Addiction issue hits home for nurse in Weymouth
For two years, Weymouth-based nurse Katelyn Corrigan couldn’t look at a set of scrubs without crying. After all, that had been her mother’s daily uniform before addiction cost her her job, and then her life.
Karen Corrigan was fired from a local nursing home in September 2009 when keys to the drug room went missing, her family says. Already deep in the throes of drug use, she overdosed on heroin the following February. She was 42.
“She struggled for years with addiction to narcotics and painkillers, and her job made it worse,” said her daughter Katelyn, now a nurse herself at the Dwyer Home, a senior living facility. “She was afraid to get help. She didn’t want to lose her license and her career.”
Fear of punishment remains a barrier for those seeking help, but even more so for health care workers. The Herald reported yesterday that even as nursing schools fail to prepare their students for the dangers of temptation, some 165 nurses have enrolled in the state’s Substance Abuse Rehabilitation Program. Eight people who didn’t make it through the five-year program have lost their licenses this year.
The lack of education feeds into the stigma. And that stigma can become deadly.
Ellen Corrigan, Katelyn’s grandmother, said Karen once confided in her that she was “petrified she’d lose her job.” And eventually, she became unrecognizable.
“It was like she came out of her body,” Ellen recalled. “She was a different person.”
Before, Karen had been a natural caregiver — the kind of mom who ordered a special cake and gave Katelyn flowers for her kindergarten graduation.
That memory stands in stark contrast with the woman who couldn’t stay awake long enough to have a conversation — who never came home the night before Katelyn went to college, and stood her up when they were supposed to go back-to-school shopping.
“You broke my heart,” Katelyn remembers telling her mom, who she said had been her best friend until she began using. “Have a nice life, junkie.”
She was gone five months later.
Until people are properly educated and able to view drug misuse as a disease, they will keep losing their lives, Katelyn said.
“Not only do nursing students need to understand the disease, they need to understand warning signs among themselves,” Katelyn said. “Nurses are just people. We’re not superheroes.”