Pubdate: Sun, 03 Jan 2016
Source: Albuquerque Journal (NM)
Copyright: 2016 Albuquerque Journal
Contact:  http://www.abqjournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/10
Author: Nicholas Rondinone, the Hartford Courant (Tns)

FOR PARENTS OF HEROIN ADDICTS, 'WHAT-IFS' CAN PERSIST

Whether It's A Condition or a Disease, Drug Dependence Is Confusing 
for Families to Battle

HARTFORD, Conn. - Fred Hayden still wonders if closing the door on 
his daughter one night in 2007 helped put her on the path to heroin 
addiction. Crystal Hayden's descent started with a new job at a 
restaurant earlier that year. Then 20, Crystal started hanging out 
with new friends who, her father said, liked to drink. They were 
older. She wanted to fit in.

Hayden remembers she started coming home late. One day, she came home at 4 a.m.

"Wherever you were until 4 o'clock, go back there," he remembers 
telling her before shutting the door.

 From that night on, she stayed with her grandmother just downstairs 
from her dad. In the months to come, she experimented more with drugs 
and eventually began using heroin. Crystal Hayden overdosed in May 
2008. She was 21. Hayden is among countless parents and family 
members who have struggled with how to deal with loved ones who have 
turned to heroin, a drug that has accounted for hundreds of deaths 
since Crystal's.

That struggle is amplified by the complexities of heroin addiction 
and the medical system in which patients and their families find 
themselves, said Dr. J. Craig Allen, the medical director of Rushford Center.

"This isn't something you cure; this is a chronic and recurring 
disease and that's not well understood by laypeople and by medical 
providers," Allen said. "Is it confusing to parents? Yes."

Hayden raised Crystal on his own since she was 5 months old, when he 
and her mother split up. He had help from his mother and his 
grandparents, who also developed a strong bond with Crystal.

Making people happy

Crystal grew up in Shelton, Conn., and graduated from Shelton High 
School in 2004. She was never a standout student, but she had an 
affinity for making those around her happy, Hayden said.

"She went through high school and got good grades - she was no A 
student. She was always interested in making people laugh and having 
people who are around her be happy," Hayden said.

Crystal never gave him any trouble growing up. While some parents 
worry about the high-school temptations of marijuana and alcohol, 
Hayden said that never crossed his mind.

"She was never into drugs her whole life (until the end). As a kid, 
she was just good," Hayden said.

"She was the one I always said I would never have a problem with."

But Hayden said his daughter's new group of friends stayed out late 
after their restaurant closed and drank. At the time, father and 
daughter were living in a two-family home with his parents - he and 
Crystal were in the top unit.

On the night she returned home at 4 a.m., he said he recalls telling 
her, "You're not doing this."

After Crystal moved downstairs to live with her grandmother, she met 
and fell in love with a man who used heroin with her, said Hayden.

"... She had moved downstairs, and I knew she was doing something 
bad. I could see it in her face. She was breaking out," Hayden said.

Rehab confusion

Eventually, Hayden organized an intervention with their family. It 
led her to agree to go to Yale-New Haven Hospital. But once there, 
the pair stayed briefly before they were given some treatment 
information, and then they left. Hayden recalls not knowing how to proceed.

"The whole system often is quite confusing," Allen said. Sometimes 
people seeking help are just given some information in an emergency 
room; often it's hard to find out what programs are available, what's 
covered by insurance, how to get a loved one admitted and how to pay 
for what can be an expensive rehabilitation.

Hayden found a treatment facility for Crystal in Middletown, but that 
also did not work out.

"She called me and said, 'Daddy I can't be here. These people will 
get me in more trouble,'" Hayden said. She spent a few weeks there, 
but was discharged early. Hayden said employees found heroin in her room.

Not more than a month before Crystal died, the family went on a 
vacation to Disney World, a typical trip for them, Hayden said. Much 
of the family was there, even Crystal's mother, with whom Crystal had 
reconnected after many years.

Her dad had moved to Beacon Falls while Crystal remained with her 
grandmother in Shelton. But they were talking often and he felt good 
about that.

