Pubdate: Sat, 19 Oct 2002
Source: Times-Picayune, The (LA)
Copyright: 2002 The Times-Picayune
Contact:  http://www.nola.com/t-p/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/848
Author: Keith O'Brien, Staff writer/The Times-Picayune

THE HELPER

As an Alcoholic and an Addict, Charles Harbaugh Took Himself to the Very 
Edge of the Abyss. Now He Finds Purpose at Charity Hospital's Detox Unit 
Helping the Addicts, Having Walked Many a Mile in Their Shoes.

The parents of the heroin addict were late. Charles Harbaugh looked at his 
watch, took a sip of coffee, and fished a pack of Pall Malls out of his 
shirt pocket. He was on time, of course. He likes to follow instructions, 
likes to have structure to his life, and the night before he had made a 
promise to meet the parents of the troubled woman in front of Charity 
Hospital. So he was here, and they were not, and he was waiting.

Harbaugh, 48, had waited here before. On a night in early April, unable to 
check into Charity's medical detox unit until morning, he spent hours 
waiting outside the hospital, drinking wine until he fell asleep on an air 
grate. His hair was long and tangled then, his mouth full of rotten teeth, 
his body broken down by 30 years of drinking and his mind set on one thing: 
dying.

He was trying to kill himself, Harbaugh tells people now, because the pain 
surrounded him like water and only alcohol helped him stay afloat. This is 
why he waited all night to get into detox and why later, weeks into his 
recovery, he started showing up at the detox unit again -- not for 
treatment this time, but for companionship. He didn't want to be alone with 
his thoughts.

The nurses, weathered to the lip service and lies of patients who vanish 
without notice and reappear with the usual explanations, didn't expect 
Harbaugh to keep coming. But he did. A couple times at first, then almost 
every day. He came back to talk to patients and hold group meetings. In 
group, he felt at his best, like he was making connections, even if the 
addicts assembled in the room slept or drooled or dry heaved as he spoke. 
Someone might listen, he thinks, even though he knows half of them will not 
complete their stay in detox and many will be back again soon.

Outside the hospital, waiting once again, Harbaugh checked his watch and 
sipped his coffee. It was a Saturday morning -- gray, damp and quiet, 
except for the man begging for change, and not finding any, among the few 
standing on the street. Harbaugh shrugged, lit a cigarette, and opened the 
black satchel that held his Bible, his meditation book and the notes about 
the heroin addict he had taken during a telephone conversation with her 
parents the night before.

Kelli, he had written at the top of a pad of paper. Addicted to heroin . . 
. family is Christian-based . . . tired of lip service . . . care, but want 
to see action . . .will meet me at 10 a.m. in front of the hospital with 
fruit and clothes . . . have a lot of love.

Harbaugh was supposed to bring the fruit and clothes to Kelli, a 
22-year-old woman now in her sixth day of detox. But looking up Tulane 
Avenue, and seeing no sign of her parents, he decided they weren't coming 
and gathered up his belongings: the notes, the satchel, the bag of candy 
and soft drinks he had bought for the recovering addicts. Then he walked 
inside the hospital, took the elevator to the fourth floor, and pressed the 
buzzer at the doors of the detox unit. A nurse appeared in a small square 
window.

"I'm Charles," he said.

"I know," she answered.

. . . . . . .

Rhonda Green keeps an obituary pinned to the bulletin board in her tiny 
office on the fourth floor. The man in the picture is 38, outgoing and 
personable, a hard worker and a former patient, a man addicted to opiates.

Green, the section manager of the unit and a registered nurse, last saw the 
man on a Friday this summer. He had just completed a 28-day rehabilitation 
program and, like many former patients, he came back to detox to tell the 
nurses he was doing well. He was perky that day, Green thought. His eyes 
had cleared up, he had gained weight and he said he planned to come back on 
Monday to talk to the group about his recovery. He never made it. On Sunday 
night, he died of an apparent overdose.

The obituary, now fading to yellow, is part memorial to the man and part 
reminder of the challenges that Green, the nurses and the recovering 
addicts face every day -- as if they need a reminder. They know the 
statistics: that 50 percent of the 1,200 people who come to detox each year 
will leave without completing treatment, that 40 percent of those will be 
back again and that roughly 10 percent will stay clean for good. They know 
the stories, too. There was Ronald, who came to detox, finished 
rehabilitation and came back to give rousing group talks until he got 
arrested for sleeping in a church. There was Edward, whom they lost track 
of until he appeared in the newspaper, wanted for armed robbery. And there 
was Henrietta, who completed treatment and came back to detox for five days 
in a row until she, too, vanished.

