The Coleman Institute Blog

Fred came for an implant yesterday. He detoxed off of street fentanyl 10 weeks ago. He was about a week late for his scheduled naltrexone implant and as the time drew closer to his return visit, he was getting antsy.

An argument with his wife, who is rightfully having trouble trusting Fred, caused him to get — in his own words — “a f__k-it attitude”. He found his old contacts easily, bought heroin and crack and, for the first time in weeks, ingested drugs into his body.

Gabby completed a screening form to come to the Coleman Institute for Addiction Medicine looking for a safe way to stop drinking alcohol. Reviewing it before I called her back, I noted that Gabby was 35, a data analyst, married for ten years and had two children. Neither of her parents had any history of any sort of Substance Use Disorder (SUD), and Gabby noted that she had never attended any form of treatment in the past for her alcohol use.

When I was a young mother with friends and family members having babies, I would often send a hand-lettered card with a poignant message by Elizabeth Stone:

“Making he decision to have a child — it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

Recently, the New York Times ran an article proposing that most opiate addicts should receive Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT). I couldn’t agree with them more. Success rates for patients with opiate addiction who are not treated with any form of MAT are horrible.

It has been quite a year. We did not see the COVID-19 pandemic coming and only now are we beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It has been an extremely painful and challenging year for everyone — a year of isolation from friends, family, and our places of employment (our family away from home).