COMMUNITY PROFILE LIVED EXPERIENCE FUELS COMPASSIONATE RECOVERY CARE BY GILES CLASEN SALLY GIBBENS REMEMBERS HER MOST FRIGHTENING OVERDOSE. She had been using heroin and other drugs for years and overdosed a handful of times. Unmoved by those experiences, she refused to change the trajectory of her life. But that changed in 2015. Gibbens had just picked up her friend Natalie and parked in a bowling alley parking lot in downtown Duluth, Minnesota. Gibbens felt sick. It had been nearly a day and a half since she last scored her drug of choice. Now she was in the earliest phases of heroin withdrawal. Natalie shot up first. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head, and she slumped moments after pushing the drug into her vein. Then, her breathing slowed. Gibbens recognized immediately that Natalie had overdosed, and her friend’s only chance of surviving was to get to a hospital as quickly as possible. But she delayed making the trip to the hospital. She needed to get high first. According to Gibbens, she thought to herself, “I’m too sick to drive. I’m going to do less than what Natalie did.” Gibbens needed the hit. Then, she would be able to drive Natalie to the ER . “At the time, it was more important to me to get that fix than to take my friend to the emergency room,” Gibbens said. Gibbens found a vein and coerced the needle in. She pushed the plunger. Once Gibbens felt the comfort of her high, she drove off, blood dripping down her arm. She turned right from the parking lot down a steep hill. Everything went dark within seconds. Gibbens woke up in an ambulance screaming a wretched, desperate wail. She could see her car smashed into the Duluth library and paramedics trying to revive Natalie. “I just knew there were going to be a lot of repercussions for my actions,” Gibbens said. DISCOVERING URBAN PEAKS Today, Gibbens works as the office administrator for Urban Peaks Rehab. The small medical office, near Colfax and Park Avenues, specializes in offering medication-assisted treatment, or MAT, for opioid use disorder. What sets Urban Peaks Rehab apart from other addiction treatment programs is that most of the small staff have faced opiate or opioid addiction. They understand what it is like to crave the drugs. They also know what it means to go through withdrawal and what life after drug use can look like. Urban Peaks Rehab’s founder and medical director, Dr. Chad Johnston, shifted his practice to addiction treatment after his own fight with opioids and opiates. He started using tramadol while working in the intensive care unit, just before his medical residency. “I was working in the ICU, and we had this guy collect the meds and usually dispose of them,” Johnston said. “There was often some stuff left in there, and I started stealing the leftover pills.” Johnston didn’t realize it at the time, but he was depressed. Throughout life, his father pushed him to succeed. The ERIKA GONZALES DOESN’T BELIEVE SHE WOULD BE SOBER WITHOUT THE PERSONAL CONNECTION SHE BUILT WITH URBAN PEAKS REHAB STAFF. CREDIT: GILES CLASEN 6 DENVER VOICE January 2024
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