09 May Hope for a New Life
Looking at her life, you’d never have guessed that Kasey had been battling depression and anxiety since she was a little girl. “I was 40 years old. I had a good job, a house, a car, a great kid,” she says. “But, inside me, it wasn’t a good reality.”
Then she had a surgery that left her with physical pain to accompany her emotional wounds. In the midst of her suffering, someone offered her heroin, and she gave it a try. “It took care of the pain and made me numb to reality,” she says. “The depression and anxiety all went away, so I just kept trying and trying and trying it… I became a heroin addict.”
For the next six years, Kasey was in and out of rehabs and finally stopped using all on her own, but her life was in a shambles. “I’d lost my home. I’d lost pretty much everything,” she says.
So she came to Wheeler Mission to put the pieces back together. “Everything’s turned around. I’ve been clean for 16 months. I have two part-time jobs, a car, and a savings and checking account, and I go to church every Sunday.”
Kasey credits our Center for Women & Children with her dramatic transformation. “If you need help, there’s always somebody to talk to – groups and therapists,” she says.
Her daughter is overjoyed to have her mother back. “She’s proud of me for being clean; that I’m the mom I used to be, not the person I was because of the drug.”
Kasey is now looking for her own home. “It’s the last piece of the puzzle needed to complete my new life,” she says.
Because of your support, Kasey, and others like her, find help and hope when they walk through the doors of Wheeler Mission– at Easter and always. “At any age, you can have a comeback, a second chance.”