For what it's worth

I've been trying to write about my experiences at the 12-step treatment facility, but it's been a lot more difficult than I ever thought it would.

It's always a shock when you leave a class and go out into the real world, and are suddenly forced to turn facts and statistics into people, real people. I should have expected it, but I was still shocked on the first morning of my first day, when my father and I typed up the paperwork of the first patient to be admitted -- a 19-year-old girl. It shouldn't have surprised me; I hear often enough about new patients at the addiction office who were in my high school class. Kids my age, in the 15-to-25 bracket, are some of the highest-risk for substance abuse and addiction.

But knowing the statistics, and having friends who you know smoked pot in high school, is different from meeting someone who could have been your friend -- someone you can see yourself in -- being admitted to rehab for heroin and ecstasy. When she walked in, the dynamic of the room changed; it wasn't my father and I as medical figures on one side with the patient on the other, it was two kids rolling their eyes as the old man took ten minutes to answer a text message.

It was uncomfortable for both of us, and she left as quickly as she could. I saw her plenty of times over the next week, and though I was going around asking the patients questions, I never said anything to her. I was afraid she would think I was judging her. I was afraid she was judging me -- and her opinion mattered in a way that the opinions of the older men and women there didn't. I was there on the afternoon when she got up and told the group her story -- she came from a well-off family and had had a nice childhood, with siblings and vacations and pets. She read a letter her dad had written her, full of support and love.

Whatever had happened that caused her to wind up here, in rehab for every drug I'd ever heard of, could probably have happened just as easily to me or to anyone else I know.

Back when I was first starting to plan for this summer, the idea of spending a lot of time in a rehab center was scary to me. I imagined that the people I'd meet would be the drug addicts that are on TV -- the dope fiends, methheads, crackheads, dealers, junkies -- all dangerous and unpredictable and hardly human. That's what addiction looks like in our culture, and it's a frightening picture. And it's catastrophically wrong.

There have been a handful more kids my age admitted to the rehab center in the past few weeks, and one 20-year-old named Jeff who finished his 28 days and left. I got to attend his farewell ceremony and hear about how excited he was to have his family come and pick him up the next morning. I've felt that, too, but only at summer camp, where I didn't have thirty patients and two counselors warning me that the rest of my life was going to be a struggle I would have to be prepared to face.

Friday was my last full day interning at the rehab center. Halfway through, I overheard that the girl I admitted on my first day had left treatment, two weeks into the month-long program. I don't know whether she went back home to her parents, or went back to live with the boyfriend she'd been using heroin with. I do know that this rehab center was her second in two months, and I hope that she left because she thought she'd learned all she could from it. And I hope she doesn't have to go to another treatment facility next month, or ever again.