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People Making a Difference
I have some good news of my own for you. I send Methadone Today and other methadone literature into a hospital here in Flint, Michigan with a nurse who works in emergency. The other night, they had a methadone patient come into emergency with a heart attack. The doctor gave him morphine for the pain, but the nurse to whom I give the literature was on duty and saw that he probably wasn't affected by it. She told the doctor that the patient was on 85mg of methadone and that he should have more pain medication because of the tolerance he had built up to opiates. She got the information I had sent and gave it to the doctor. He gave the patient about three times the amount of morphine that he had given initially, and the patient rested.
If I had not been feeding this information to the nurse (I gave it to her because she is conscientious and interested), the doctor would not have given the patient more pain medication because they are ignorant regarding the pharmacology of methadone. They usually think that the patient doesn't need as much pain medication because of the methadone, when the reverse is actually true.
That made me feel so great. The nurse called me the next day to tell me, and it made my whole day. So, you see, with just the little bit I accomplish in the ocean that needs to be done, at least one person benefited. There is nothing that can compare with that feeling.
Beth Francisco is the editor of Methadone Today, the newsletter of Detroit Orgazational Needs in Treatment (DONT), a NAMA affiliate.
When handing out the Shot of Hope newsletter, I always make sure that the staff at my program get a copy. The day after handing them out a counselor approached me and said that the newsletter "really opened her eyes," that she had learned much she didn't know. I was very pleased but also confused. The woman is a counselor? Well, come to find out, she is not. She is a social worker, a social worker who has had no experience at all in addictions. This is something new that the county or state is trying out: hiring social workers instead of counselors, and it's not to save money; they get paid more than counselors. Anyway, after I found out, I gathered all the back issues of Shot of Hope, and copies of other methadone newsletters, and left them for her at the clinic. If one issue of Shot of Hope opened her eyes, maybe after reading all the others she will really do some learning. She is a very pleasant and caring person, and hopefully with the information from the newsletters she will be on her way to becoming a better counselor.
Jessie Durnin publishes and edits the Shot of Hope newsletter for Baltimore Advocates for Methadone (BAM), an affiliate of NAMA. For subscription information contact Jessie at Jess2day@aol.com
Last modified on: 1/29/99