 Hi, I'm Dave Augustine, and welcome to this episode of Quality of Life. In this episode, we're gonna continue to discuss major problem that our community has, substance abuse. Joining us for this episode is Wendy Stewart from the Red Balloon Group. Welcome, Wendy. Thank you. Also joining us is Chris Murphy from the Wisconsin United Live We Can initiative and also to talk about Narcan. And then last but not least, we have Sarah Moende from the Nova Counseling Group for Recovery. Welcome. Thanks. Welcome. Wendy, I'd like to start with you as far as your background on how you are introduced or how you were introduced and how you work with substance abuse. Well, I got involved because my daughter, Alyssa, passed away from a heroin overdose in June of 2014. And I just decided that I was gonna get more involved with education and awareness. And also because there were, like I searched for grief support groups and there wasn't anything that I felt comfortable with. So I started, because when your child passes away from something like addiction, there's a stigma. And so I just wanted to talk to other people who were going through the same thing that I was going through, other parents. So I started the Red Balloon Group. The name comes from a balloon release that we did for Alyssa on one red balloon that landed in a cherry orchard. But anyway, so I started the Red Balloon Group for parents and families who've lost a loved one, either a child or a family member, friend, anything to addiction. So I started that back in October of 2015 and it's really grown since. I now run three grief support groups, one for families in Ableton, and then one for just parents who've lost a child in Oshkosh at Solutions Treatment Center and then one in Ableton also at the Mooring House. So after I started the groups and realized that there was really a need for them out there because people started coming and they were so happy to be able to talk to people in their same situation, I actually partnered with Wisconsin United We Can and I became the grief support director for Wisconsin United We Can and so we joined together in our efforts. Okay, are those the only things you do or are those on the side or is it completely consume your oil? Well, I have a full-time job as a healthcare. And a full-time job asides, wow. There's that. You still have to pay the bills. But yeah, so I do have a full-time job. So I do this in my spare time. So the groups meet in the evenings and then I also reach out to families through Wisconsin United We Can and sometimes I'll meet with parents or families individually if they can't make it to the groups. So there's the other things I do. I share my story publicly whenever I can because Alyssa never had any criminal charges. So she came from the background where she went to a Catholic school and we had family dinners and all those things that you would consider a normal family, quote unquote. So I try to tell parents who don't think it would happen to them that I was that parent who didn't think it would happen to them or to me. And I was, Alyssa was that girl who didn't think it would happen to her too. So I try to spread the word that way. Okay. Kind of a tag onto that. How do most people fall into the trap of substance abuse that you see in all of your encounters? I just feel like it can happen any number of ways, whether they're trying to feel better because of some sort of illness, mental health issue. For my daughter, it was anxiety and depression. She was medicated for that with different things. She went off to college and she got irregular with her medication because she couldn't make it home for doctor's appointments and she started self-medicating with prescription pain medication. But there's other ways like kids could be experimenting, self-medicating, any number of ways that kids could get addicted or fall into that trap. Chris or Sarah, any? I also feel like we, as a society, I think kids have a need to be light. And so our kids are growing up in a totally different culture these days. So I think peer pressure is really big. I think kids know that drugs are bad and alcohol, there can be problems that come from consuming too much alcohol. But I also think that they never think it's gonna happen to them. And I think that peer pressure and that need to be liked is also a significant factor in some of these kids and addiction being prevalent in homes. I think it can also be as simple as a legal prescription opioid from a dentist or from a physician for sports injury. And something like that can trigger a person who's predisposed to addiction. And when those pills run out, then they can turn to other things such as heroin that's cheaper. Just to support that addiction. Why is heroin so popular all of a sudden? As far as boiling to the top because if memory serves, I believe, it's not even at the top of the list of addiction, of substance abuses. I think alcohol still is probably one of your number one and some of the others, but it seems like heroin is in the news lately so much. Any reason why that might be? Well, I think, oh, go ahead. I think heroin is in the news more often than other things just because of different things it can be caught with. So it leads to more overdoses. And then those overdoses are more publicized than strictly prescription pill or different problems. And we have all of those. It's just that heroin finds its way into the news more often, so. Okay, okay. Back to the red balloon group. So what would a normal session meeting go like? Actually, it's just a matter of parents or family members getting together. We might have a theme. We might talk about a holiday. We might have, talk about a birthday. We might talk about an anniversary of a death. Whatever