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|January 9, 2002
Volume 4, Issue 2
|Midwifery Today E-News
"Omnium Gatherum"
Print Page
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Midwifery Today Conference News
Herbal remedies. Singing in pregnancy and birth. Birth dance. Therapeutic touch. Waterbirth.
Learn about these topics and more at the Midwifery Today conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S, March 21-25, 2002.
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Quote of the Week:
"As diverse as we may be, a common thread weaves us together: our firm belief in, and experience of, the divine presence that is inherent in life and the divine presence that is transmitted during the birth process."
- Miriam Medicine Prayer
The Art of Midwifery
For healing the postpartum perineum, I mix 1 part rosemary, 1 part sea salt, 1 part uva ursi, and 2 parts comfrey (roots and leaves). Simmer the mixture, strain it, and keep in the refrigerator. My ladies really like it and will use it as a sitz bath, a wash with a peri bottle, or on a compress. Arnica taken internally for the first few days or week postpartum helps heal the bruised tissue. Use lots of oil and hot compresses during second stage.
- April H. Bailey
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News Flashes
A study to measure the impact of socioeconomic deprivation on rates of teenage pregnancy, the extent of local variation in pregnancy rates in Scotland, and how both have changed included 62,338 teenage mothers who gave birth between 1981 and 1985 and 48,514 who gave birth between 1991 and 1995.
The overall maternity rate among Scottish teens increased during the 10 years of the study; however, that increase was consistently less dramatic among the socioeconomically deprived. Teenagers in rural areas had smaller increases in birth rate than teenagers in the cities. The only group among whom the maternity rate decreased was that of teens 18 to 19 years old in affluent areas. Abstinence or use of contraceptives was more common among affluent teenagers.
- British Medical Journal, July 2001, 323: 199-203
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I think baby and I might have thrush, but I've been keeping it in check with a low-sugar, no-fermented-foods diet that includes yogurt. I plan to start using acidophilus and I'm working to reduce my stress level. I'd like to see some resources for treating thrush naturally.
- Anon.
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Question of the Week (repeated)
Q: A mom just delivered after a 43-week pregnancy. The labor was terribly long but OK for her. The baby looked 40 weeks; the gestational age came in at 38 weeks. There is no way we were off on dates. She had a circumvallate placenta. The cotyledons were really mushy where they tore really easily. I've read that a circumvallate placenta has a higher risk for postpartum hemorrhage, which she had--a long, trickle bleed. What causes this type of placenta? Did it cause her baby to stay in so long yet look and test out to be a normal, term baby?
- Heather Zanon
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Question of the Week Responses
More about kidney stones [Question of the Week, Issue 3:50]:
Does anyone have ideas about how to avoid kidney stone formation for a woman who got them in her first pregnancy and would like to avoid them the next time around?
- Cyndi
Our family has had success with dissolving both kidney and gallstones using fresh-squeezed lemon juice or raw apple cider vinegar. The lemon juice may be taken first thing in the morning with warm water and honey. If the acid bothers your stomach, take it as lemonade with a meal. Same with the vinegar, a teaspoonful with honey and water. The lemon is superior for the enzymes that offer healing to the liver, but the vinegar is cheaper and also effective.
- Francie Smith
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Fused labia {Issue 3:50}:
If the baby is six months old, I doubt it is a congenital problem. Things like this are checked closely at birth and the first few pediatric checkups. What has probably happened is labial adhesions. This happens *after* birth as a baby girl gets older. It has to do with the mucus membranes of the labia sticking together and then becoming stuck to the point that it can't be separated without causing pain and/or tearing of the skin. Doctors usually prescribe estrogen cream and the parent is asked to apply a very small amount to the area with a cotton swab or Q-tip once or twice daily. The hormone gives the skin more moisture and elasticity and the labia slowly come apart. The treatment then is stopped and the parents are asked to check the labia daily.
If the baby does have congenitally fused labia, the scan is a good idea. There is a chance she doesn't have any internal female genitalia. If she does have internal genitalia she will have to have her labia surgically opened, but it will be years before it would be necessary.
- Robin E. Williams, doula and former medic
My daughter had a similar condition as a baby. One of my favorite OBs said, "Don't let anyone cut her!" She told me it was "vaginal or labial agglutination" and prescribed a conjugated estrogens cream (Premarin) to apply 3x/day. Within a week the vagina had an opening.
- Kimberley Schmidt, RN CD
My daughter had this condition and the GP pulled it apart at age 6 months. I put vitamin E cream on the edges and it healed beautifully. She grew into a healthy young lady and is now pregnant with her first child.
- Anon.
I wonder about the wisdom of using hormones on infants. The problem can be corrected surgically at puberty if it does not self-correct before then.
- Merrilyn
The overwhelming tendency for children born not obviously male or female is for their parents and medical doctors to subject them to surgery to "correct" their "aberration." Many of these people experience trauma, pain, and other difficulties in puberty and adulthood as a result of both their families' lack of acceptance and the surgery. The Intersex Society of North America is comprised of individuals born with other than XX or XY chromosomes (they estimate 1 in 500 children are born this way) and they advocate for greater societal acceptance of people of all types. Contact them for more information: www.isna.org
- Seanain
I would not allow anyone to do anything unless and until the baby has been evaluated by a specialist in human genetics. There are a multitude of reasons for abnormalities of the external genitalia. Usually they are very minor and unimportant and easily repaired. Sometimes they can be extremely serious with potential physical and psychological long-term consequences. Be aware that the typical general practitioner and pediatrician have not been trained to handle more complex situations such as a baby who is chromosomally a normal boy but who lacks a full complement of male external genitalia. This can present as fused labia. There are also genetic conditions that can cause abnormalities of the genitalia in which these abnormalities are just one aspect of a whole syndrome requiring treatment and monitoring. Again only a trained geneticist can pick these up.
In the past (and regrettably in the present in some places) male babies with abnormal external genitalia have been made over into "females" by surgically removing any testicular tissue and/or penis material they do have and by telling the parents if these genetic boys are raised as girls, they will become girls as adults. This appears to be true for some genetic conditions and some individuals, but definitely not for others. For some people, this kind of forced surgical gender reassignment can lead to extremely difficult psychological adjustments in these "girls" as they reach adulthood and they find themselves with a normal male sexual orientation and male gender identification. Plus, the childhood surgery that removed any testicular or penal tissue they once had also removed any choice about becoming fathers if they find themselves with a male sexual orientation as adults, compounding the problems they face.
- Natalie K Bjorklund
Midwifery Today Issue 44 includes the excellent full-length article, Advocating for Intersexed Babies and Their Families.
Paths to midwifery:
I will graduate in June with a BSN and plan to go the CNM route. I worked in a homebirth practice with a senior midwife. My hard-won CPM certification just went inactive and will remain so for one cycle. Four to six years ago, I was asking all the same questions about paths to midwifery. What a quandary it is.
After two years of science prerequisites and almost two years of nursing school, I am still a fervent advocate of homebirth and noninterventionist by nature. I have surprisingly gained pride in becoming a nurse, an underappreciated profession. I have not sold out to the hospital-based system of Western medicine. I will be a nurse-MIDWIFE, and serve women and families with pride.
- Jennifer McGeorge, CPM
I'm a doula finishing my BSN in May. I began nursing with the sole purpose of becoming a CNM. I had no interest in working hospitals. I was afraid of becoming a medwife and I know quite a few. They've become afraid of birth, they love gadgets and doohickeys. But after doing an externship in L&D, I realized that we are needed in the hospital to offset the medwives, doctors and RNs from hell. We can't run away. Running away is hiding from the real situation, putting blinders on. Women must be empowered in these sometimes horrific situations, cared for, smiled at, cheered for, and treated as if they're the first one to ever give birth. Working in a hospital has done the very opposite of what I thought it would do. I love women and birth and I won't turn my back on them for the easy, more pleasurable route. It is hard and I won't say that I'll stay in the hospital setting forever, but I will do my part for as long as I can.
- Charisse Lawson, CD
In Issue 3:51 many hospital midwives said positive things about their hospitals and the success rate in terms of natural birth and acceptance of alternative methods of healing. Is it within the scope of the email newsletter to name the state, city, and hospital? I am not a midwife or doula. I am just a strong believer in making the right birthing choices for myself. I think to share that information would be very helpful to someone like me who researches birthing options.
- Teresa Gelerter
I loved reading about all the fabulous changes in the hospital birth setting [Issue 3:51]. It is so important that we continue to promote safe, accessible births everywhere. I feel so connected to my CNM/RN sisters!
I am an apprentice with a homebirth practice; it is absolutely the right path for me. Unfortunately my husband just got a dream job in Virginia where it is illegal to practice as a CPM. Does anyone have suggestions about how I can continue my training? Although I admire my CNM sisters, I do not work well in the hospital setting, and it is not a viable option for me.
- Jeanne Catherine
I am a nurse who has worked with birthing families for 30 years. I have worked in education, hospitals, a wonderful free-standing center, with newborns, with mothers in recovery, with teenage moms, with breastfeeding couplets in a baby-friendly hospital birth center, etc. Now my lovely little hospital birth center, which is not perfect but a sweet place to work because of the wonderful nurses and its philosophy toward birth, may be closing.
I have just traveled to New York to assist my niece with the birth of her first child, a beautiful 10-lb. boy born at home, a lovely experience that reminded me how peaceful and beautiful it is to birth at home. I am feeling a pull toward midwifery that I have resisted before for many reasons. But now it seems it may be time to just get trained and licensed so I can use the body of knowledge I have acquired to help women have more satisfying and fulfilling births.
Can you tell me the best way to find out where the programs are that I might investigate to make a plan for the future?
- Mary Jo Terrill , RN, BSN, MSW
PATHS TO BECOMING A MIDWIFE: GETTING AN EDUCATION, a Midwifery Today book. The quintessential guide to preparing yourself to become a midwife or other birth practitioner. Read about realities, politics and philosophies, direct-entry and certified nurse-midwifery, childbirth education, labor support and postpartum caregiving, the future of midwifery. Extensive resources listings.
