PURCELLVILLE, Va. — As a heroin epidemic rages in the region and nationwide, a local mom wants to share her surprising story with other parents.
“If anybody should have recognized the signs of addiction, it was me. I missed every single one of them,” said Theresa Fones at a town-hall meeting held in Purcellville on Wednesday to discuss heroin concerns.
Fones is a neonatal ICU nurse at Loudoun Inova, and an EMT with the Purcellville Volunteer Rescue Squad.
Despite her medical training, she says, she didn’t initially know that her daughter was using heroin, probably starting when she was 15.
“My daughter went through the goth phase, and everything was black, and she held on to that black sweatshirt. And I’m like, ‘Why are you wearing a sweatshirt and it’s 95 degrees outside?’ ‘I always wear my sweatshirt, Mom.’ Well, come to find out it was to hide the track marks.”
Fones says she also saw her daughter’s personality change, and cash and jewelry began to disappear from their house.
“When you start noticing that, ‘You know, I thought I had three $20 bills in my wallet, and now I only have one $20 bill.’ She went the whole gamut of stealing not only from family but from other people.”
Jewelry was taken to pawn shops and traded for cash to fuel the girl’s drug habit. And she was using at school.
“She was to the point where she was going into the bathroom … and she would shoot up with heroin. She would have vodka in a water bottle.”
Eventually, her daughter decided to get treatment.
“The addict has to get to the point where they say, ‘Now is the time. I’m done with this kind of life; I can’t do this anymore because if I keep doing this I’m going to die.’”
Fones says it took a while to find a program that worked.
“There were many, many, many days where you worry, ‘Is this going to be the day where somebody calls me from another state and I have to go to a morgue and identify my child’s body?’ It’s the worst feeling in the entire world.”
Eventually, Fones says, the girl went through a methadone program out of state that was successful, and February will mark three years that she’s been drug-free.
Fones says her daughter is now happily married and working. She wants other parents to know that heroin is not a party drug.
“It’s not like the party atmosphere, where taking the drug is going to make you more sociable, and dancing on the table and lampshade on your head. It’s the, ‘I’m by myself, if I take this I’m just going to feel warm and fuzzy and cozy, and I don’t have to think.’ It’s a floating, euphoric kind of feeling, and they can escape having to deal with what it is they don’t want to deal with.”
Fones says her daughter has a genius-level IQ, but turned to drugs because she felt she couldn’t meet expectations.
“Her demons came from feeling like she had to live up to being superhuman because she was so smart.”
On the job as an EMT, Fones says, she continues to see the effects of heroin use.
“When we’re called to the scene of a cardiac arrest or someone not breathing, they … often are now heroin overdoses. So you’re thinking that you’re going to the house of a 65-year-old gentleman who’s had a heart attack. But actually, you’re going to the home of an 18-, 19-, 20-year-old young person, and they are unconscious and they’re not breathing and they don’t have a heartbeat and it’s
because of the heroin overdose.”
She urges anyone with a loved one or friend who is an addict to pick up a prescription of Naloxone, also known as Narcan, which can reverse the effects of a heroin overdose.
