The Choctaw Nation Health Services Authority (CNHSA) hosted a recent recovery walk at the Choctaw Nation Headquarters pavilion to celebrate and honor those walking the path of recovery from substance misuse.
The event included a ceremony and a short walk to celebrate those who have made efforts toward recovering from addiction.
Jennifer Spainhour, who works in recruiting and hu- man resources for the Choctaw Nation, shared her story of recovery from addiction. She said her addiction began when she was 12 and that somehow by God’s grace, she stayed in school and wanted to become a nurse.
She later received her nursing license and LPN and was still active in her addiction to alcohol.
“I set all of my curriculum my entire high school to be a nurse,” Spainhour said. “I still wasn’t quite sure that’s what I wanted to do because of the oath. The oath that it has attached to it was that I will never do harm to anybody else. I will never do anything that’s unbecoming of a nurse, and the moment that I had to say that, it really changed my perspective on whether or not I was drinking too much.
“It didn’t change my actions, but my perspective changed and I just didn’t drink when I had to work. I continued on in a nursing career for 13 years. I had a really, I mean vibrant nursing career. I loved every second of it. I was made for that type of work. I was made to be a caregiver.”
She said she was still drinking every night non-stop. She had been married for 10 years and had a child and her husband gave her an ultimatum to quit or he would leave, and she chose alcohol.
“No matter what, I chose the alcohol,” Spainhour said. “As that transition happened, I played the victim for a very long time.”
Spainhour said she had been asked several times over that course of 33 years to utilize drugs and she had always said no until finally hitting a point where she seeped into the realm of addiction.
“My drug of choice took me down a road that I lost my career in 21 days,” Spainhour said. “From the time that I even had the thought of using it, I played with it on the weekend. The moment that I used it on a night that I had to work changed my whole life. I walked into my nursing, my facility, where I had been a charge nurse for 13 years. Highly respected by my peers and I was high.”
When it was time to assess patients, she said she could not feel a patient’s pulse because her pulse was much faster than the patient’s.
“I couldn’t feel it and I realized I couldn’t do my job,” Spainhour said. “At that point, I pretty much hid behind the table and found myself in shame. Found myself in guilt. Found myself in a place that I could never return out of I thought. So, I was hopeless, completely hopeless. Being at that point after that, I walked out of that facility that night and never returned. I never returned to my kids. I left that, that was it. I experienced so much shame. I didn’t want to be around anybody that knew me as a nurse because then they would know what I did.”
Spainhour said she then chose the path of homelessness and living on the streets that took her to places she never thought she would go.
Things began to change when one day someone asked about taking her to church.
“I was like, I don’t try to go to church,” Spainhour said. “You don’t want to try to take me to church because trust me, they would want to shut the doors on me because they don’t want a person like me in there.”
Finally, she reached a point she had sustained enough, so she called the person who invited her to church.
“I just called her one night and I said, ‘You said about a week ago that you would take me to church and I just want to see if it’s going to burn down when I get there,”’ Spainhour said. “She was like, ‘Sure, I’ll come get you.’ So, she comes and gets me the next morning and I went in and getting there, she set next to me and the people were ever so nice and I heard the altar call.”
She said she had always been running from herself and she thought no one could help her. Spainhour thought she could continue the way she was living, but the things she was going through just became worse.
“It felt like everything I touched caught on fire or it was definitely going to be some kind of turmoil, so that I just quit doing anything and then I just walked out of a casino one day and jumped in somebody’s car and said, ‘Will you please take me back to the church that I received my gift to recovery,”’ Spainhour said.
When Spainhour was taken back to the church, she said she dropped at the altar.
“I was like I really want to use drugs again and I can’t use drugs in this way anymore and turns out I walked out and the police were there and things changed and I ended up getting clean.”
She has now been clean for almost five years and she credited others with helping her.
“Each and everybody in this town and surrounding towns brought me back to life,” Spainhour said. “Being in that point and that state of mind, I somehow made it down here. My dad said, ‘Well, you’ve never … I don’t know what you’re going to do but you can’t stay here. I told you a million times that you’re Choctaw.’
“I kept seeing that our marketing department’s amazing. They’ve reached me at the depths of where I was at and told me that I could come down here I was like, ‘Oh yeah, maybe Choctaw.’
“So when I got here, I got into a beautiful sober living home. Walking into there, I was completely breathless because it was clean. I walked into that house and the woman that directs that house showed me around and I couldn’t believe how clean it was. I sat on the bed and I just started crying.”
Spainhour said she was then given a hug.
“In recovery, that’s one of the strongest things that you can give a recovering addict is a hug,” she said. “That’s that point when two hearts speak. That was the first time that I had felt anybody else’s heart against mine. It felt like it was so powerful.”
