JAIL SAVED MY LIFE
From a heroin den to amazing rehab success at Rikers
A healthy-looking Leidanett (Lady) Rivera (above) at Rikers Island, looking like a different person compared with the ravaged woman photographed by the Daily News on streets of the Bronx last year (inset).
Leidanett (Lady) Rivera was living a life of almost unfathomable despair a year ago.
Sleeping inside an openair heroin den in the South Bronx, the rail-thin Rivera spent her waking moments scrounging around for her next hit.
She had just survived two overdoses. She weighed close to 100 pounds. And the veins in her arms were so badly damaged that she was injecting drugs into her neck.
Rivera’s agonizing existence was chronicled in a Daily News story on the horrors of the heroin epidemic in the South Bronx.
Some 14 months later, Rivera is locked up at Rikers Island — and she’s convinced the jail saved her life. The 39-year-old mother has received consistent doses of methadone and other badly needed medications for the first time in years. Rivera has also benefited from intensive counseling sessions and other services available in the jail system.
“Jail was my rehab,” Rivera told The News in an interview at Rikers. “Jail made me realize how much I could lose in a minute.”
She spent the last five months behind bars on shoplifting charges, and she now looks like a completely different person. Rivera’s face is full. Her eyes gleam. Her skin looks healthy. And her body has filled out.
When she sees the photographs of herself in that News story last year, she has trouble recognizing herself.
“I couldn’t believe that was me,” she said. “I couldn’t believe that I got myself there. Like I didn’t care.
“But now I do,” she added. “I’ve got people around me that care and a place where you don’t really want to come to. But, hey, I call it God’s savior.”
Rivera still has a long road ahead in her recovery. It remains to be seen whether she can stay clean when she’s thrust outside the jail walls later this week.
Still, experts say her dramatic transformation is a testament to the quality of care at Rikers — and an indictment of the lack of resources available on the outside for the most vulnerable opioid abusers.
Dr. Chinazo Cunningham, a leading addiction expert who is affiliated with Montefiore Medical Center, said her Bronx hospital is one of the few places in the city — apart from jails — that provide addiction services, along with medical and mental health treatment, under one roof.
“On the outside, she
g different systems to get the care she needs,” said Cunningham. “I’m assuming that because of her social situation, which I imagine is pretty chaotic, that would be a near-impossible task.”
Dr. Jonathan Giftos, director of the opioid treatment program at Rikers, agreed. Giftos said the fact an opioid user might only get the treatment she needs while in jail is “really an indictment of our community response and our community engagement with people who use drugs.”
“We need to build spaces that meet people where they are,” Giftos said.
Rivera said she was most recently living at a singleroom-occupancy, supportive-housing facility in the Bronx. The building was several blocks away from her previous home — a makeshift shelter she built along an abandoned railroad bed on E. 151st St. known to hard-core heroin users as “the hole.” The past year was particularly grim for Rivera and the circle of fellow addicts who used to congregate there. She said six of them died from overdoses.
The publication of the story in The News prompted city officials to close up “the hole.” Rivera said users blamed her and accused her of being a snitch.
One man attacked her with more than words.
“I got hit with a crowbar above my eye,” she said. “I got threatened. They were going to burn me alive.”
Rivera said she got clean and managed to stay sober for several weeks with the help of methadone. But late last year, she started using again. One night, Rivera, afraid of slipping deeper into her old life, said a prayer.
“I got on my knees and literally begged, ‘Please, God, I want this to be over. I can’t put no more in my body. I’m a waste.’ ”
Divine intervention came Feb. 17, when she was arrested for stealing shampoo
and nail polish from a CVS pharmacy in Manhattan.
Rivera pleaded guilty to petty larceny and was sentenced to eight months behind bars.
“I got saved,” Rivera said. “The way I was living, I don’t think I would have made it.”
Rivera was in fact lucky to be arrested in New York. Rikers is one of only a few dozen American detention facilities that treat opioid users with methadone or buprenorphine, commonly known as Suboxone. Scientific studies have found the medications to be the gold standard in helping people to kick their addictions to heroin and prescription painkillers such as oxycodone.
Rivera soon became one of the roughly 950 Rikers Island inmates enrolled in the drug treatment program headed by Giftos. Cocooned inside the jail, Rivera has been cut off from her dealers and fellow users.
But now comes the hard part.
Rivera is set to be released from Rikers on Friday. Due to a chronic health condition, she’s expecting to be provided a room in a supportive-housing facility. In the first of two jailhouse interviews, she admitted she was worried about falling back into her old life.
“To be honest, I’m really scared to get out,” she told The News last month. “I know there are drug dealers out there waiting for me.”
Rivera has good reason to be nervous.
Former inmates with drug problems are 129 times more likely than the general population to suffer a fatal overdose within two weeks of their release, according to a widely cited 2007 study.
“Incarceration confers significant harm to patients and significant risk factors,” Giftos said. “I always think it’s important that we make clear jail is not the ideal place for any health intervention.”
Even before Rivera leaves Rikers, the release protocol calls for her to be connected with a drug treatment program and reenrolled in Medicaid to help ensure that she can easily obtain methadone. As of last week, Rivera was still not certain where she wanted to end up. Two daughters were pushing for her to move to Florida where they live, but Rivera said she was concerned about her access to methadone there.
Reached by phone, Rivera’s daughter Aidanett Rosa said she feared her mother would once again fall victim to the street life.
“I’m terrified that she’s going to come out, go back into the streets of New York and meet up with her old friends,” said Rosa, 25. “This isn’t the first time my mom went to jail and cleaned up. This has been my life for the past 10 years, looking for her and hoping she’s not dead somewhere.”
Yet Rosa said she still wasn’t ready to give up on her mother.
“I would really like her to come here,” she said, adding that Rivera has never met her two kids. “She has somewhere to stay, and I’m willing to provide her with whatever programs she needs to be healthy and productive.”
Rivera told The News last week that she was looking forward to the next chapter in her life. Her long-term goal: to become a drug counselor.
“(But) for the grace of God, I feel great. I’m not missing any part of my last high,” she said.
“I feel good about myself. I know I could do better. I know I have a lot to offer for the better. I just need to keep staying on my recovery to help others the way I want to.”