The Coleman Institute Blog

I am going to change the details for my patient’s confidentiality, but the basic story is spot on.

Alana, a beautiful 23-year-old woman who lives far away from Richmond, VA, convinced her mother to bring her to the Coleman Institute for Addiction Medicine to help her stop using opioids.

I interviewed Caylee for this blog article.

Caylee has been coming to the Coleman Institute for Addiction Medicine for several years now for long-acting naltrexone treatments. She has close to four years of sobriety under her belt, and although many things impress me about this young woman, I think I’m most taken by the intensity she continues to put into her commitment to stay off drugs.

Rebecca now realizes that this is no longer a joke. While she used to kid around calling herself a “functioning alcoholic,” that all changed when, after many attempts at cutting back, stopping drinking for a period of time, or setting limits, she suddenly lost her job of 10 years. She made an error that cost her company thousands of dollars and they fired her.

This was not her first mistake at work. Although the mistake was not attributed to alcohol use, it was serous enough to result in termination. Deep down in her heart, she questioned whether her nightly alcohol use had contributed but she then remembered that she is functioning just fine in all other areas of her life so she discounted these thoughts.

Looking at my schedule a few weeks ago, I saw that a new patient was coming in for a consultation to learn more about our Accelerated Opioid Detox (AOD).

Detox means different things to different people.

This was the call I received from a woman who was desperate to get off her opioid pain medication. To protect her privacy, her name has been changed for the purpose of this post.

Janine is a 52-year-old woman who had her first surgery in her late twenties for a gastric by-pass. She did fairly well and lost about eighty pounds, which she was able to keep off for several years. In her mid-thirties, she had complications with the surgery and for the next eleven years, she had a series of operations to repair, revisit, or revise the original surgery. These were difficult years and Janine experienced almost constant pain, even when she was months beyond the actual procedures.