people are struggling with, that's what we talk about. I have the meetings as much for my own support as to support others. So it helps me a lot to talk about what happened. And we just understand each other. And sometimes we talk about their life before they overdosed or passed on, because that is so similar a lot of times too, the things that we were struggling with. And when you lose a child to anything, especially addiction, you have guilt. So a lot of times we talk about guilt and trying to get past the guilt that you feel and knowing that we've done everything that we, we had done everything that we could for our children, and we still couldn't save them. That's what we're dealing with. And so we talk a lot about that. And I just think it helps to get together with people who know what you're going through because you don't feel alone anymore. We can call on each other outside of the group too. And we do. If we're having a bad day, we call each other. We talk to each other. Okay. How old was Alyssa? She was 20. Her funeral ended up on her 21st birthday. Oh my goodness. Yeah, so when I talk to, when I talk to kids, I feel like that's very impactful because that was not planned. That just ended up that way. And so when I talk to kids and I talk about what they wanna be doing, imagine what you wanna be doing on your 21st birthday, pretty sure you don't wanna be doing what Alyssa was doing, cause we were celebrating her life at her own funeral. So it's impactful. I mean, I didn't think it was a blessing at the time, but now when I try to help others, I feel like that's a blessing in that it's impactful. How many people would you say you reach or meet with on a yearly basis? Oh gosh, that's hard to say. I mean, I have the groups three times a month where there might be anywhere from just two of us there to seven or eight of us. And then we have new people all the time, unfortunately. It's a group that nobody wants to belong to. And then when sharing my story, I don't share it on a weekly or monthly basis just whenever I can. But Chris and I have a presentation that we do and we just spoke at St. Francis Xavier High School in Appleton and there was 420 kids there, plus teachers and then we did it for the parents at night too. So I mean, that was the most recent one we did. Wow, that must take a lot of commitment and I thank you for doing that. You know, staying on top of it. Yes. Especially what you've been through in everything and in the Be Strong and to do that, that's fantastic. I mean, I'm just a mom. So Chris, turning to Wisconsin United, we can, could you tell us what that program is about? Well, we started out just as an online support group and it was because I think when you first learned that there's an addiction in your family, it's a very lonely road to walk and your first instinct is to cover it up and not say anything because you're gonna be judged. You're a bad parent. You're a bad sister or brother or grandparent and so you hide it and you just go through that alone. And I met someone else on a site online and listened to her story and I thought to myself, my God, that's exactly my story. So we, a group was created. It started out with 50 or so members. Over the past couple of years, it has grown to over 800. And we have weekly or bi-weekly meetings in six different places all over the United, all over Wisconsin, the United States. And where people come together of, if they're just families or siblings or aunts, uncles, grandparents and everyone can share their story without feeling any shame. And we try to just educate and empower families to deal with addiction when they find out it's happening in their family. Again, I'll ask, what are your meetings consist of or a basic meeting when you have one? Our meetings are non-traditional. We don't follow a smart recovery. We don't follow Elinon or Narinon. It is simply a group of people coming together. We do introductions. And then anyone who needs to speak can. There isn't an actual format like a lot of the other structured programs. It is more just talking, getting opinions and having a group of people who you know aren't going to judge you. Nice. How long has this been in existence? May of 2014. 2014. Yes. And is that your only main thing or do you have a full-time job as well? I do have a full-time job. I am the service coordinator for the Appleton Housing Authority. And I try to, they're obviously separate careers. Sure. But there really is kind of a tie-in to that. When you look at, aside from our youth, the second next growing population in addiction is 55 plus. They are an at-risk population. And I deal with a lot of people in that situation because I am the service coordinator at a large residential facility in Appleton. We serve a large veteran population who have PTSD, pain issues. And the elderly, when a lot of people say, why would that be? And you have a lot of people who are seeing multiple doctors for multiple ailments and sometimes in multiple states. So, you know, I kind of tie-in that work with Wisconsin now that we can because you're still dealing with opioids, whether it's heroin or whether it's legal prescription pills. So, I know there's been a new treatment that protective services, fire services that have been trained on called Narcan. Yes. Could you go into that a little bit what Narcan is and how that's being used? Well, Narcan will reverse an opioid overdose. I think there's a lot of misinformation out there where people think that Narcan is strictly for heroin. The reason I say that is, you'll find Narcan in the news with a heroin overdose. In a lot of the comments you'll find are very negative and derogatory. You'll see anything from junky or let them die and it's always upsetting and I always stop