A client who at 32 weeks was told by her OB that her baby is transverse. She also said that the baby will not turn, so prepare for a c-section. I have done my best to give her exercises to help turn the baby. Does anyone have suggestions other than the usual?
- Karen A., doula
Re cord clamping and twins [Issue 3:50]: Almost all identical twins
have some degree of vein-to-vein, artery-to-artery, or vein-to-artery
transfusion (twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome [TTTS]). Acute TTTS from
the first twin to the second twin usually occurs at birth. Clamping and
cutting the first twin's cord immediately after birth prevents it. Once
the last baby is out, its cord can be left unclamped if desired. It is not
possible for fraternal twins to have TTTS even if their placentas are
fused. Fused placentas of fraternal twins simply implanted next to each
other and the membranes have become joined on the outside. They still have
separate placentas, bags, and circulatory systems.
- Debra, midwife
HOLISTIC MIDWIFERY, VOL. I is available from Midwifery Today.
Re Breast hypoplasia and milk supply: A very informative study in "Current Issues in Clinical Lactation" (2000) by Kathleen E. Huggins et al. is one of many great articles compiled in this book. The illustrations are a useful and practical addition to the info provided.
- Esti, CBE ,LC
Re breastfeeding during pregnancy: I breastfed during two of my pregnancies. Although I had a history of preterm labor, my midwives and I felt that as long as I made sure to eat a bit extra and have a drink every time I nursed my child, it was no big deal. It is important to note that in each case, my children were more than a year old so breastfeeding was not their primary source of food. Is mom concerned about preterm labor? Is this part of her history?
I don't think all nursing during pregnancy situations are the same. How old is the nursing child? How does the mom feel about nursing/weaning? How is her nutrition, activity level, etc? Why is the child still nursing? It is much different to nurse a 6-month-old baby and be pregnant than it is to nurse a 3-year-old for comfort and snuggling. Each situation is unique and it makes sense to think about all the factors involved. The mother must pay attention to her actions and how her body reacts to them.
- Holly Sippel, student CBE
Proven or not, we have to be very careful what we encourage (or fail to
discourage) in pregnant and laboring women. The more emotional side to
this argument are the effects that we who have been there live with every
day. Both my teaching partner and I have children who have learning
disabilities and other problems resulting from horrible drugged births. My
three brothers who had drugged births are all drug/alcohol addicts. The
only one who experienced twilight sleep is the only one who is not
recovering--and he has no intention of stopping now. I am the only one of
my siblings who did not have a drugged birth and the only one with no
addiction problems.
- Amy
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Midwifery Today: Each One Teach One!


text:
Developing a solid resume can be difficult. During my freshman year at AFA Leader's Conference, Jim Emanuel, then of Water Street Solutions, offered feedback on my resume and told me it was "too artsy." As a freshman agricultural journalism student, I was proud to display my graphic design skills within my resume. Initially, I was insulted by his comments.
However, after some reflection, I realized he was right. My resume wouldn't fit the needs of perspective employers. Most employers prefer a clean resume they can skim quickly and access the applicant's skill set. At that point, my skills and abilities were caught up in the graphic elements. These elements might be more suited to a design position application, but not for a sales and marketing position. I needed to learn how to customize my resume for the position I was applying for.
Leslie Svacina, internship coordinator at the Career and Internship Offices at the University of Minnesota, recommends young professionals consider their career goals when developing their resume. You should also tailor your resume for each application by highlighting relevant related experiences, community involvement and organization involvement. "Customizing your resume to what the position is asking for under applicant requirements can help set your resume apart," Svacina said.
Part of this customization includes choosing how much and what type of experience to use. Svacina said to include experience relevant to the job field, which can include: internships, class projects, studying abroad, on campus involvement and professional associations or communities. These experiences can be accompanied by bullet points with action verbs to demonstrate skills and accomplishments that show initiative to go above and beyond, Svacina said.
Depending on the type of position you are applying for, you may want to include work examples with your resume. Svacina said depending on the organization's hiring process, work examples might not be considered until later on in the interview process. Regardless, she said work examples should be relevant and demonstrate skills. Work examples can be included as a PDF email attachment, website link or tie to LinkedIn.
"LinkedIn is a great tool to help showcase experiences and continue to build your professional network," Svacina said. It can help young professionals develop their online presence and personal brand. Svacina advises young professionals to treat LinkedIn similarly to a resume, and use it to showcase skills and experiences.
She also said to join relevant groups within your professional field, university and alumni groups to continue to expand your network and increase the potential to connect with other professionals. These groups can be as valuable as face-to-face interactions if you are "involved in discussions, asking questions, being engaged and demonstrating knowledge and interest."
Is your resume "too artsy"? Or have you learned how to best customize it for your career goals? Please share your thoughts with us using the comment section below.

subset: commoncrawl


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Caught: The Art of Photography in the German Democratic Republic
University of California Press, Oakland, California, 1997
This collection of powerful images by fifty-five East German photographers demanded a reconsideration of all aspects of the design. The need for duotones and fine paper on a small print run precluded a large-format book. Instead, a 7 x 10 trim was reduced to near-square dimensions, offering an unusual shape and surrounding both horizontal and vertical images with similar blocks of white space. Staggered placement allows the varied images to be viewed independently. Typography adheres to a clean, ordered grid with occasional modern twists, acknowledging the mixed influences of the era from which the photos originate.
Collections: 50 Books | 50 Covers of 1997
Discipline: Book design
Format: Book
- Design firm
- University of California Press
- Graphic designer
- Nola Burger
- Editor
- Karl Gernot Kuehn
- Typefaces
- Adobe Granjon, Univers Condensed (Light and Bold)
- Printer
- Tien Wah Press
- Paper
- 135 gsm Matte
- Publisher/client
- University of California Press


text:
When her mom came to pick her up for drug court that morning, Stacy Nicholson was still high.
She staggered to the door, fumbled with the bungee cord that kept it closed, blinked back the sunlight.
"You ready?" asked her mom.
Stacy and two of her cousins had been holed up for months in this rundown house, shooting crushed-up pain pills. Used syringes littered an end table. Stacy's mom had kept telling her: Someone in this house is going to die.
Stacy, then 28, knew she was right. Days before, she had told her mom she was tired of stealing and doctor shopping to get pills. She was in trouble for skipping her last court date, so today, she planned to turn herself in.
"Okay," Stacy said. "Let's go."
She twisted her long, honey-colored hair into a knot. Zipped her sweatshirt. Underneath, she was wearing two bras, a tank top, two white T-shirts and three pairs of panties.
She wanted to be sure she would have a change of underwear in jail.
COURTROOM 10 WAS PACKED when Stacy and her mom, Sherry Alkire, slid into the back row. It was Feb. 1, a Tuesday.
More than 100 women, most 20 to 40 years old, filled the wooden benches. Some were visibly pregnant. Others trailed toddlers. Many of the women struggled to hold up their heads.
Just before 9 a.m., a thin, chestnut-haired woman in a black robe strode through the back door. "All rise!" called the bailiff. "The honorable Judge Dee Anna Farnell presiding."
The judge raised her arms and smiled. "Welcome to Ladies' Day," she said. America's first all-female drug court was in session.
Soon the judge called Stacy's name. Stacy slouched down the aisle, clasped her hands behind her back and hung her head.
Eighteen months earlier, she had been arrested for using a fake prescription to buy oxycodone, the painkiller she had been snorting or shooting for four years. The charge carried a possible five-year prison sentence.
The judge had offered a deal: Plead guilty and go on probation. If you go through rehab, if you go to 12-step meetings and get a job and stay sober, you can stay out of jail — and have your felony record wiped clean.
For a while, Stacy had tried. But then she failed a drug test, stopped going to counseling, started skipping court. Now she faced a sentence of 10 years instead of five.
The judge could send her to a long-term treatment facility or halfway house. Or she could put her in prison for violating her probation.
Farnell asked Stacy about her children. Stacy said her 12-year-old daughter had been staying with her paternal grandparents for almost a year. Her mom was taking care of her 2-year-old son.
"What are you going to test positive for today?" asked the judge.
Stacy shuffled her Air Jordan slides. "Well, I've been smoking and drinking. So marijuana and alcohol." She paused. "And benzos. And maybe …"
The judge shook her head. "Okay," she said. "What do you want to do? Do you want to opt out? Or keep trying?"
Stacy wanted what a lot of addicts want: to get clean, but also to get high. She wanted to have her kids back, but also to have no responsibility. She wanted to feel better, and to feel nothing.
She wiped her nose on her shoulder, looked up and said, "I want to keep trying."
PRESCRIPTION DRUG abuse kills 40 Americans every day. That's more than a threefold increase in the last decade, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Oxycodone is the deadliest drug of all. An opiate found in such painkillers as OxyContin and Percocet, it's prescribed after surgeries and car wrecks, and to people in chronic pain.
Others take it just for the high. The drug works by blocking the spinal cord's pain receptors. It doesn't make the pain go away, but prevents people from feeling it, creating a sense of euphoria. Soon, they need to take more to get the same pleasurable escape.
Oxy makes junkies out of people who would never buy from a street dealer. It is everyman's high, heroin in a pill.
Of all the oxycodone prescribed in America in the first half of last year, 98 percent was dispensed in Florida. According to the state medical examiner's office, an average of seven Floridians die from prescription drug overdoses every day — more than from car accidents.
In recent years, Pinellas has lost more people to prescription drugs than any other county in the state — 249 just last year. That's an increase of 60 over the year before.
"Everyone knows someone who has gone through this addiction and you just feel so helpless. It's a horrible, vicious disease," said Pinellas County sheriff's spokeswoman Marianne Pasha.
