try a hypnotist session, and it did work, she says. But the withdrawal was rough. “I was sick for weeks,” she recalls. “I finally had to go to the doctor.”
She didn’t smoke a cigarette for three years.
Then, Hoffer had a panic attack. “The first thing I did was pick up a cigarette, and I never quit,” she says. “That was 10 years ago.”
Smokers who quit deal with behavioral and physical withdrawal, says Luciana McCartney, owner and clinical director of AcuLaser Treatment Center. There’s reforming old habits — finding something else to do with the time you’d spend smoking. And there’s the body’s reaction to pulling the plug on nicotine. Laser therapy works by making the withdrawal symptoms more manageable.
“Our goal is to help smokers break the physical and mental cycle,” McCartney says. “We teach them to modify their behaviors and physically use the laser to stimulate pressure points.”
Laser therapy is similar to acupuncture except it uses light, or energy, rather than a needle. “We allow that energy to open up meridians in the body to create a general sense of well-being,” McCartney says.
Skeptical?
Everyone is, McCartney says. And so was Hoffer, but she had nothing to lose. She sat through a 45-minute session at the AcuLaser office in Broadview Heights. She put up her feet, closed her eyes, and a technician activated pressure points using the laser while talking in a soothing manner.
The alternative therapy felt like the touch of a pen. “You don’t feel anything,” she says. But Hoffer did feel a sense of calm as she was reassured: “You will feel free now.”
After the therapy, Hoffer was surprised to find that she didn’t crave a cigarette while walking to her a car. Come morning, she busied herself with her cellphone and coffee rather than a cigarette. “It was the weirdest thing, but I really didn’t want a cigarette.”
In fact, Hoffer says the thought of smoke entering her lungs was repulsive. “I didn’t want that anymore.”
McCartney says activating pressure points by laser curbs cravings and speeds up the body’s healing process. Withdrawal symptoms can be significantly alleviated. Hoffer didn’t experience the sickness that she did the last time she quit.
Ongoing support with free follow-up sessions or a wellness CD given to clients can help with smoking cessation. Hoffer says she didn’t need to listen to the recording, but she did go back for one follow-up treatment when she began dreaming about smoking a few months after quitting. That second session did the trick.
Hoffer says her commitment to quitting led her to the alternative therapy. But if you aren’t ready to stop smoking nothing will work, she says.
“What I tell clients is, ‘If you give me your commitment, you will get a commitment from me 100 times over,’ ” says McCartney.
Now, Hoffer has been smoke-free since April 2015. “I don’t crave cigarettes at all,” she says. “I actually get upset if I’m around someone whose smoke blows in my face.”
She is a believer in laser therapy, and so is her son, who decided to try the weight loss therapy involving a sugar detox.
“Our focus is on weight health, not weight loss,” says McCartney. The program includes laser therapy to curb sugar and carb cravings, and clean eating support.
“We stimulate pressure points so you can focus on a new lifestyle of clean eating and weight loss usually happens as a result,” she explains.
Hoffer’s son was able to shed 25 pounds in 2 1/2 months.
Hoffer says that laser therapy worked for her and her son because they were willing to stop — they were ready for change. “You have to be willing to go the whole nine yards,” she says.
