A SHOT AT A NEW LIFE
Our House offers fresh start for addicts
Shawn’s life truly began to spiral out of control after a horrible car accident smashed open the back of his head and left him in an induced coma for four days at Calgary’s Foothills Hospital with 12 broken ribs and a punctured lung.
That’s not to say he was really in control before the accident five years ago — his lifestyle was a blur of meth and madness, filled with crime and violence.
Somehow he managed to cling onto that final thread of sanity, but then, one day, he simply let go and let his addictions engulf him.
But he’s not ready to give up just yet and neither are the 59 men he lives with at Our House, a unique year-long live-in addictions rehabilitation program located in a former motel just outside of Edmonton
“I’ve lost everything. I know that if I go back to the streets … I’m not going to survive,” the 32-year-old said. “Here saved my life.”
The men, whose similar battles with addictions have left them homeless, friendless, and in some cases, almost lifeless, have committed to fight their addictions — to get their lives back on track. Postmedia agreed not to publish the men’s last names in order to share their stories.
The former Alamo Motel, located off a service road between Edmonton and Stony Plain, was bought in late 2007 to allow for the expansion of a program that started in Edmonton’s
inner city in 1984.
Disillusioned parishioners attending St. Stephen the Martyr Anglican Church, concerned by the growing number of alcoholics, drug addicts and prostitutes in the area, rented an old house as a drop-in service with “addicts helping addicts.”
Four years later, government funding allowed the church to purchase a 32-bed facility on 121 Avenue. In 1999 they opened the 10-bed John Hilton three-quarter house, located nearby on 81 Street.
When the doors of Our House opened in March 2008 outside the city, the group sold its 121 Avenue building.
Offering abstinence-based addiction treatment for 60 men at a time, the facility is one of two in the province that requires clients to commit to a one-year stay. The other is Recovery Acres in Calgary.
As a not-for-profit, a majority of Our Houses’ $1 million annual revenue comes through room and board fees. It costs $1,800 per month to be at Our House, and stays are funded through Alberta Health Services and via subsidies from programs like Alberta Works and Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH).
Alberta Health Services funds close to 1,000 addiction treatment beds across the province, ranging from overnight detox to long-term treatment programs, and demand for those services shows no signs of letting up.
Annual admissions to residential addiction treatment and detox jumped to 11,726 in 2016-17 from 9,978 in 2013-14.
In 2014-15, alcohol addiction accounted for 87 per cent of admissions, followed by cannabis (53 per cent) and opioids (31 per cent). Patients can self-disclose more than one substance.
Clients — who battle addictions to everything from crystal meth, cannabis and cocaine to alcohol and amphetamines — find their way to Our House with referrals from Alberta Health Services, lawyers, doctors and increasingly, from other short-term treatment centres and detox facilities.
“These are people that haven’t been successful in recovery. Most of them have nothing. No assets. No income. This is a last resort,” said executive director Laurie de Grace. That includes people like Shawn. His car crash wasn’t his only brush with death. After he recovered from those shocking injuries, he overdosed on meth in a Tim Hortons parking lot in Medicine Hat.
That was when he finally hit rock bottom.
An emergency crew rushed him to hospital and he remembers waking up and someone — he doesn’t remember who — said he needed help. “So I asked for it,” he said.
He was sent to Fort Macleod from Medicine Hat, where he spent 10 days in detox. He slept the first three days and gained 27 pounds in the first week.
From there he was taken to Claresholm for a “spin dry,” a short-term treatment where he stayed for 17 days.
Now he’s at Our House. Once admitted, each client is assigned a room with someone else. Staff try to pair new clients up with someone who has been there for a while and is of a similar age.
During the first 30 days, the men are not allowed to leave the property. Then comes the odd night pass, followed by weekend passes. After six months they are allowed to find part-time work.
“There’s still a stigma surrounding these guys. These guys should be treated as people with a disease, as opposed to being a bad person who is intentionally doing something that is wrong,” said de Grace.
Although it is an abstinence- based treatment centre and clients are expected to have detoxed before arriving, it allows men battling opioid addiction to use suboxone or methadone to help alleviate withdrawal symptoms.
“We want people who are medically stable because we are not a medical facility,” de Grace said.
Suboxone or methadone are not allowed at many rehabilitation centres, de Grace said, but Our House is willing to adapt to the changing realities of addictions. “It’s a vicious circle,” she said. “You really are discriminating against people recovering because basically they can’t recover unless they have that treatment, but they can’t get the treatment if they are taking it,” de Grace said.
For two hours each morning the men are split into groups of 15 for sessions dealing with everything from anger management to relapse prevention and conflict resolution.
