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naloxone Two tout benefits of drug project
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Joseph Yuhas remembers the day at age 15 that he discovered that alcohol made it easier to cope with the horror of watching his alcoholic father beat his mother.
“When I saw my mother hit the ground, I grabbed my sister, closed her ears and ran to her room, shut her eyes, and said, ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’”
He remembers how he went to a friend’s house, and he drank alcohol for the first time.
“That’s when I had my escape from reality. I didn’t have to think about any of that when I took that drink. I really liked it. It brought me out of myself.”
Yuhas now lives in a Warren sober house, where he is house manager, after coming to Warren last fall in one of many attempts over about four years to get clean.
This time, a factor in his journey into sobriety was a shot of the drug naloxone, administered by his mother back in Cleveland, where the drug has been available to the public for two years.
His mother, who had joined a parents group in Cleveland, saved his life one night when he overdosed on heroin on the bathroom floor of his parents’ house.
“I was just so upset, just so guilty and full of shame and so tired of the way I was living,” Yuhas said. “And at that point, I knew something needed to change or I was going to die from this disease.
“I hated the lying, the cheating, the stealing, everything that Joey was not, everything that I had become because of this disease,” he said
He now has a job in addition to managing the sober house.
He and Kim Webb of Howland talked to The Vindicator at the Trumbull County Board of Health offices Monday as two people who strongly support the project the health board started Jan. 1 to provide naloxone to family members and friends of addicts.
The drug reverses the effects of overdose. Cleveland’s program has been advised of 114 reversed overdoses.
Webb has a 27-year-old son who has been clean a year, working and living in Cleveland. He, likewise, got help at a sober house. Webb said the key for her son is the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that keep him on track in his recovery.
“He goes to meetings all the time, and he’s not only got our family, he’s got a new family because if he doesn’t show up at a meeting, his sponsor is calling or his co-sponsor. ‘What’s going on?’ And if he’s late because he’s working late a lot, they’re right at him. ‘Where are you?’ Because that’s his family. They watch over him very much.”
But two years ago, when he was living in the Warren area, he overdosed.
“He was living at his dad’s at the time, and a girl took him to the hospital. He was deceased in the car. They had to take him in and administer it or he would have died,” Webb said.
Webb said she had to let go of her son to help him get better. She had to let him “hit rock bottom. It was 12 below. He had no place go to. He had been kicked out of the Christy House,” she said of a Main Avenue Southwest homeless shelter. A Warren man who works with addicts took him to a treatment facility in Cleveland called The Absolute House.
Yuhas remembers his mother also drawing the line with him when she drove him to Warren in October. “She basically dropped me off at this [sober house], and didn’t put herself down as my emergency contact. I looked at the house manager at that time, and he said, ‘I guess I’m your emergency contact now.’”
Webb added, “It gets so bad when they’re spiraling out of control. You don’t know what it feels like to know what you’re going to say at your son’s funeral, and that’s what it comes down to because you know what they’re doing.
“I knew what I was going to say at his eulogy because I thought he was going to die. You grieve for them when they’re still alive.”
Kathy Parrilla, public-health nurse at the Trumbull County Health Department, can be reached at 330-675-2590, option 3, to make an appointment to receive a naloxone kit.