"These aren't Dumpster-diving drug addicts," she said. "These people are getting their pills from doctors. It's the person in line beside you at Publix, the woman next to you in the pew at church."
A few years ago, drug court Judge Farnell started seeing more and more women charged with prescription drug abuse. By 2009, almost half of her drug court defendants were women.
That year, Pinellas County received a $900,000, three-year federal grant to fund substance abuse treatment for women in drug court.
That's how Tuesdays became "Ladies' Day."
Instead of punishing the women, the judge offers them a chance to start over. They come to court once a month. She creates incentives for them: Do yoga, run a 5K, quit smoking, and we'll waive your $52 monthly probation fee. She makes sure they know how to get a bus pass. If she gets a bad vibe about a boyfriend, she'll order a woman to steer clear of him.
She tells defendants, "You can do this. It's going to be hard. But it will be worth it."
When a woman slips, the judge scolds her and sends her back to jail to detox. Then she offers another chance.
About 500 defendants came to court on Ladies' Days this year. St. Petersburg Times journalists attended week after week. They interviewed dozens of women. They followed addicts as they bounced between jail and treatment, stayed in abandoned houses, looked for jobs and stumbled toward recovery or relapse.
One woman let the journalists follow her all year.
Stacy Nicholson grew up in St. Petersburg. A streetwise, Southern-fried tomboy, she loves the Florida Gators, Chevy pickups, Lil Wayne and Toby Keith. She believes in dream catchers and her Gemini horoscope, craves Cocoa Puffs and smokes Newports. She never wears makeup, always spritzes on Victoria's Secret body spray. When it comes to men, she likes the smell of trouble.
Her history of drug use and dysfunction stretches back to puberty. She tried marijuana at 13 and alcohol at 14, had her first baby at 16 and her second, with a different man, at 27.
But the pursuit of the oxy buzz erased any chance of a productive life.
For addicts, using quickly becomes a necessity, not a choice. Getting the next pill becomes more important than work, friends, family, even food. The addict's values shift to justify whatever it takes to get more oxys. Hard workers can no longer hold jobs. Smart students drop out. Good moms neglect their kids, drain their bank accounts, steal from family members.
If addicts stop using, they suffer horrible symptoms: vomiting, headaches, intense bone pain. That's why many are afraid to even try to get sober. They need to stay high so they don't crash.
After Stacy got hooked, she lost her personality, spark, motivation. Every new boyfriend was a red flag, but she never saw it. She dragged her kids from bad apartments to cheap motel rooms, and finally gave them up.
In Judge Farnell's court in February, Stacy entered what everyone agreed was a fight for her life. She could get better, or she could become one of Florida's seven a day.
She had a lot going for her: a mother who supported her even after all the times Stacy had broken her heart. Two children who desperately needed her love and attention. A treatment program backed by almost $1 million in taxpayer money. Drug counselors who wanted her to succeed. Other recovering addicts eager to share their experiences at 12-step meetings. An empathetic judge who was willing to give Stacy chance after chance, if only she would try.
Working against her: a little blue pill and Stacy's need to numb herself with it.
WHEN STACY SAID she wanted to keep trying, the judge sent her straight to jail to get the drugs out of her system.
Guards took Stacy's clothes — all those bras, all that underwear — and strip-searched her. She pulled on gray jail scrubs and followed a guard to the medical wing on the fourth floor.
All 50 beds in the infirmary were full, so a guard gave her a blowup "boat" and a blanket, which she tossed on the floor.
Stacy had detoxed before, and she dreaded going through the ordeal again. It was one of the reasons she had kept using — she was afraid of how sick she would get when she stopped.
"If you don't give them anything to help, a lot of people will have really bad seizures," said Dr. Bernard Yukna, the jail's medical director. He prescribed diazepam for alcohol withdrawal, Tegretol to stop seizures, Valium "to keep them a wee bit high while they're here."
Stacy spent 10 days in the medical wing, aching, shivering and nauseous. Her back hurt from lying on the floor. Nurses kept checking on her, bringing her Gatorade.
When the sickness subsided, the doctor sent Stacy into the general population. She lay on her bunk hour after hour, listening to country radio and wishing she could tell her son she was sorry.
ON FEB. 25, SHE WAS brought back into drug court. Her mom stood beside her.
Stacy was going to get another chance at rehab. The director of a halfway house had agreed to take her into his six-month program.
But first, Stacy's mom had a request for the judge. It was about Stacy's cousin Frankie.
Stacy had been living with him, using with him every night, before she had gone to jail.
Two days ago, Frankie's brother had found him snoring on the floor. Puncture marks dotted his thick forearms. On the table nearby stood vials of painkillers: Dilaudids and Roxicodones.
Frankie's brother tried to wake him. No response. He threw water on him. Nothing. When the snoring stopped, Frankie's brother dialed 911.
Now Frankie was on life support. Stacy's mom, Sherry, had visited him in the hospital.
"He looks terrible," she said in court. "His liver is shot. He had a heart attack at 32. He's bleeding bags and bags of blood."
Frankie Herrera had been like Stacy's big brother. He taught her to swim and ride a bike and play Nintendo. Sherry asked the judge to let Stacy go to the hospital so she could watch him die.
"Please, I feel my daughter needs to witness this," Sherry said.
Stacy, still in jail scrubs, began to sob.
Dee Anna Farnell had that day off. Her husband, Crockett Farnell, a retired judge, was presiding over Courtroom 10. He agreed to let Stacy out of jail. She could check into the halfway house later.
He told the women in drug court, "Every one of you should see this."
Stacy and her mom sped to Northside Hospital. When they arrived, Stacy heard her aunt wailing in Frankie's room. Stacy gagged at the smells of blood and bowels and death.
Above Frankie, a breathing machine puffed, lights flashed, a monitor beeped. Tubes trailed out of his nose, from beneath his arms, between his legs. His eyes were open, rolled back in his head. Stacy reached out to stroke his forehead. His skin was hot and slick with sweat.
"I love you!" Frankie's mom kept moaning. "I'll see you on the other side."
Stacy stood at the head of the bed, crying over her cousin, until the beeping of the monitor melted into one long, low tone.
Afterward, in the hospital hallway, Stacy's mom held her close. "Don't ever do this to me," Sherry cried. "You hear me? This time you have to get better."
They collapsed to the floor, rocking in each other's arms.
RESEARCHERS SAY about 50 percent of addiction is genetic. So if you come from a family of alcoholics and addicts, you're more likely to become one yourself.
But why do people take drugs to begin with?
"Trauma, abuse, depression, anxiety, emotional discomfort. People use drugs to dampen their negative feelings," said Dr. Douglas Marlowe, senior scientist at the Treatment Research Institute in Pennsylvania.
Others use drugs for the opposite reason — to amplify the reality they're in. "People who are reckless and outgoing, gregarious and sensation-seeking will try drugs, at first, because they're fun," said Marlowe, who also teaches psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
Stacy's parents say she doesn't have addicts in her family. Stacy herself leans toward emotional trauma as the reason for her drug abuse. Her parents split up when she was little and she rarely saw her father.
"The saddest image I have of her is when she was little, 5 or 6," Sherry said. "She'd be sitting at the window, holding her Barbie suitcase, waiting for him." Stacy's dad, Mark Nicholson, said that may have happened "once or twice. Things come up. But I didn't do that repeatedly."
Stacy was 10 when her mom married another man. She said she had a difficult relationship with her stepfather.
Stacy's mom says her daughter has a reckless streak. "She's always been balls to the wall," Sherry said. "Whatever she did, she did it big."
At 13, Stacy was with a group of boys who threw a Molotov cocktail at their school. She got kicked out of Riviera Middle and sent to counseling. She started sneaking out of her bedroom window at night. Then came the dope smoking and drinking.
Stacy dropped out of the PACE school for girls at 16 to be with the baby daughter she named Jade.
Stacy moved in with Jade's dad, who was 18. They worked as telemarketers, rented an apartment, paid their bills, took care of their daughter. Most nights they partied: Bud Light and pot.
They split up when Jade was 1. Stacy later took up with a man who started using pills to dull the pain from a car accident. Vicodin, Percocet, oxycodone.
The ones that worked best, he told Stacy, were the blue ones: 30 milligrams of Roxicodone. It's a high dose of oxycodone; the "R" stands for rapid release.
Stacy's boyfriend gave her one, and she felt herself melt away. "The high was so much stronger, it was amazing," she remembered.
Someone told Stacy the buzz was better if you crushed and snorted the pills. Snorting turned into shooting. "I had times when I was real bad, shooting 30, 40 pills a day," Stacy said. Needle tracks scarred the insides of her arms; her veins turned into rivers of dark bruises.
For a while, she waited tables at a Greek restaurant. When she couldn't work anymore, she started stealing to buy pills. She took hundreds of dollars from her mom's purse, broke into Sherry's backyard shed and pawned a chain saw.
She lost half her weight, dropping from 180 to 90 pounds. Her collarbones protruded, her skin went ashen.
All she and her friends talked about was their next high. They would shoot Roxys, pass out, wake up, start again.
In one year, Stacy lost 10 friends who overdosed. One cut up Fentanyl patches for cancer patients, chewed on them and died. Another was a 19-year-old who did oxys and died with her baby sleeping on her chest.
"But that didn't scare me," Stacy said. She kept doing whatever pills she could find, anything to blur the sharp edges.
By the time she was 26, she had figured out she didn't have to steal. She bought somebody else's MRI and carried it with her to pain management clinics. She told the doctors her pain was an 8 on a scale of 10. When she got her prescription — she always got one — she would pay a dollar or two for pills at the pharmacy and sell them for $15 on the street.
That left her with enough Roxys to keep her high — and enough money to take her daughter to Disney World.
When Stacy got pregnant again, she kept using. Three hours after her C-section, she snorted Roxys in the hospital.