Afterwards they have one-onone counselling and five times a week they must attend Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings in the city.
Program manager Rebecca Bernard said clients are required to participate in all of the programming for a year and, even if they do decide to get a part-time job, they still need to completely integrate into their programs and finish every task as prescribed.
“One of the big things we teach them is accountability, because that’s something they lack some of the time,” Bernard said.
Volunteering is also a large part of the program. Each Monday, Our House clients volunteer at the food bank and every Christmas they do all of the pickups on Candy Cane Lane for the food bank.
They partner with Alberta Health Services during national addictions awareness week and go into high schools and tell their stories of addiction and recovery in the hope their stories will influence others.
Fighting addiction is tough work. And Our House is a tough looking venue, something de Grace doesn’t shy away from as she points out the cosmetic failings of the former motel.
Some would see them as flaws or idiosyncrasies, but not de Grace.
The bottom line is tight, which means making ends meet is tough. There is very rarely any money left over for renovations.
This last resort has seen better days.
The odd panel of grey cladding is starting to lift. Inside, some of the rooms lack overhead lights.
Some of the light switches do nothing. Blown bulbs are common, as are bare light bulbs.
When you stand on the second storey of the main accommodation area, you can hear the wind moaning through the corridor. These rooms get really hot, de Grace said.
It doesn’t help that a lot of the air conditioners are in bad shape. The furniture is a hodgepodge collection drawn from all sorts of places.
The Wingate Inn down the road helped furnish 10 rooms on the cheap. And de Grace said when they heard the Sands hotel was refurbishing their rooms, they asked if they could buy their old furniture.
Caesar’s Bingo House gave them 10 chairs for the main meeting area. Another 20 chairs came from the Varscona Hotel.
“There’s so much work that has to be done,” de Grace said.
And she’s not just talking about the building.
Nine years ago, when Bernard first started working at Our House, mental health and addictions were treated as completely separate issues. There was no recognition that they needed to be treated simultaneously.
“If we knew someone had an addictions issue it was, ‘OK, just don’t be high when you come and see us’,” Bernard said.
Now they are treated as concurrent disorders.
Bernard estimates that 80 per cent of people coming in for addiction treatment have been diagnosed with some form of depression or anxiety.
“The guess is the other 20 per cent just don’t say so because most of them experience those things.”
They are encouraged to go off site into the community to gradually become adjusted to being around people and meet with sponsors.
“Social isolation often goes along with addiction, so this way they are learning to be part of community,” de Grace said.
There’s also a compulsory recreation component every Friday. Activities can include paintball, volleyball, board games, painting or attending the opera.
“Our leisure part is a big part of what we do because many don’t know how to have fun sober,” Bernard said. “Everything that they have done up until they’ve come here they’ve done it drunk or high ... that’s how they have fun.”
Discharge planning unofficially starts about four months before graduation. Counsellors explore different housing opportunities and career paths. Some are encouraged to go into a three-quarter house sober living arrangement that still affords some structure, accountability and guidance. Some tackle it alone.
Client and counsellor will also explore options, like going to school or getting back into their career.
Prior to graduation, the men are required to complete at least five steps of a 12-step Narcotics Anonymous program.
“We try, right from the day they get here, to prep them for successful life outside of here and try to get them integrated as best as possible into the community,” Bernard said.
“It’s not a very nice position for them to be in, going from being surrounded by 60 men to themselves when they leave. We try to mitigate that.”
Jason was 12 when he first started using. At first it was alcohol. Then, over the years, his attention changed to harder things, namely cocaine.
At 21, his cocaine use was so bad that he had a heart attack, an event that jolted him into sobriety for the next 13 years.
Then, one day, he dabbled again. “And that was that,” he said. His addiction roared back to life and his life began to unravel. He is now another of the men using Our House to get his house in order.
Jason, a plumber and carpenter who ran his own renovation business, could use as much as 10 grams (or around $800 worth of cocaine) a day at the peak of his addiction. Then, of course, there was the booze. All that combined with his mental health issues. He was diagnosed bipolar when he was 25.
Behind on his mortgage, struggling to put food on the table, his wife left him.
“Life became unmanageable to the point where I had nothing left,” he said in late October on his 70th day of being clean.
“I lost my kids. I lost everything.” So, at the start of the year he made a pledge to himself that he’d get his life sorted out. That started with a stint at a short-term rehab centre. He was fine for about six months. But then the wheels fell off again.
Now he finds himself as one of Our House’s newest clients.
“I’ve taken this year to really look at myself,” the 37-year-old said.
At first, he says, it was embarrassing to make that call, to admit he had a problem.
“If you are going downhill way too fast it’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” he said.
“If you feel as though you have a problem, talk to somebody.”