"Either she'll be back with us again or she's in jail or she's dead," said 
Green, because these are the possible endings, as she sees it, to the 
patients that walk through the doors of detox. "They get treatment and get 
better, or they go to jail, or they die."

In spite of these odds and these stories, or perhaps because of them, Green 
and the other nurses return to the detox unit every day, hoping to 
recognize the "frequent flyers," as they call returning patients, from 
those who are truly ready to tackle their addictions. They will be there 
for the withdrawal, for the hallucinations and tremors, for the vomiting 
and anxiety. They watch over the heroin addicts, attached to IVs, and the 
alcoholics, who can suffer seizures and even die of heart problems if not 
medicated properly.

Then, if the patients stay long enough to wash the toxins from their 
bodies, the nurses will refer them to one of several rehabilitation 
programs that can last anywhere from 10 days to 21/2 years. They usually 
know who will make it and who will be back for another extended stay of 
sweating and trembling and sleeping curled up beneath white sheets in the 
ward where first names are enough. "It's just gut," Green said. "You just 
kind of know."

Everyone had a feeling about Harbaugh.

. . . . . . .

"I waited for your parents, but they didn't show up."

Kelli nodded. "Thanks," she told Harbaugh. Then she wandered down the hall 
to the conference room in the detox unit and sat down among several others 
slumped over the table in pale blue scrubs. Outside the door, Harbaugh 
walked the floor, trying to wake the others. He said:

"Good morning."

"How you feeling?"

"My name's Charles. I'm a recovering alcoholic and addict. I came here this 
morning to bring you a message of hope. We're going to have a meeting in 
about five minutes, if you'd like to come."

They said:

"What?"

"I'm tired."

"Thank you."

When he was drunk, he would yell, his eyes twitching to avoid the gaze of 
others as he plotted new ways to pay for his next drink. Now, hands in his 
pants pockets, Harbaugh rejoined the handful of others in the conference 
room, stood up at the head of the table and spoke in short soft sentences, 
reminding himself to make eye contact with the people eating chocolate with 
trembling hands.

Few looked up at him. They stared instead at the table, at their feet, out 
the fourth floor windows into the gray morning. They were a typical bunch: 
black and white, young and old. They snort cocaine. They sell heroin. They 
want their kids back. They want their jobs back. They have criminal records 
and financial problems and dreams. John doesn't want to miss his son's 
wedding next spring. Rodney doesn't want to die selling drugs. David 
doesn't want to lie to his grandson anymore.

"I'm still Charles," Harbaugh told them. "I'm still a recovering alcoholic 
and addict. I want to give you a quick, brief rundown. A little bit about 
my background . . ."

"Who's Charles?" Kelli whispered to the woman next to her.

"You're so loaded," the woman replied.

Harbaugh kept talking. He told them about his failed marriages, about 
serving time for stealing cars in the 1970s, about the three children he 
had with a woman in the 1980s and how he once considered killing all of 
them, then himself. He told them how he didn't do it, how he got help, got 
clean, then relapsed, then moved to Harvey to live with his sister. He told 
them how the mother of his kids came with them, then left him, how he 
married another woman only to have her leave him in July 2001 and how this 
final failure launched him into what he called his "last episode" of drinking.

"Lord, that's the worst story I've ever heard," Estella Johnson thought the 
first time she heard Harbaugh tell it. It was early April then and Johnson, 
a registered nurse in the unit, was leading the group. She was hoping to 
get people to open up and share their stories because she wanted them to 
see they could find strength in their failures. Harbaugh had been one of 
the quiet ones at first. Now she couldn't get Harbaugh to stop talking or 
writing in his journal.

April 4: "Ate breakfast at 8 a.m. and ate like a cow. Still have trouble 
thinking clearly and focusing on things concerning my kids and my home 
situation."

April 6: "Laid back day. Went to two meetings and got a lot out of them. 
People like my attitude and when I voice my opinion. Played spades and did 
some reading and thinking."

April 14: "I've seen people lay around like zombies, vomit on themselves 
and urinate. Watched them go through their withdrawals with a lot of pain . 
. . It has taught me that I don't want to be in their shape ever . . . I 
know what I need to do to be sober and clean and I will honestly try to do 
the best I can this time around and hope that, with my faith in God and his 
love for me, I should be able to recover successfully."