After Richie was born, Stacy and her boyfriend fell behind on rent and got evicted. Jade was 10 and starting to talk back, so Stacy sent her to live with her dad's parents. She and her boyfriend turned to battered motels, dragging the baby with them.
"She kept calling, so messed up she couldn't talk, and I could hear the baby screaming in the background," Stacy's mom said. "I kept begging her to give him to me. I kept trying to find them."
On Aug. 26, 2009, Pinellas deputies arrested Stacy and 20 other people in a drug sweep dubbed Operation Oxy-Con. She had tried to buy oxys with a fake prescription at Seminole Pharmacy. She was charged with obtaining oxycodone by fraud and trafficking. That was when she landed in drug court.
Now, after failing at her first try there, Stacy was getting another chance, this time at a halfway house with an optimistic name: Simply Hope.
She checked in the night her cousin died.
SIMPLY HOPE PROVIDES "transitional housing" for recovering addicts in 14 homes in Pinellas Park. Its clients are too deep into their addictions for outpatient treatment, but not so far gone that they need full-time residential facilities. The houses are grouped by gender, each with about five residents. Most come from drug court.
The program is run by Ray Harris, a Vietnam vet who sounds a little like Robert De Niro. He shot heroin for 31 years. He has been clean for eight.
Of his 181 clients this year, 86 graduated and 56 are still clean.
"You have to want this," Ray, 56, told Stacy the day she moved in. "You can't just fake it to make it here."
Rules at Simply Hope are strict: Get up by 8 a.m., make your bed, clean the house. Go to counseling and to Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Get a job. Get home by 10 p.m. Pay $125 a week in rent and utilities. Pee in a cup whenever Ray asks. Test dirty and you go back to jail.
Ray warned Stacy: "I'll be watching you."
In the back bedroom of the halfway house, Stacy spread a plaid blanket across the single bed. On the dresser she placed a photo of herself and her daughter. Stacy hadn't seen her in two months. Jade was doing gymnastics, getting good grades. Stacy felt she had done the right thing by leaving Jade with her grandparents, but that didn't erase her shame at other things she had done — snorting pills in front of her daughter, locking her in her room, neglecting her. Stacy knew Jade was still angry. She didn't plan to contact her.
Next, she pulled out her little boy's frog pillow. It still smelled like him. Richie lived with Stacy's mom now and was learning to color. Stacy knew it would be a while before she would see him again.
For the first few weeks at Simply Hope, Stacy kept having nightmares. In them, she was always shooting Roxys. She could feel the needle sliding into her arm.
"After the dreams I feel like I've used," Stacy said. "But I don't feel good. I feel guilty."
By the end of March, Stacy was bonding with her roommates, making coffee every morning, watching TV with them most nights. Her mom brought over a bag of DVDs: Road Trip, Castaway, Meet the Parents. "I've seen all these movies before," Stacy said. "But I was high all the time, so I really don't remember. It's like they're all new to me now."
One Wednesday night, Stacy curled up in a blue armchair with the remote in her lap and her roommates sprawled on the couch. Stacy had gained 8 pounds. "Sober girls love food," said her roommate. They raided the fridge and pooled what was left: cottage cheese, canned pineapples, frozen potato pancakes. "Can I steal some of your Oreos?" Stacy's roommate asked her.
Stacy responded, "Can I have your applesauce?"
Four days a week she went to counseling, riding the bus an hour each way. She attended NA meetings. On Sundays, her mom brought her over to play with Richie.
But a month after getting out of jail, Stacy still couldn't sit still. "Jimmy legs," she called it. Her face had broken out. "That's the drugs coming out of my skin," she said.
When she got the urge to use, she thought about getting her driver's license back, getting her kids back.
She just needed a job. If she didn't get one by April 1, Ray was going to send her back to jail.
WHILE STACY WAS IN REHAB, her mom struggled with Richie. Sherry was 49. "Too old to be raising a 2-year-old," she said.
Especially Richie, who had been exposed to opiates in the womb, dragged in and out of motels, dumped in a playpen.
Richie's dad was serving five years for selling pills. Stacy would be in the halfway house for six months. The boy was confused and frightened and restless. To get him to sleep, Sherry had to lie beside him in his crib.
"I love my grandson, but there are mornings I wake up and just don't want to deal with all this," she said.
Stacy's mom works for a commercial copier company. She takes in stray pit bulls and neglected nieces, offers rides and advice at all hours, a sofa to crash on. She says she was too lenient with Stacy, that she should have been less of a friend and more of a mom.
"Stop helping her," her boyfriend, Tim, kept saying. "You have to let her fall."
Sherry wanted to believe Stacy would get better, get her own apartment and take Richie back. But she was afraid to let herself hope. For the first time in her life, she started taking antidepressants.
"Richie's like an energy drink," Sherry said, catching him as he dived off the couch. "He never slows down."
She started calling her grandson Full Throttle.
He started calling her Mama.
THE DAY BEFORE Ray's deadline, Stacy walked into Roma Pizza Pub and asked if they needed help. She was honest with the owners about being in rehab. Turns out the owner's son had pill problems, too.
"God sent you to us," the owner said.
Stacy hadn't had a job in three years.
To get from the halfway house to the pizza place, she had to take two buses. Stacy would get up at 7:30, walk a mile to catch the bus and arrive just in time for her 10 a.m. shift. She earned $8 an hour.
The busier she was, the less she thought about using. By bedtime, she was too tired for nightmares.
On a sunny Friday in April, Stacy walked into work. "Morning!" she called. She tied on a long black apron, pulled a tan visor over her ponytail. Then fired up the oven and started rolling out dough.
"Sit anywhere you like," she told two men who walked in. "I'll get a couple of menus and be right there."
When she got her first paycheck, she rode the bus to the mall and bought Victoria's Secret body spray. She gave the rest of the money to Ray, for rent.
That weekend, he made her write 1,000 words on staying clean. "I always failed at everything. I hurt way too many people," Stacy wrote. "The joy of being clean is more than I imagined."
By mid April she had been sober for 75 days.
Part 2
Wearing a mask
THE CALL CAME about 5:30 p.m. Sherry was working at the copier shop.
"Mom?" Stacy said. She sounded defeated.
"I did something stupid."
This is the story she would tell later:
Her group counseling session that morning had been canceled, so she had gone to see a guy she knew from Narcotics Anonymous. At his friend's house, they watched a movie called The Losers, had sex.
When Stacy went to the bathroom, she saw a bottle of Klonopin tablets. She fought herself, washed her hands, turned away. Went back. And slipped the pill bottle into her pocket.
Klonopin is prescribed to prevent seizures and relieve panic attacks. It slows a person's thoughts, makes everything fuzzy. Like other benzodiazepines such as Xanax and Valium, it can be habit forming.
On the way to work, Stacy took two.
She felt the wave of nothingness creep over her. At the pizza place, she took two more.
"What did I just do?" Stacy said she asked herself. Her first thought was, "Can I puke them up?"
She told her boss she had to leave. Then she called her mother.
"Come get the rest of what's in this bottle," she begged. "If I have them, I'm going to keep eating them."
She swallowed two more before she met her mom. That made six.
They drove back to Sherry's house, where Sherry stood over the toilet and flushed the rest of the pills. While Richie toddled around breaking crayons, Stacy flopped on the sofa.
"I'm glad you called me. You've never done that before," Sherry said.
"I ate a couple of pills," Stacy snapped. "That's all I did."
"Your attitude's back," said her mom.
"My attitude?"
"You're grumpy," Sherry said. "Like the world is crumbling in on you."
"I'm upset," Stacy said. "I'm going through things you wouldn't understand. I'm uncomfortable."
Just like that, she changed the subject from her own responsibility to her complaints in life. She was uncomfortable: She clocked 50 hours a week at work. Her roommates fussed at her for leaving toothpaste in the sink. Her daughter wouldn't talk to her. Her son wouldn't come to her.
"I'm not using," Stacy told her mom. "I made a mistake and I took a couple of pills. Yes, to me that is a relapse." But she wasn't about to confess, go back to jail and start over. "Am I going to throw away what I've done? No. It's not worth it."
Stacy's mom reached to stroke her tangled hair. "Up until yesterday, I was very proud of you," Sherry said. "I had seen a lot of changes in you. I'd seen you handling things better, not calling me for money. Right now, I'm just disappointed and hurt. And I pray that you don't test dirty."
Richie threw his sneaker. Stacy shouted, "No!" The toddler crumbled on the floor, kicking and whining. "Okay," Stacy said, standing up. "I think Mommy wants to go to a meeting now."
She knew she was supposed to be honest at 12-step meetings, that she should admit she had slipped and ask for help starting over. But she thought people at NA would judge her for being weak. And she worried about someone telling Ray.
Stacy stepped into her flip-flops, pulled back her hair and asked her mom to drive her to the evening meeting. "I just have to go there with a mask."
FIVE DAYS AFTER Stacy took the pills, her probation officer tested her for drugs. She passed.
She didn't have the same luck with Ray.
He didn't know about the Klonopin, but he had seen signs that Stacy was slipping.
Instead of riding the bus to counseling, she was calling her mom to come get her. Stacy said she was working long hours, but she wasn't paying off her back rent. And she seemed defensive, not the sunshiny Stacy who had started to emerge.
On April 24, Easter Sunday, Ray acted on his suspicions. Stacy had told him she had to work all day. At 5:30 p.m., he drove to the pizza place. No Stacy. He went back two hours later. Nope. The last time he checked, at 9 p.m., the place was closed. He was waiting at Stacy's halfway house when she walked in at 10 p.m.
"What time did you get off work?"
About 9, she told him.
"You're lying," he said. "Pack your things and get out."
Stacy backpedaled. Her boss had let her off early, she told Ray, stammering. She had gone to her mom's house to spend Easter with her son. All they had done was fry pork chops and play with Richie.
"All you did was lie to me," Ray said. Stacy knew the rules, he said. If she wasn't working, she was supposed to be at the halfway house. She had lied, and lying led to relapses.