reading it. But I think what people fail to realize is that Narcan also reverses a prescription pill, opioid overdose. And that can be as simple as a person taking their medication and then 20 minutes later saying, oh my gosh, did I take my medication? It's happened with me with my allergy pills but when it happens to the elderly and 20 minutes later they take their prescriptions again, that can be the difference between life and death. So it's not just heroin, it could be your mom, your grandma, your grandpa. Everyone can benefit from Narcan. It's been used in hospitals for decades. It's just more publicly in the news now because of heroin. I know when you had mentioned like grandma, a little bit of a scare at my grandma this past week where she was unresponsive and they thought maybe she had a stroke or something and it turned out everything was clear, good. So she came in and out of it and now she's back alert again but it's like we still don't know did they give medications too much or whatever. You just don't know as far as that goes. Or Narcan is the treat to that. It's like an epi-pen is the treat. If you hit an allergy with peanuts you don't just say, well, we ate that too bad, let them, it's just something we can't do. Exactly, yes, exactly. Anyway, the other point I just wanted to tag on to your point is when you just did say United States or whatever. It's still, as Wisconsin I think we have to be a United State where all of our communities unite to battle this condition we have in our communities because it isn't just gonna go away and like law enforcement said, Chief Domagalski said up at Green Bay when they did the heroin in Wisconsin is it's like this isn't a punishment solution to get us out of that. It's more of an educational and how do we cope with it and force it out of our community. And it's not an easy fix. No, and as they said too, we can't arrest our way out of this problem that won't work. And we do have a parent group so to speak that is United Weekend and that is throughout the United States. And we have different state specific groups and ours is the Wisconsin United Weekend. Okay, okay. Any side effects of using Narcan? No. She saw it, no. No, it will reverse an opioid overdose and if that is not the case there's really no adverse effects to it. Nice, nice. Sarah, let's switch over to you as far as NOVA counseling where you help with recovery process as well. Could you go into some detail about your programs and how you operate? Yeah, so NOVA counseling services is a 50-bed residential facility and we treat adult male and female clients with addiction or substance abuse issues. And so we have a residential inpatient program that's 28 days. We also have a 90-day TAERA program and then we have a focus program for clients that maybe are able to come just during the day and they just come and go five days a week. Okay, now with your program is that for people who are physically have substance abuse issues or is this for grief counseling like what Wendy and Chris talked about? Now, Wendy and Chris's programs are a little bit different because we are actually treating the problem. Okay. And they are more preventative measures as a result of the problem but our clients are, we are treating the clients, the individuals. And so my job at NOVA is marketing and business development so that leads me out into the community, networking with folks like Wendy and Chris. So basically your services are complementary to each other where the member of the family may be being treated but then for support services for the rest of the family may be relying on your services to help work together to combat the whole thing. Right. And I think that's how we all kind of collaborate together because addiction is such a community problem right now. All three of us have been at multiple committee meetings and part of task force, hero and task force committee meetings that are meeting to just kind of take a look and see what we can do as a community to help what's going on with our kids, with professionals, with our parents. You know, it's literally hitting everyone. Yeah. I think one thing that doesn't help is the more prescription type drugs that are being released on the market. And physician education, so to speak, for when they prescribe. I think there was an issue for a while. I know they've been taking some steps along for education for that too. It isn't like, okay, take a few Vicodin here and here like Dr. Hall, so to speak. As far as that goes, so I think that's some of it as well. With the patients that you treat, what would you say is the repeat factor or if there are any? Well, they're repeat as in somebody not getting well after they complete. I think there's so many determining factors in a client's treatment, but I know when clients come in the door, a lot of them are not sure. They're fearful. They don't know what to expect. They've been dependent on the substance for a very long time. They don't know how to live without it. So sometimes it's just that fear of implementing themselves back into society as productive members of society that they start hitting some glitches and they're not used to coping without the substance. So they go back to the substance or maybe they're not willing to let go of those old friends because they don't know how to socialize and they find themselves lonely. I know the addiction factor with heroin because it attacks the opioid receptors of the brain makes it highly addictive and it's been difficult to maintain recovery for a lot of, especially the young people because they're starting at a young age, they're not developed more than an adolescent, some of them, so they're finding their way back into society very difficult. And some of them without