Shortly thereafter, Harbaugh wrote:

Dear Liquor,

After 30 years of pain and hurt, anxiety and desperation, you have taken me 
to the limit. You have broken up my relationships, separated me from my 
children and tried to kill me.

I need to end this now because I need to start a new life and try to 
rebuild what you have helped tear down. I need my self-esteem back and my 
family. Most of all I need my sanity. I need God.

Good-bye.

. . . . . . .

Harbaugh asked the question and watched Kelli roll it over in her mind: 
"Why do you want to change?"

His hair was trimmed now, his bad teeth pulled, his eyes peering out from 
behind new glasses. The glasses had been a gift from the eye care center 
whose staff found out he was getting clean and going to college to study 
social work and substance abuse counseling. The change had been his own.

"He is a seed planter that's planting seeds, and I may never see the fruit 
grow on the trees from the seeds that he's planted, but I'll tell you 
this," said a 44-year-old recovering addict who met Harbaugh during his 
stay in detox. "Once you meet him, you have no more doubt about what you 
need to do for your recovery. You know what you need to do for your recovery."

It began, Harbaugh told the group, the day he walked back into the detox 
unit after weeks of rehabilitation. He had vowed never to return, he said, 
but as he sat on the porch of his sister's home and watched his father 
drink beer, a voice kept telling him: "Come back. Come back."

"The staff welcomed me with open arms," he told the patients on this 
particular Saturday. "They asked me if I would chair a meeting, and I did. 
And at that moment, I knew then that this was where I was supposed to be 
for the rest of my life. Something came over my whole body. I can't explain 
it. I just knew this was where I was supposed to be."

He had answered the question. He knew why he wanted to change. He wanted to 
be a social worker and substance abuse counselor. He wanted to help others 
overcome their addictions, and the nurses in the detox unit had encouraged him.

They referred him to the eye care center that gave him free glasses and 
helped him figure out how to enroll at Southern University at New Orleans. 
They loaned him money for bus fare and, knowing he couldn't live on loans 
forever, helped him get a job as a patient escort at the hospital, where he 
makes more than $6 an hour. Now he was leading the group in detox, where he 
felt most comfortable, and it was Kelli's turn to answer the question.

"I want my family back," she said, her sad, distant eyes studying the table 
top. "I came here and nobody knew I was here."

Harbaugh nodded.

"And I'm tired," she added. "It's like this dude I was running with . . ."

Her mumbling voice trailed off into a rambling tale about paranoia and 
drugs and stealing to buy drugs and running with this man, this dude, she 
hardly knew, and how he would get high on cocaine and heroin and get 
spooked and she would get aggravated because she had legal charges pending 
against her and dreams to be a good mother, a better person, and yet here 
she was once again: high next to a skittish stranger who kept saying, "I 
don't like that truck right over there."

"I'm sick of it," Kelli said, and her tale rambled on, to her mother and 
the Bible and talk about the end of the world until it finally came back 
around to her once again and she said, "I really do want to change."

Harbaugh thanked her for sharing. Two days later, Kelli left.

They tried to stop her, Green said. The nurses surrounded her and told her 
they supported her, even if she felt like no one else did. But Kelli, 
defiant after an argument with her mother on the telephone, walked out, 
vowing to go get loaded.

"You have to want it for yourself," Harbaugh cautioned a patient in the 
detox unit a couple weeks later. "You can't do it for anyone else."

The 24-year-old heroin and cocaine addict sat on his bed and looked up at 
the man who once had L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E tattooed across the knuckles of 
his hands. It was the thing to do in prison in the 1970s, Harbaugh said. 
But somewhere along the way the L-O-V-E faded from his right hand, leaving 
only H-A-T-E on his left hand, which Harbaugh now slipped into his pants 
pocket as he spoke.

"You know the saying in Alcoholics Anonymous?"

The man shook his head.

"You've got jail, institutions and death. You're in an institution now. 
Ever been to jail?"

The man paused. "Yeah."

"Well, what's left?"

The man paused again. He knew the answer, of course, just as Harbaugh had 
known the answer months earlier and, really, still wakes up to the answer 
every day as he gets on the bus to go to school or to work for another day 
of sobriety.

"I'm scared," the man said.

"That's a good thing," Harbaugh replied. "It's good to be scared."
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