"Now call your mom to come get you. And you need to be in court at 8:30 tomorrow."
'YOU HAD AN OPPORTUNITY and you blew it," Judge Farnell told Stacy the next morning. "You've been lying and you've got to take responsibility for it."
The judge didn't know about the pills, and Stacy didn't tell her. Instead, Stacy kept the discussion narrow, insisting she hadn't done anything wrong the night Ray checked on her.
"It was about my child," Stacy said, wiping her eyes. "It's not like I was trying to deviate to do something wrong."
"It was about you," the judge countered. "That's the addict's way of thinking."
Stacy's mom stood up.
"Up until this point, she's been doing very well," Sherry said.
It was the kind of thing only a mother could believe. Sherry had just seen Stacy relapse, insist it wasn't a big deal, and go to a 12-step meeting and pretend it didn't happen.
Addicts' families can rationalize as well as addicts themselves. Parents are often so traumatized, so desperate for any sign of hope, experts say, that they'll focus on tiny successes and ignore catastrophic failures.
In Sherry's mind, Stacy was doing well because, this time, she had called her mother when she had used.
"I've seen a big change in Stacy," Sherry told the judge. "But it's not all going to happen overnight. She's going to make some mistakes along the way."
Stacy sniffled.
"I'm so sorry," the judge said. "I truly am. But I'm going to have to send you in. And I want you to take some time to think about what you really want.
"You can get clean, take responsibility, do the right thing. Or you can continue to waffle through life. It's your pick. Part of success is what you do with failure."
Stacy spent that night in jail. And the next. She wouldn't shower. Wouldn't eat. Then the judge brought her back into court and Stacy said she was sorry for lying. Ray agreed to take her back and give her one more shot at Simply Hope.
STACY'S MOM DROVE HER to Ray's office to pick up the key to the halfway house.
"There are some things we need to straighten out with you," Ray told Stacy. She nodded slowly. Whatever he wanted her to do, it had to be better than staying in jail.
"I need to see your weekly payroll stub, your time sheet where you clock in and out …"
He leaned back in his leather chair, laced his fingers across his belly and laid out the rest of his expectations:
Submit your weekly work schedule. Be home by 8:30 every night, including weekends. Attend a group that addresses relationship issues. Submit a timeline of everything you do over the next two weeks. Write a 5,000-word essay on how justifying and rationalizing are going to lead you to your grave.
"And I got an offer for you," Ray told Stacy. "What kind of education do you have?"
"Not a good one. I don't even have my GED."
"So what do you want to do?" Ray asked.
Stacy studied her hands, thought for a while. "I want to be an ultrasound technician, but that takes a lot of school."
"I tell you what," Ray said. If she did well in the program and got her high school diploma, Simply Hope would pay for her nurse's training and her licensing test. "You do what you're supposed to and I'll take care of you."
Stacy didn't seem surprised or grateful. She looked scared. "Okay," she said slowly.
Then her focus shifted. She saw a Florida Gators calendar on Ray's desk and picked it up.
"You like it? Take it," said Ray.
Stacy started flipping through the pages, as excited as Ray had ever seen her. "Really?" Stacy asked. "It's even got trivia!"
As she walked out, she told Ray, "I'm 90 days clean Sunday." At least she would have been if she hadn't taken those pills.
Stacy knew honesty was the first rule of sobriety. Counseling had taught her that addicts perpetuate their behavior by lying first to themselves — I didn't know what I was taking; I took just one pill. She understood that each lie is a crack in the dam of recovery.
At the next NA meeting, 18 days after she relapsed, Stacy stood while everyone clapped for her. She accepted the red key chain indicating three months of sobriety and faked a smile.
BACK AT SIMPLY HOPE, Stacy started pushing herself through the program.
Out of bed by 8. Shower. Brush teeth. Rinse sink. Coffee and Cocoa Puffs. Wash dishes. Walk to the bus, transfer, show up at work or a meeting or counseling. Home by 8 p.m. Lights out by 11.
Her Narcotics Anonymous sponsor wanted her to start tackling the 12 steps. The sponsor talked about what each one meant, how hard Stacy would have to work. She told Stacy to write the first step on notebook paper:
"We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable."
Stacy started talking to God. She started writing down her prayers. "Help me see the plan for my life and guide me on the right path."
When Stacy was stressed or angry or wanted to get high, she fingered a necklace her mom had given her, a silver ring inscribed with the word FAITH. It helped her focus. Made her feel strong.
Stacy's aunt gave her a blown-glass globe to thread onto the chain. Its outside swirled with amber, cobalt and forest green. Inside were some of Frankie's ashes. Now Stacy had a new touchstone. She felt her cousin was watching over her.
Every week, Stacy went to a court-ordered individual counseling session, plus three group therapy meetings at PAR.
She learned about the "feeling wheel," where red was angry, yellow was joyful and sad was purple. Mostly, she was yellow. But she still had purple days.
"Feeling sucks," Stacy said. "But I'm starting to get used to it."
At first, all she felt was guilt, self-loathing, regret. Then good feelings started getting through, like when her mom said she was proud of her or when Richie kissed her nose. Pills had been drowning out the bad feelings — but also muting the good ones.
To really feel, Stacy's counselor insisted, she had to give up all drugs, even marijuana and alcohol. Any substance can send addicts into a tailspin of remorse and shame. Once they've taken that first drink, it becomes easier to say to hell with it and keep going. Drug court, Simply Hope and probation all required Stacy to sign papers promising total abstinence.
Recovery is a big struggle, said Stacy's counselor, Ronald Ellis. "You start thinking about your identity, your purpose. What you haven't done. What you could have been doing."
Men are your weakness, Stacy's counselor told her. In eight months she had been with four guys, all of them using or in recovery. One of Stacy's biggest fears was being with someone who looked down on her. So she gravitated toward men as broken as she was — dropouts, partiers, guys who defined relationships as sex and texting. Stacy didn't think she deserved anyone better.
"Once you become intimate with someone, it's all about the physical relationship," Ellis said. "You need to build that emotional intimacy first. Concentrate on friendship."
On a steamy Thursday in May, at the end of an individual session, the counselor handed Stacy a document in a plastic purple frame. He told her she had completed PAR's program. "Congratulations."
Stacy stared at him. She wasn't ready to be done. She had been sentenced to 48 sessions but had finished only 30.
"It's an administrative discharge," Ellis explained. The grant that paid for the counseling had run out.
He told her to be careful. Only half the people who complete treatment stay clean.
"Now you have your life back," he said. "The rest is up to you."
BY LATE JUNE, Stacy had been in the halfway house almost four months. She had two months to go until she graduated. She insisted she had been off drugs since her mother took her to court that morning in February.
But even now, the cravings wouldn't go away. "Stinking thinking" the judge called it.
Stacy woke up thinking about getting high. She didn't want to get high, so she thought about getting high to forget how much she wanted to. Sometimes it just didn't seem worth it, all this trying and still getting nowhere.
One Monday, Stacy had the day off. Her mom was at the copier shop and her son was at day care and her roommates were working, so she rode the bus to St. Petersburg to see an old friend.
They hung out for a while, watched TV. Afterward, Stacy's head was throbbing. When she shifted on the sofa, she saw a plastic pill bottle.
This is the story she would tell later:
She didn't read the label on the pill bottle.
"I thought it was something else," she said. "I don't know what, like Suboxone for cravings, or Tylenol, something non-narcotic." She got up, poured a glass of water and swallowed two pills. In half an hour, she felt the cottony numbness, felt her eyelids droop, her shoulders relax. She thought about saying "screw it," taking the rest of the pills and never going back to the halfway house. But then she realized she didn't want the high. "I knew if I let myself enjoy it that would be a mistake."
"Come get me," she texted her mom at work. She gave her the address on Fourth Street.
Sherry texted back, "Start flushing." In other words, start drinking liquids that will mask the drugs in your system.
Sherry knew she was enabling Stacy. But she wanted to believe someday her daughter would finish the program and take care of Richie. She wanted that for Stacy, and for herself. Stacy had gotten away with the first relapse. Maybe she could also hide this one.
That night, Sherry made dinner for Stacy and Richie. She tried not to scold, but she was starting to break.
"I thought you were going to be done with all this by August," she said. "I was counting on August."
She handed Stacy a plate of spaghetti and sat beside her. Stacy seemed almost despondent this time, not defiant like before. Her mom hugged her and said, "At least you're not dead."
Maybe Ray won't even find out, Stacy said.
Her mom dropped her off at the halfway house before curfew and Stacy holed up in her room.
The next day, Stacy went to work and to a meeting. She posted a new Facebook status: "Loving my life!"
Nine hours after that, Ray's assistant banged on Stacy's bedroom door. "You should have been out of bed an hour ago," the woman said. She held out a cup. Ray wanted a urine sample.
RAY HAD SUSPECTED Stacy for weeks. She swore she was clean, but he had noticed the pinpoint pupils, the glassy eyes, the little frown people get when they're on opiates. People on pain pills have a hollow stare, he said. Like zombies.
"I guess seeing her cousin die wasn't enough," Ray had told his assistant. "That girl is up to something."
Stacy told Ray's assistant she couldn't pee. She drank water, chugged iced tea. Even after a drive to Ray's office, Stacy insisted she couldn't give a sample. So they waited.
Finally, Stacy tested positive for methadone. "I thought I was taking aspirin," she told Ray. He told her to pack her things, call her mom and tell it to the judge. He drove her to court.
She didn't seem aware of how unlikely her story sounded. She expected everyone to believe she had swallowed some mystery medicine without knowing or really caring what it was.
The judge said she was worried. "You've got the dragon all over you," she said. She sent Stacy back to jail for violating probation.
Stacy's mom wept as she watched her daughter slink out of the courtroom. Stacy didn't look back.
