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"After all that clean time, I went right back. If your brain isn't mending, you're going to do the same thing."
- Sara Whittum,
on a relapse after being clean 8 months
FARMINGTON - Christmas can really suck when you're a junkie.
Sara Whittum of Farmington had one of her worst in 2008.
"It was Christmas Eve, and I knew that day I was going to be sick," said Whittum, who has waged a day-to-day battle with addiction more than half her life. "I hadn't seen my family in two weeks. I had no gifts and no money, so I couldn't even get high. You're not even getting high, really. You're using (drugs) to feel normal just so you can go to the bathroom, eat, get dressed, normal things.
"I hadn't seen my family in two weeks, because I felt awful, I was sick and I felt depressed and discouraged. It felt better not seeing them rather than them see me as I was. And I couldn't bring any gifts.
"I wasn't feeling festive."
At the time Whittum was on methadone as a substitute for heroin, but she needed two other things to replicate the heroin euphoria junkies chase from their first fix to their last. She needed Suboxone and amphetamines.
"Suboxone or valium gives you that good heroin high, but then you need the amphetamines to get you going or you'll just sit there. I needed those three things."
At the time she had a warrant out for her arrest for disobeying a police officer and resisting arrest, because she had skipped a court hearing.
"My lawyer called and said if I didn't turn myself in, I'd go to jail on Christmas. I said to myself, 'No one goes to jail on Christmas. Aren't they closed?'"
She got someone to drive her to her Suboxone doctor, and returned home to await her crystal meth dealer. Later than night she thought he'd finally shown, but it wasn't him; instead it was the cops to take her to jail, which began an eight-month stay in jail and various court-ordered resident drug programs.
But heroin and other super addictive drugs like crack and Oxycodone often don't loosen their grip in eight months of staying clean, or even years. And they didn't with Whittum, who went right back to chasing the high as soon as she got out the next August.
"I remember I got out of jail on Aug 17. It was hot as Hades," the 45-year-old Whittum said this week. "After all that clean time, I went right back. If your brain isn't mending, you're going to do the same thing."
Whittum, who now has been clean and in recovery mode for more than four and a half years, said she hopes addicts who live in the area will take advantage of the Access to Recovery Day at Wentworth Douglass Hospital in Dover on Saturday.
She knows it's not easy to turn that corner - it took a threatened stint at state prison to help her see the light - but hopes the scores of service and assistance providers who will be at the event will be able to convince addicts to take that first step like she did in March of 2010.
Whittum's epiphany came three months after her second trip to jail in January 2010.
"I had started using amphetamines toward the holidays (in 2009), as well as opiates and pills. I was on probation. They did a lab test, and I got caught."
They said she could avoid prison if she did the Addiction Recovery Program (ARC), a 90-day residential program housed near the Strafford County House of Correction in Dover.
But Whittum even struggled here.
"I had trouble with rules, like talking in the hallways," she said. "They were talking about kicking me out of the program and I'd have to go to state prison. I didn't want that.
"I went in the laundry room, and prayed I could change. Then I started to listen, talked about things I wasn't talking about." That was March 30, 2010. She's been in recovery ever since.
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| Sara Whittum relaxes with best buddy Pippin in the library of her Farmington home. "He's my therapy dog," she says. |
After spending time at a halfway house and in 12-step programs like AA and NA (Narcotics Anonymous), Whittum this December is looking forward to a fourth clean Christmas. A habitual offender in the past, she now has her own car, a driver's license and a career.
Whether working at her house cleaning and pet sitting job, or feeding her two ponies at her Farmington home, Whittum's calm demeanor and country charm belies a dark past that included working as a stripper and constant brushes with the law.
Started out with beer, pot
Whittum graduated from Farmington High School in 1987, spending her early years at a local Catholic school.
"As a young child I loved animals, had everything, horses and ponies, a pool. I did dog and horse 4H.
She said at 9 she became concerned with her weight.
"I'd spend time looking out the window. I felt like I was missing out," she said.
In seventh grade she began having difficulty at the Catholic school.
"Then I made friends on the street where I live, those kids all went to public school," she said.