On May 29, Hayden said, Crystal told him she was going to call at 7 
the next morning to let him know she was off to work. He woke up 
about 6:55 a.m. expecting the call.

"I was waiting for the phone to ring. And it wasn't ringing. It was 
quarter after, 'I am going to call over there. I'll call in a few 
minutes.' And then at, like, 20 after 7, my phone rang and it wasn't 
my daughter. No, it was my mother calling me to tell me she had 
passed away," Hayden said.

Relationship repaired

On that day they first went to Yale-New Haven Hospital to face her 
addiction, Hayden remembers the conversation he had with his 
daughter. She told him about how much she used.

"It was so painful, and kind of like she was saying it to me to get 
that pain from me - because of that night that I broke my promise 
that I'd never shut the door on her."

He struggles with what happened toward the end. They weren't living 
together, but he said they had repaired their relationship. Crystal 
had left the man with whom she used heroin, he said.

"She was all excited about her life. It's not like she wanted this to 
happen," Hayden said. "She was totally excited that she was going 
back to work. She was totally excited that her life was back."

He said he now realizes that despite Crystal's progress, she was an addict.

"It's a disease that told her it's OK. That I'll be all right," said Hayden.

What draws someone recovering from addiction to use again is hard to 
pinpoint and difficult to grasp for people who love an addict. Allen 
said people use because they feel happy or sad, angry or accomplished 
- - or any number of other triggers that can lead to relapse.

"(The recovering addict's) brain says, 'I can do a little bit this 
time. I can use enough to get through the night.' You say to yourself 
. 'I can use this once just tonight. I'm not going to go on a run. 
I'm not going to lose my job or my family. I am going to shoot up or 
snort two bags,' and you do it," Allen said. The brain, he said, 
tells the recovering addict to use as much as they used before 
stopping, and sometimes long after the physical tolerance they built 
up is gone, posing dangerous consequences.

Amid the frustration surrounding why she used heroin that last night, 
Hayden still questions if he could have done more to help her combat 
her addiction.

"Part of it, I take blame. I should've gotten her into a real rehab 
somewhere. Maybe there's something else I could've done. There was 
something I could've done," he said.

Coming to terms

Crystal's story - her struggle - is one Hayden has told more than 100 
times in support groups and other settings.

"My hope any time I talk about my daughter and tell her story is that 
there is some parent out there who maybe, you know, is ashamed of why 
their kid passed away or that this drug addict was their kid. Don't 
remember that, remember what they were," Hayden said.

That said, it was difficult for Hayden to come to terms with his 
grief. He went through his own personal problems. He moved himself 
back to Shelton from Beacon Falls and shut himself off from the world 
in his red house on a quiet street, the same house where Crystal 
died. Family functions and the holidays were awful, he said. He still 
asks himself why he gets another birthday and she doesn't.

"You know, people think ... that when you lose a kid you are going to 
get over it somehow, that it's not going to change who you are as a 
person," Hayden said.

He got help; and the birth of his grandson several years after 
Crystal's death gave him purpose.

However, as he was working through his grief, it was hard for him to 
share his story with other parents who had lost children - to cancer, 
car accidents or other causes. But since then, drug overdoses have 
increasingly become the source of their loss.

"Everybody is touched in some way" by heroin, he said.

Though parents and families are more aware of the problem, he wonders 
whether enough young people understand the consequences of heroin use.

"These kids who are doing this stuff have no idea. What it will cause 
their family? They have no idea what could really happen," he said. 
"They think they are invincible."

Despite the heartache, Hayden said he won't let Crystal's addiction 
be what he remembers about his daughter.

He recounted how Crystal convinced him to visit his dying father in 
the hospital. The two men had never had much of a relationship, he said.

And he recalled how after they cleaned out his house one day, Crystal 
was left with a bunch of coats in her car. She was driving home one 
night and saw a homeless man, Hayden recalled. She got out and gave 
him the coats. "She had a huge heart," Hayden said.

"(Heroin) doesn't define my daughter as a person," Hayden said. "It 
doesn't define who she was and it doesn't take away the great things 
she did. And all the things and all the people she touched in her life."
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