Part 3
I'm still here
GUARDS ASSIGNED STACY to a bottom bunk in a pod with four other women. If she leaned off the end of her mattress, she could almost see the TV. But she didn't feel like watching TV. When cartoons came on, she cried. She drew a smiling SpongeBob for Richie and signed it, "Mommy loves you."
She kept torturing herself, reliving her relapse, throwing out what-ifs. What if she hadn't seen that bottle, what if she had been stronger, what if she had thought of the consequences?
Every night before lights out, Stacy stood in line at the jail phone and called her mom. Sherry got to know the routine: Stacy would complain that it was loud, she was bored. Then she would shift to despair: How long was she going to be stuck here? She would sob until the phone began to beep time's up.
She kept asking her mom whether she had heard from Jade. Her daughter was still living with her grandparents in Port Charlotte. Stacy hadn't talked to her in months.
And how was Richie? "Richie is having a hard time," Sherry told her. He was pushing other kids in day care, taking their toys. "He misses you."
After Stacy had been in jail for a month, Sherry drove Richie to see her. She put him in his stroller and pushed him through a long room walled with TV monitors. Inmates at the Pinellas County Jail aren't allowed to have in-person visits, so talking to Stacy on a TV screen would have to do.
Sherry pulled up a plastic chair and sat Richie in her lap. As soon as she picked up the black phone, Stacy's blurry image appeared on the screen. Stacy was wearing gray scrubs. Her long hair was wavy because she had been wearing braids. Stacy waved at her son. He turned and hid his face in Sherry's shoulder. Why was Mommy on TV? Why couldn't she come home?
Sherry said Mommy was at work. She wanted to come home, but she couldn't. Richie wailed so loudly that Sherry had to hurry him out of there.
As the weeks passed, Stacy's hair started falling out. Her face became pocked with sores. In her nightmares, a crowd was chasing her, trying to tackle her.
Stacy wasn't sure she wanted to go back into drug treatment. She told her mom she didn't want to get high either. "Not anymore," she said. She felt she had learned a lot about addiction and coping. For the first time in years, she had been earning money, playing with her son. Then she had picked up that pill bottle.
What were you thinking? her mom asked. "I wasn't," Stacy answered.
"And now I'm going to lose my job," Stacy said, sobbing. "I lost my place at Simply Hope and my chance to get my kids back. I realized, this time, that I don't even have any friends. They're all just users who want something." Only her mother ever came to see her.
Everyone in jail was telling Stacy to forget about drug court. Just do your time and get it over with.
But Stacy was facing 10 years. Her mom begged her to keep working, if the judge would let her. "Your kids need you," Sherry told her. "You need to try again."
Stacy said she still believed in drug court. "If you want it, the program will work," she said. "I did want it." A tear slid down her nose. "I guess I just didn't want it enough."
She spent all summer in jail. In 79 days, the guards let her outdoors into a fenced courtyard for 45 minutes.
A COFFIN STOOD in the back of Courtroom 10. Stacy's public defender had built it in his garage after Judge Farnell asked for a meaningful place for defendants to deposit their cigarettes. It doubled as a symbol of how drug users courted death.
"All rise!" called the bailiff.
It was the second Tuesday in September, and Stacy was finally returning to Ladies' Day.
Stacy's mom sat in the front row, clutching a white three-ring binder. Inside were the sketch of SpongeBob for Richie, and a letter Stacy had written telling her mom she was sorry. She had never said she was sorry before. Sherry wanted to show the judge her daughter was ready this time.
Farnell thumbed through Stacy's file. Stacy had been in drug court almost two years. "So you did well at Simply Hope, except for the methadone," said the judge. "And you're well aware that addiction is a horrible disease that not only plays with your body but with your mind. All of a sudden, it pops up and you do something so outrageously dumb …"
Stacy bit her lip. With the heels of her hands, she wiped both eyes.
"We need you to operate out of hope, not fear," said the judge. "Know that you will get better. But if you want to blow out of here, I'll let you go. You may be walking right into state prison, but …"
Then the judge turned around and addressed Ray Harris. "Ms. Nicholson was doing well at Simply Hope. Are you willing to take her back?"
Ray was wearing a black suit and silver tie. With his coal-black hair and ruddy complexion, Stacy thought he looked like the devil.
"I emailed our board. They don't want me to take her back," Ray said. "This will be her third time. But I will."
Stacy's mom gasped. Stacy looked up. She thought he hated her.
"I want 60 days clean," Ray said. "No games." He strode over to Stacy, poked a finger in her face. "Stacy, you're an addict," he said loudly so everyone in court could hear. He jabbed his finger toward the coffin. "And that box is your future. I see you and your cousin meeting up again soon if you don't get busy."
Stacy's shoulders were shaking.
"You need to take a deep breath," said the judge. "Be grateful you're still here. You've been through enough. Your family has been through enough. Now, what do you want to do?"
Stacy looked at her lawyer, then her mom. "Finish this."
"Okay," said the judge. "I don't want to see your name in an obituary. Stacy is going to make it."
At Simply Hope, Ray gave Stacy the key to another halfway house. He told her, "I don't think you're going to make it."
STACY'S MOM BROUGHT HER a Big Mac on the way home from jail. "Mmm," Stacy said. "Real food."
As they pulled into the driveway at Sherry's house, Stacy saw a little blond head peek through the window. "Mommy!" Richie shouted.
Stacy ran in with both arms spread wide and fell to her knees. But the boy backed away. "It's me, Mommy!" Stacy said. "You don't know me?" To a 2-year-old, a summer apart is forever. Richie ran to his room.
Stacy stood up and got a surprise: her daughter, Jade. "Sissy?" Stacy shouted. "Oh, look at you! You're taller than me now."
Stacy hadn't seen her daughter in almost a year — not since Christmas. They hadn't spoken. Now Sherry had arranged a reunion.
At 12, Jade looked like a teenager. She had been telling everyone her mom was on vacation.
"I can't believe you're here," Stacy said, pulling her daughter to her. Jade fell into her mom's arms, then wriggled away and said, "I have a song for you."
She perched on the arm of the couch. "I'm nervous," Jade said. Taking a deep breath, she launched into a song by the Band Perry:
"If I die young, bury me in satin, lay me down on a bed of roses …" Stacy had to turn away. She didn't want her daughter to see her weeping. "The sharp knife of a short life," Jade sang. "I've had just enough time."
It was all too much for Stacy. After an hour of people hugging her, singing for her, showing her things and stopping by to welcome her home, she was overwhelmed. She still had to check in with her probation officer, find her clothes and get back to the halfway house by dark.
"Where's my stuff?" she called to her mom. "Where's my sheets and my perfume?" Everything was balled up in the garage. Stacy had been in and out of so many motel rooms and jail cells that her mom had stored bags all over. "I can't find anything!" Stacy screamed. "I'm having a breakdown here! I'm freaking out!"
Jade brought Richie into the living room. She sat the boy on the floor, filled his sippy cup with chocolate milk. Stacy knelt in a pile of clothes, holding her head in her hands. The girl touched her mom's shoulder and asked, "You want help?"
STACY MOVED INTO the halfway house for the third time. Got a new sponsor and started again at Step 1, humbling herself before her addiction: "We admitted that we were powerless …"
A pizza shop owner who knew Stacy's mom gave Stacy a job. Dave Rose had known other people who were addicted to pills. "I know it's a risk," he said. "But everyone deserves a second chance."
Within a week, Stacy's boss gave her a raise, to $8 an hour. After a month, he handed her keys to the store. "I can't say enough about Stacy," he said. "She works really hard, and she can do it all, open, work the front counter, cook. She's definitely proven herself."
Stacy spent her days off at her mom's house, playing with her son. She made Richie his favorite meal: macaroni and cheese. She tickled him and bit his toes and taught him peek-a-boo.
By late October, Stacy had been clean for four months.
In two weeks, she was supposed to graduate from the halfway house and move back into real life.
ON A DRIZZLY THURSDAY just before Halloween, Ray let Stacy stay out after curfew to go to a candlelight vigil with her mom.
"Thanks for coming with me," Sherry told her. She smiled at Stacy, wrapped her arm around her shoulders.
More than 500 people had poured into Largo Central Park for a memorial to victims of prescription drug abuse. The event was sponsored by the sheriff's office and NOPE — Narcotics Overdose Prevention and Education — a group of parents who had lost children to pain pills.
Here, Stacy's mom knew, she was one of the lucky ones. "You look great," she told Stacy. "Tired, but great."
Stacy buckled Richie into his stroller and they walked toward the outdoor stage.
After the sun set, a projector began flashing faces across a screen: a biker, a soldier, a cheerleader. A teenage boy with a guitar, a gray-haired woman with glasses, a girl smiling in her graduation cap.
Images of 249 people, all dead in the last year.
Stacy thumbtacked a photo of Frankie to one of the memorial panels. She added a sticky note. "We love you and miss you more than words can express."
She slid back into her seat, wrapped her right hand around the necklace with Frankie's ashes and, for the first time, let herself mourn.
"I can't believe I'm here," she told her mom. "Why is he gone and I'm still here?"
A WEEK LATER, Stacy showed up at Ray's office unannounced. "Well, hello," he said. "Can I help you?"
For eight months, Ray had surprised Stacy with drug tests and bed checks. Now, with a week to go at the halfway house, she was seeking him out.
"I'm here to pay off my balance," Stacy said, holding a cashier's check for $475 in back rent, fines and fees. Her mom had been paying her phone bill, buying her bus passes and cigarettes so Stacy could save everything else for Ray.
Ray studied Stacy. "How many meetings are you doing a week?" he asked.
"Four, sometimes five," she said. "I try to go every day I can."
Ray nodded. "So what's different?"
Stacy smiled and looked away. "A lot," she said. "I'm not worrying about who I'm hanging out with or where I'm going to find the next pill. I got other goals now."
"Good thing," Ray said. "When I told you you're not going to make it, that's when you determined to prove the old man wrong. I'm glad you did."