So in eighth grade she transferred to Farmington High, fell in with the fast crowd and things went downhill fast.
"It was pell mell, I felt at home," she said.
Her grades fell. She began smoking pot and drinking beer.
She said in eighth grade she was in constant suspension, once for bringing alcohol on the bus.
After school she continued to her routine, riding her pony and being active in pony clubs, but she yearned to be free, to seek adventure.
"I wanted to hang out, hang loose, stay out all night. I hung out with my friend who lived downtown. She had no supervision," she said.
In high school she developed bulimia, drank ipecac often, and went to just 107 pounds.
She began partying full bore a couple of times a week and on weekends.
At one of those weekend parties she ended up getting pregnant at the age of 14.
"It was due in January and no one noticed till my grandmother did in November. I had a baby girl."
While the father wanted to keep the baby, she didn't. An acquaintance quietly adopted her.
Nine months after the baby was born, her dad died in a car accident during a hurricane in 1985. The guilt was beginning to pile up.
"I began to drink often and smoked pot daily," she said.
She went to UNH for a short time, then left and got a job at a local humane society,
At 19 she got a DWI, which with the crowd she was with at the time, was a badge of honor, she said. She felt even more like they were her true family. She began using cocaine and crack.
"Marijuana and drinking was no longer fun, it wasn't cutting it," she said. "Cocaine and crack are extremely addictive. I also tried heroin, which the first time is the best feeling of euphoria, the best feeling ever. For 30 seconds you're relieved of all that pain, you feel invincible, you feel like God. You chase that feeling, but you won't ever get that first initial high ever again, but you continue to chase that."
A short time later she began using heroin regularly with a couple of guys who were Dead Heads, followers of the Grateful Dead. She also tried acid for a couple of years.
"The first time I tried heroin I got nauseous, but I wanted to keep doing it to fit in. I wanted to stay with these guys," she said. That was around 1993.
Then one day she said she'd had enough.
"I got addicted to heroin and I was stressed out. I decided I wanted to start over. So I got on a bus to California with a handful of valium and a bag of pot and I kicked it," she said, meaning she escaped addiction on her own, at least for a time.
She ended up working as a manager at a big resort hotel near Big Sur, Calif., where she stayed about a year.
Then one day she got a call from friends back in New England who said they were working as strippers and making good money.
"Their lives sounded better than mine, so I moved home and started stripping. You make good money, but I would spend it all," she said.
A life of addiction returns
Then the drugs came back. First amphetamines, then cocaine and crank, a powdered form of crystal meth, an amphetamine. At the time she was living in Connecticut. After a couple of years she was back on heroin, too.
After a while, she decided to leave the stripping life and return to New Hampshire. When she returned she got jobs in local horse barns and later became a veterinary technician. Despite her career success, the drug use escalated even more. "First we were doing methadone pills, but then they got cut off, so I did heroin. There was no more pot, no more drinking, just heroin."
She lost the vet tech job due to her drug habit.
"It's not easy having a full-time job as a heroin addict. It's a full-time job being an addict."
Then the arrests began mounting. She was arrested in Massachusetts on heroin possession. She was in trouble with the law a lot: habitual offender, driving without a license, prescription fraud, shoplifting.
"One time I racked up three felonies in 20 minutes. I was a massive shoplifter," she said.
In 2000 she began visiting a methadone clinic, and things spiral downward even more.
"Meth keeps you off heroin, but you find folks who have other drugs: Klonopin, Valium, amphetamines," substances that used together will almost mirror the euphoria of heroin.
Whittum stayed on this mixture till 2008, losing her driver's license a "plethora of times" in the process until she was arrested that Christmas Eve.
Now she is hoping her message of recovery will inspire an addict suffering today the same way she did for so many years to go on Saturday and take that first step to their own recovery.
It's a long road, but it's worth it, Whittum says.
Whittum is still on that road.
"I believe I was born with this (addiction)," she says. "I will always do a 12-step program. I'll always be in recovery."
"We're very proud of her," her mom said standing nearby.
To read about Saturday's Access to Recovery Day, click here.
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