NEW YORK NURSE: February 2007
by Andrew Waite
Gina has sparkling green eyes and white teeth that flash when she smiles. She puts down her coffee cup and pulls a buzzing cell phone from the pocket of her coat.
You’d never guess that she is recovering from addiction to drugs.
“No, I don’t think I’m going tonight,” Gina says into the phone. “But you still want to go rollerskating this weekend, right?” She closes the phone and puts it back into her pocket. She smiles as she sips her coffee, “See – I made friends there.”
“There” is a support group sponsored by the NYSNA Statewide Peer Assistance for Nurses (SPAN) Program. The program helps nurses support one another as they recover from addiction. Gina is one of about 1,200 New York State nurses who have participated in SPAN since 2001.
When Gina moved to New York from Connecticut in 1992, she was 22 years old and recovering from a heroin addiction that had begun in college. She started using marijuana at the age of 12 and continued experimenting with other drugs. She had been arrested twice for heroin use.
Gina tried to put her problems behind her by moving to Schenectady. She attended Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meetings and received outpatient treatment. She had a job in the field of substance abuse and worked at a clinic. She became a licensed practical nurse (LPN) in 1996 and an RN in 2001. She got a job in the intensive care unit at a local hospital.
It would appear that Gina had made it. She was married. She had a daughter and a great job. She had been “clean” for nine years.
But with her apparent success, Gina stopped attending NA. “I started to slack on recovery,” she says, shaking her head. “I stopped going to meetings, stopped talking to my sponsor. My career became more important. I was forgetting that the only reason I was a nurse was because of my recovery.”
The pressure of the job became too much for Gina. She began diverting medications from the hospital. With careful planning and calculated manipulation, she was able to obtain quantities of morphine and hydrocodone.
According to Barbara Waite, one of five SPAN regional coordinators, many nurses fall into a trap of becoming addicted to the medications they are supposed to administer to others: “Stress and access makes nurses susceptible,” she said. “Nurses take care of other people, but at a cost. They want to help others but often fail to take care of themselves.”
Knowing she was in trouble, Gina did the only thing she thought she could do – run.
She took a leave of absence and went back to Connecticut. But she could not outrun her addiction. She began seeing different physicians, complaining about fake ailments so they would prescribe medications for her. She needed more and more drugs just to feel normal.
One day she was at home with her six-year-old daughter. High on medication, she passed out on the living room floor. Her daughter called Gina’s mother, who found her face down on the carpet.
Gina’s husband convinced her to move back to Schenectady, but she still was not ready to quit using drugs. “I don’t think I was ready because I hadn’t had a jarring experience to bring me back to reality. I was unable to stop,” Gina confesses.
Back in Schenectady, Gina joined a SPAN support group. Linda English, a volunteer group facilitator, says “The goal of these groups is to foster support, encourage sobriety, focus on recovery, and deal with licensure issues.”
Currently, 38 states have similar peer support programs. Nurses meet, discuss their problems, and support one another. Entry into the program is completely voluntary, but participants are strongly encouraged to attend meetings. Some participants, who don’t really want to be there, attend meetings grudgingly.
In the beginning, Gina was one such participant. She had a new job at a rehabilitation center and attended SPAN meetings, but used drugs in between. This pattern continued for three years. “I was making attempts, but I wasn’t really stopping,” Gina says.
Gina’s employer caught her giving out medications while on restriction, and she was fired instantly. Before, Gina had been able to leave her job without actually getting in trouble. Not this time. This was her “jarring experience.”
She went home in tears, dejected, confused, and lonely. Her husband was not sympathetic. He held her purse upside down and pills poured out on the floor. Furious, Gina’s husband gave her an ultimatum. It was either go to treatment or lose her daughter forever.
For the first time in her life, Gina called SPAN with serious intentions of ending her addiction. She went to a 28-day inpatient substance abuse program and applied to enter the New York State Professional Assistance Program (PAP). PAP is an alternative to discipline for licensed professionals. It does, however, require participants to surrender their licenses temporarily. Gina did this in March 2005. She cried all the way home.
“When you become a nurse, your profession becomes who you are,” said Ellen Brickman, director of the SPAN program. “Nursing becomes a part of your identity and a threat to your license is big.”
At SPAN meetings, Gina began to see that she was not the only nurse with an addiction problem. This is the value of SPAN, Brickman said: “Talking to other people who have done similar things is very helpful. People benefit from hearing their story told in a slightly different way. To hear someone say, ‘You won’t believe what I did, but look at me now,’ can be very beneficial.”
While her license was inactive, Gina followed protocols that included going to treatment, taking urine tests, and attending support meetings four or five times a week.
With a letter of recommendation from the SPAN regional coordinator and a lot of hard work, Gina’s RN license was restored, but with some stipulations. She could not work in “high risk” situations without being monitored, she could have no access to narcotics, and she couldn’t work nights. She got a nursing job at a physician’s office, but still went to support meetings, talked to her sponsor, and called her mother daily for support.
Gina kept working hard. She began taking classes toward a BSN, attended the SPAN support group meetings, passed urine test after urine test, continued outpatient care, and returned to PAP for progress meetings. When she regained narcotic access, she took her current job on the cardiac floor of a local hospital.
Going through recovery has humanized nursing for Gina. “I’m more aware of patients; I’m not just caught up in the job. I realize that their needs are more important. I am not just a nurse, I am a person.”
Gina will continue to go to SPAN meetings because she knows it will help her beat the odds. “They say only 3% of addicts recover,” Gina says, “but those are just statistics. Everyone has the opportunity to live a good life.”
After every meeting, Gina and her friends from the group talk about their progress, “We ride home from SPAN every week and say ‘I can’t believe we made it this far.’” But she knows her recovery continues: “Recovery is an ongoing event. Forget that – it’s a process, not an event. It’s not something you’ll ever get over.”
Editor's Note: Andrew Waite is the son of SPAN regional coordinator Barbara Waite. He is a student at Boston University.