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What’s getting lost in the all-coronavirus-all-the-time news coverage? This simple fact: life goes on. Each day someone somewhere is being diagnosed with a serious and progressive illness—like cancer, kidney disease, diabetes or heart disease. And these potentially deadly diseases require treatment. Treatment that, in many instances, can’t be put on hold until after the COVID-19 pandemic passes.
Treatment for Substance Use Disorders (SUD) is just as essential. Addiction is a disease. It takes lives and destroys families. I know of what I speak, from my own personal experience.
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Keeping my guys healthy right now is my highest priority, my deepest concern, the thing keeping me awake at night. Like most treatment facilities ours was not designed for social distancing. Just the opposite, in fact. Addiction is a lonely disease. Social isolation can trigger an addiction or cause a relapse.
Our men live in dorm-style rooms. Almost everyone has at least one roommate. I’m well aware that this is far from ideal right now.
We’ve suspended our all-house meetings, which would normally bring everybody together in fellowship, in one big group. We’re limiting our group recovery or rehabilitative sessions and meetings to no more than 10 people, and most of those have no more than five to seven participants. We’re just having to hold more sessions than we normally would each day, which is actually giving everyone more opportunities to participate.
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What’s disheartening is that we normally operate at or near capacity, 80 men, and have a waiting list of those seeking to enter our program. This isn’t unusual at all. I’m guessing that’s common among all of COMBAT’s treatment agencies. People are desperate for treatment. They’ve made the self-diagnosis necessary as an addict or alcoholic to seek treatment. Like I had to find my personal rock bottom, they've found theirs.
But there just aren’t enough beds for everyone.
It breaks my heart that we simply can’t accept new clients until this crisis subsides. We’ve had to put them on hold.
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There’s a misconception that places like ours are medical facilities. We’re not. We don’t normally have to buy PPE, the personal protective equipment you may have heard about in the media.
Those of us providing SUD treatment are having expenses we never expected to have. Expenses are up. Revenues are down. That’s obviously not sustainable for very long, especially in the non-profit world.
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