Stacy said she realized her mom needed her to get better for Richie. She decided to start over. Stop seeing people she used to party with. Stop getting together with guys she met in rehab.
She had a new phone number. Her boss let her hire people and collect money from the register. After work, she attended a meeting or went straight home.
Stacy told Ray she wanted to get her driver's license back, and a car, and her high school diploma.
"That's great," Ray said. "But you got to make sure you don't get overwhelmed."
Stacy said she was ready to move in with her mom and Richie. When she had saved enough money, she and Richie would settle into an apartment.
Ray told Stacy she could leave the halfway house in two days. He would bring her graduation certificate to her next court date. But she still had to report to him for random drug tests. "That's no problem," Stacy said.
"That's what I wanted to hear," said Ray.
The next 90 days will be the hardest, he said. Addicts have a hard time handling freedom. "The cat's out of the bag," he said. "The dog's out of the yard. And there's no fence. Just a lot of danger.
"The holidays are a hard time for all of us addicts," Ray said. "Most 12-steps have marathon meetings around the clock, so just go."
He shook Stacy's hand. "The rest is up to you," he said. "Do the right thing for the next six months and we'll see if we can't get you off probation. Maybe you can even graduate from drug court by May."
"I turn 30 in May," Stacy said. "I'm ready."
ON A BRIGHT FRIDAY in November, Stacy cleaned out her closet at Simply Hope and dropped off her key. Her mom drove her to the pizza place to pick up her check, the first one she didn't owe Ray. "Feels good, huh?" Stacy's mom asked her.
"Feels great," Stacy said. "I wasn't sure I'd ever be done."
For the first time in years, Stacy was moving back home with her family.
She still thought about using, still craved that high. Any high. When her head hurt she thought about popping pills. When she sniffled she thought about snorting Roxys. She couldn't watch Intervention on TV because seeing someone slide a needle into his arm made her want to do it, too.
Temptation was everywhere. A man on the bus offered her oxys. A guy in Williams Park dropped his plastic bag of pills right in front of her. "I'm not even a drinker, but now that I'm pouring beers at work, it gets to me," Stacy said. "I want a Bud Light so bad I can taste it."
Drug court had kept her alive, she said. If she hadn't gone to jail, she would have died in that house with her cousin. The counseling had given her ways to cope. The halfway house had given her sobriety. She wasn't going to be a statistic.
Stacy was starting to enjoy quiet moments: watching a squirrel scamper along the fence, laughing at Kung Fu Panda, digging worms with her son.
"I'm just going to take it slow," Stacy told her mom.
Sherry had hauled a mattress into the Florida room along with a new dresser, computer desk and TV. Richie was at preschool, so Stacy and her mom spent the afternoon setting up the new space. "I got a box spring and frame for you, too," Sherry said. "I'm so glad you're back."
Stacy flopped on the mattress and said, "Me, too." Then she said something she hadn't said in years. "Thanks."
STACY'S DAY STARTS at sunrise now, when Richie crawls into her single bed. He goes to her instead of to his grandmom.
Jade is back in her life, too. She visits on weekends. She loves rapping Drake songs with her mom, dancing the Dougie. "I used to cry all the time thinking my mom was going to die," Jade said. "I thought she hated me, that she was never going to be there for me, that me and Richie weren't as important as the drugs."
Jade can't believe how much her mom has changed. "After Mom got out of jail this last time, she was a much better person," Jade said. "Everything is way better than it was before. I just want it to stay this way."
The weekend after Stacy moved home, her mom built a bonfire in the back yard to celebrate. Sherry invited her boyfriend and the latest guy Stacy had been talking to. Stacy went and cashed her check.
And brought back a bottle of Crown Royal.
TO BE ADDICTED, experts say, is to be brain-damaged. When you take a drug, you flood the brain with more chemicals than it is used to. The brain stops making its own endorphins. It likes endorphins, so it wants more drugs.
"You're basically killing brain tissue. If you do this long enough, the changes can become long term," said Marlowe, the Pennsylvania addiction scientist. "The brain becomes dependent on that external chemical. Drugs reprogram your brain."
Marlowe's definition of recovery is "sustained long-term abstinence from all intoxicating drugs, including alcohol." He doesn't believe someone is in recovery until he or she has been totally clean for two years.
In treatment, Stacy had heard all the warnings. Addicts can't afford to take any drug, the counselors had said, because one substance leads so easily to another. That means no alcohol, no marijuana, no nothing.
But to Stacy, booze and pot were not the problem. Pills were the problem. And she was proud of how far she had come.
A week after the bonfire party at her mom's house, Stacy went camping with her latest boyfriend. They slept under the stars. But on Sunday, a few hours after they got back, he texted her and made a confession: His old girlfriend had just come by, and he had slept with her. He still wanted to be with Stacy but …
Stacy was devastated. This guy was the first one in years who didn't use drugs, or wasn't in recovery. He was supposed to be the good one.
On any other day, for most of Stacy's life, a text like that would have been the perfect reason to reach for a pill. But not that day.
On that day, she let herself feel the pain.


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What do you think of when you think of the fall season? …I think it's time to eat because bikini season is over for the next 6 months! I especially want to eat some good comfort food like chili and chowder.
In case you don't already know we are having our first annual Souper Sunday Chili & Chowder Cook Off on on Mariner's Landing on October 9, 2011 and I'm happy to report that we had our first chef sign up! Greg from Spanky's BBQ will be cooking up his famous chili hoping to win the prize and the bragging rights! Local Restaurants and even your neighbors are expected to be here cooking up their famous recipes to try and beat Greg and his gang! Let's see what happens!
Don't cook? Me neither! We can buy tasting kits for $10 and taste 5 different recipes and vote on our favorite.
See you there,


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Sudafed PE Children's Nasal Decongestant Side Effects
Generic Name: phenylephrine
Note: This page contains side effects data for the generic drug phenylephrine. It is possible that some of the dosage forms included below may not apply to the brand name Sudafed PE Children's Nasal Decongestant.
For the Consumer
Applies to phenylephrine: intravenous solution
As well as its needed effects, phenylephrine (the active ingredient contained in Sudafed PE Children's Nasal Decongestant) may cause unwanted side effects that require medical attention.
If any of the following side effects occur while taking phenylephrine, check with your doctor or nurse immediately:Incidence not known:
- Blurred vision
- chest pain or discomfort
- difficult or labored breathing
- dizziness
- fainting
- fast, slow, or irregular heartbeat
- headache
- nausea or vomiting
- nervousness
- pain in the shoulders, arms, jaw, or neck
- pounding in the ears
- sweating
- tightness in the chest
- unusual tiredness
If any of the following symptoms of overdose occur while taking phenylephrine, get emergency help immediately:Symptoms of overdose:
- Feeling of fullness in the head
- pounding or rapid pulse
- tingling in the arms or legs
- vomiting
Minor Side Effects
Some phenylephrine side effects may not need any medical attention. As your body gets used to the medicine these side effects may disappear. Your health care professional may be able to help you prevent or reduce these side effects, but do check with them if any of the following side effects continue, or if you are concerned about them:Incidence not known:
- Heartburn
- itching skin
- nausea
- pain in the neck
- pain or discomfort in chest, upper stomach, or throat
For Healthcare Professionals
Applies to phenylephrine: compounding powder, injectable solution, intravenous solution, oral disintegrating strip, oral liquid, oral suspension extended release, oral tablet, oral tablet chewable, oral tablet chewable extended release, oral tablet disintegrating
Nervous system
Nervous system side effects have included headache, dizziness, nervousness, restlessness, tremor, insomnia, convulsions, and central nervous system depression.[Ref]
Cardiovascular side effects have included palpitations, arrhythmias, and cardiovascular collapse with hypotension.[Ref]
Psychiatric side effects have included hallucinations, fear, and anxiety.[Ref]
Gastrointestinal side effects have included nausea.[Ref]
Respiratory side effects have included respiratory difficulty.[Ref]
Genitourinary side effects have included dysuria.[Ref]
General side effects have included pallor and weakness.[Ref]
1. "Product Information. Ah-Chew D (phenylephrine)." WE Pharmaceuticals Inc, Ramona, CA.
It is possible that some side effects of Sudafed PE Children's Nasal Decongestant may not have been reported. These can be reported to the FDA here. Always consult a healthcare professional for medical advice.
More about Sudafed PE Children's Nasal Decongestant (phenylephrine)
- Side Effects
- During Pregnancy or Breastfeeding
- Dosage Information
- Drug Interactions
- En Español
- 0 Reviews – Add your own review/rating
- Drug class: decongestants
Consumer resources
Other brands: Neo-Synephrine, Sudafed PE Congestion, Nasop, Sudogest PE, ... +5 more
Professional resources
Related treatment guides
Disclaimer: Every effort has been made to ensure that the information provided is accurate, up-to-date and complete, but no guarantee is made to that effect. In addition, the drug information contained herein may be time sensitive and should not be utilized as a reference resource beyond the date hereof. This material does not endorse drugs, diagnose patients, or recommend therapy. This information is a reference resource designed as supplement to, and not a substitute for, the expertise, skill , knowledge, and judgement of healthcare practitioners in patient care. The absence of a warning for a given drug or combination thereof in no way should be construed to indicate safety, effectiveness, or appropriateness for any given patient. Drugs.com does not assume any responsibility for any aspect of healthcare administered with the aid of materials provided. The information contained herein is not intended to cover all possible uses, directions, precautions, warnings, drug interactions, allergic reactions, or adverse effects. If you have questions about the substances you are taking, check with your doctor, nurse, or pharmacist.


text:
Note: This item is more than four years old. Please take the publication date into consideration for any date references.
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News Release
Media Contact: TPWD News, firstname.lastname@example.com, 512-389-8030
Aug. 29, 2013
TPWD Law Enforcement Division's Annual Award Ceremony Recognizes Peace Officers and Private Citizens
AUSTIN — The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Law Enforcement Division has recognized more than 30 peace officers from multiple agencies and four private citizens for their professionalism and dedication in serving the people of Texas.