support or family support because they've just really pushed away every positive role model that they have. So these individuals are just finding themselves back in the same situations. I think we're doing better as treatment providers to recognize that yep, the first time may not always work, but we're willing to take them back and take a look at things so we can kind of get them so to speak to fly right. I think that's what's important is with the services that all of you provide the support, the relentless pursuit of making people better, which helps in the whole factor and helps us win against this epidemic is what you would call it. How did the three of you meet or initially get together? We met at, we started the rethink addiction run approximately three years ago and all three of us were on board for that in the heroin task force in Winnebago County and Oshkosh. We started that run to benefit Solutions Recovery Club, Nova County Services, the DARE program and some other outreach programs in our area and all three of us kind of took a liking to it. Wendy came with her team, Alyssa and they were the biggest team the first year we had the race. And so I found myself as a runner running for all these other causes like all these other illnesses like cancer and for all these kids groups and everything. And I thought, how come we can't run for addiction? How can we can't help this issue? And so it's really taken off. I think we all feel like the race is growing. People are coming on board. It's an amazing day to be a part of as far as what awareness and so yeah. We had the first year, how many teams do we have? Only a couple of teams and this year we have like 10 more. I don't even know. 10 teams. Yeah, and yeah, team Alyssa the first year, I think we had 70 people on our team. So we were like a good portion of the race. It just kind of took off because it was right after Alyssa passed away. And now at my red balloon group, every parent that comes, I say here's a great way to honor your child, have a team. So a lot of the parents are having teams for their kids, which is sad, but it's a great way to honor your child and remember them with a team at the race. And it's a great event for everybody to get involved in and it supports the treatment centers and the programs locally. Okay. When is the next event or when is the next race? It is September 10th at eight o'clock and we'll have the race recovery speakers, a silent auction. It's just a great event to come and be a part of. And as we spread the awareness and the word in our own community, we encourage other communities to do the same thing. So that's the only way that we're gonna really have a chance against this thing. Where is the race and the festivities held? The Solutions Recovery Center. Okay. Crash, Crash, Wisconsin. It's on the quarter of Parkway in Evans. Okay. If somebody isn't sure if they should seek help or if they wanna learn more, how would they contact each of your organizations? Is there a website, email, phone number? I guess, Wendy, if we could start with you for the Red Balloon. Well, I partnered with Wisconsin United Weekend. So you can get ahold of me that way because the Red Balloon group is under Wisconsin United Weekend, too. So the website. Yeah, that's just something that people can search for online. It will come up with our state site. It's also something people can look for on Facebook. The group Wisconsin Can is a private group. So no one except the members in that group can see what you're talking about. It is a safe place. And people can contact any of the administrators through that venue. Sarah, how about you? Yeah, NOVA has, we have a website. And the Rethink Run actually has a web page through Do Try Run as well. And there's an 800 number to contact us for services if someone is feeling like that they need some type of treatment and they can call and talk to any of our team and we're open 24 hours. Nice. We have a few minutes before we wrap up. So if we could kind of just go around any final thoughts, advice, last info bits you'd want to share with our viewers. Wendy, we'll start with you. I just would, if I could reach everybody in the world and tell them that when you're making comments about either dealers or people who've overdosed, they need to remember that those people are someone's kids. Right. Sorry. That's quite all right. When they're making the comments about they're all scum, let them die, remember that they're someone's kid. Like, I don't know, it's just, it's disturbing. I guess what I'd say is I'm not proud to admit this. But I do remember when I was in college thinking that the heroin addict was the homeless, shoeless guy under the bridge. And that is not the way it is today. So if there's anything that I could say to people, it would be these drugs, no socioeconomic boundary. This can happen to rich people, poor people, any people in that if you truly believe that it can't happen to you, you're wrong. And that's why awareness is key. OK. Sarah, to wrap up. I just want to, I would just say that there is help out there. And people are getting well. And recovery is happening all over the country. If you want help, there is help out there. Excellent. Excellent. Well, I'd like to thank you all for being on the show. This was very informative to me as well. And thank you for reaching out to our audience and that there are people out there willing to provide help in this ongoing epidemic of substance abuse. So thank you very much for taking the time out of your day. Thank you. Thanks for having us. This concludes this episode of Quality of Life. If you have any questions for us, you can email us at wscs at wscscheboygan.com. For Quality of Life, I'm Dave Augustine. Thanks for watching.