The awards were presented by TPWD Executive Director Carter Smith and Game Warden Col. Craig Hunter at 10 a.m. Thursday at TPWD headquarters.
This year, the awards highlighted TPWD game wardens and state troopers from the Department of Public Safety who worked together and responded to the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas earlier this year. The responding officers were instrumental in the success of response and recovery operations, as well as the actions of more than 350 other state troopers and game wardens.
Game wardens, fellow peace officers and private citizens who have saved lives on public waters were also recognized. Three recipients of this award were Asst. Commander Brandi Reeder, her husband, game warden Derek Reeder, and their friend Mike Amidon, who were recognized for saving the life of a kayaker who was struggling to hang on to the side of the kayak after he went underwater.
The Medal of Valor award was given to Game Warden Jacob Crumpton of Concho County who had put himself in the line of fire last May 26 to aid Concho County Sheriff Richard Doane after he was struck twice by a gunman who had already killed two people.
Two special agents with the FBI, who have supported and offered continuing educational efforts for game wardens, were awarded the Director's Award.
Also recognized, were TPWD employees and private citizens who have helped with fundraising and other administrative functions of the TPWD Law Enforcement Division, and special recognition was given to all game wardens who have served in the armed forces during a time of conflict.
The recipients are:
Director's Humanitarian Award
- Game Warden Capt. Kevin Davis- Llano County
- Game Warden Kenny Lee- Kerr County
- Game Warden Kevin Webb- Llano County
Director's Citation Award
- Game Warden Lt. Trey Shewmake- Cherokee County
- Game Warden Brent Tucker- Borden/ Dawson Counties
- Game Warden Kenneth Zuber- El Paso County
- Game Warden Jason Campbell-Falls County
- Game Warden Andrew Alexander- Bastrop County
- Game Warden Jim Daniels- Hamilton County
- Game Warden Mark Hammonds- Hill County
- Game Warden Dayton Isaacs- Bosque County
- Game Warden Trent Marker- Limestone County
- Game Warden Jeff Powell- Ellis County
- Game Warden Michael Serbanic- McLennan County
- Game Warden Doug Volcik- Hill County
Director's Life Saving Award
- Game Warden Asst. Commander Gary Teeler- Travis County
- Game Warden Asst. Commander Brandi Reeder- Travis County
- Game Warden Derek Reeder- Aransas County
- Game Warden Dewayne Noble- Rains County
- Game Warden Derek Spitzer- Wood County
- Game Warden Kris Bishop- Bastrop County
- Game Warden Joann Garza-Mayberry- Caldwell County
- Game Warden David Lewis- Brazos County
- Game Warden Charles Tweedle- Castro/Parmer/Deaf Smith Counties
- Game Warden Mallory Brodrick- Lubbock County
Medal of Valor
- Game Warden Jacob Crumpton- Concho County
Veteran's National Defense Service Award
- Game Warden Capt. James Ranft (receiving on behalf of all eligible game wardens)- McLennan County
Director's Award
- Scott Boruff– TPWD Deputy Executive Director
- Jeannie Munoz – TPWD Project Management Office
- Larry Sieck – TPWD Project Management Office
- Anne Brown – Executive Director Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation
- Susan Houston – Philanthropy Director Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation
- David Schmachtenberger's– FBI Special Agent
- Mike Rodriquez– FBI Special Agent
- Texas Department of Public Safety state troopers
- Sgt. Victor Panicera – South Padre Island Police Department
- Capt. David Blevins – U.S. Food and Drug Administration
- Mike Amidon
- Alex Campos
- Mike Fugate
- Gene Cozart
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(5.4.16 i)


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I hv tried a couple of times baking red velvet cake, just wondering if anybody hv a very good recipe that I can try out.
Hi, Inkeke!
Rose has a Red Velvet Cake recipe in "Rose's Heavenly Cakes"—many people here on the forum have baked it and really like it. I haven't made it myself, though. If you don't have her book and don't have access to a library that does, you can try this recipe: http://pinchmysalt.com/red-velvet-cake-recipe/ I've made it before and really liked it, although I used a different frosting.
Good luck!
Hi Anne,
Thanks! I will give it a try
I just made mini cupcakes from Rose's HC book. They were very moist and yummy. I frosted them with white chocolate creamcheese. Everybody loved it. However, I was struggle with cupcakes pulling away from liners.
Yes, I tried and they all liked it! Light, moist and yummy! I used only 1 tbsp of gel red food coloring though, I think 2 Tbsp is for the liquid coloring.
Bean2002, are you using the stiff/thick liner? for me, the paper liner is best for cupcakes cos it clings to the cake
Hi Ineke,
Your cupcakes look lovely. How many cupcakes did you get from one batch and how long you baked them. I used the Wilton liner(Celebrate it). Try to search for different liners.
Thanks for sharing your pictures.
Thank you Bean2002, the recipe make 20 to 21 regular size cupcakes, i baked them for 20 minutes. Good luck!
Wow! Those are SOME cupcakes!!!! I would have trouble picking one out. They're so pretty! I'm glad you liked the recipe!


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VANCOUVER – The Vancouver Whitecaps named Teitur Thordarson as the new head coach of the United Soccer League team Tuesday.
Thordarson, 55, a native of Iceland, spent three years as head coach of Estonia's national team.
He replaces Bob Lilley who was fired Sept. 18 when the Whitecaps were eliminated from the first-round of the playoffs after struggling to a 9-7-12 record.
Lilley had led the Whitecaps to the USL First Division championship in 2006.


text:
Love letter to Sound City
In an insalubrious part of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles sits a squat, ugly building that suggests a storage unit crossed with a car park security office.
The Sound City recording studio is defunct, but even in its heyday it was ''kinda dumpy'', according to Butch Vig, the producer of Nirvana's Nineties-defining Nevermind album.
The studio always looked one step away from derelict, with floors seemingly made less of carpet and wood than human detritus. Kevin Cronin, of the rock band REO Speedwagon, called it ''a shithole''.
Dave Grohl agrees with Cronin's assessment. Nevertheless, the 44-year-old Foo Fighters frontman and one-time Nirvana drummer chose the studio as the subject of his directorial debut. His documentary film, Sound City, charts the studio's four-decade history.
Driving through the Hollywood Hills on the way home from a preview screening of the film, he recalls walking into the studio for the first time as a young musician: ''I walked in the front door and I thought, 'Oh no, this place is a f---ing dump. Then I looked at the wall and I saw [gold and platinum records for] Tom Petty, Fleetwood Mac, and I saw Rick Springfield and I saw Neil Young ... All of these people came to this shithole to make records.
''And then, once I set up, plugged in and hit record, I finally understood. It had nothing to do with who is sweeping up around here; it has to do with this room.''
Sound City tells the story of a room in which Fleetwood Mac recorded their self-titled, career-relaunching album in 1975. The band had, in effect, been reborn at the studio a year earlier when a visiting Mick Fleetwood, his band falling apart again, heard an album by starving duo Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks and thought, ''They're just what my band needs.''
This was the studio in which Nirvana, Cheap Trick, Rage Against the Machine, Guns N' Roses and Johnny Cash made some of their most important records. The studio was virtually the last outpost of analog recording in the digital age, until economic reality hit in 2011 and the doors were shut for the last time.
But the film is about much more than that. It examines the strange alchemy that happens when musicians get together to make something. It is a voyage into the mythology of making music - something that Grohl says excites and flummoxes him as much today as it did when he first plugged in a guitar.
''I wanted to show people that there is more to the music they hear on the radio than just the sound,'' he says. ''It's more than just the instruments and it's more than just the band; it's the people behind the instruments and the room where it was recorded and the people who built the studio ... For me to be able to tell all these people's life story was a f---ing honour. It was great.''
Sound City's technical elements were not what made it special - not even its famous Neve recording console, which attained near-mythical status among musicians. Grohl talks about an ''intangible magic'' that sometimes happens during the recording process.
''When you find a space where it happens over and over and over again, you have to consider that there is something about that room or something about that [console],'' he says. ''We'll never know how to define it or describe it, but if you've ever heard a song that you connect to emotionally ... that's the magic. It's not something you learn; it just happens and Sound City was certainly filled with that sort of intangible magic.''
Grohl chose not to seek advice from more experienced directors: He explains: ''I knew exactly what I wanted to say and I knew the story of Sound City because it is a part of who I am. I never took a creative-writing class but I do know how to tell a good story.''
Nor did he ask for hints from professional interviewers: ''I was basically calling all of my favourite musicians and asking them to sit down and talk about music with me. Which is what we do anyway; we just happened to have cameras rolling.''
Grohl's approach to filmmaking echoed his approach to music. ''With the Sound City movie, [at] one of the first meetings that I had with my small crew of people, I said, 'Look, I don't want any Hollywood people involved at all.
"I don't want anyone telling me that's not the way it's done because, had someone told me that when I started playing the drums, Nirvana wouldn't sound the way Nirvana sounds. If someone told me that's not how you play guitar, I wouldn't have written some of the songs that I've written.'
''It's all those bad habits and those mistakes I make that gives what I do personality. When it comes to making art, when it comes to creativity, there should be no right or wrong. As long as you have the tools, you should just go with what you feel and go with your heart. And that's exactly what I did.''
Some of the world's famous studios, such as Sun in Memphis and Motown in Detroit, have become virtual museum pieces, but thanks to Grohl, Sound City's Neve console will have a second life.
When the mixing board was installed in 1973, it cost twice as much as a standard house in the San Fernando Valley. When the studio closed, Grohl bought the board and installed it in his home studio in LA.
''We had to clean that thing out with a f---ing toothbrush when we first brought it into my studio because there was so much cocaine and fried chicken in it,'' he says. ''That thing survived the '70s, you know. It could make its way through an apocalypse.''
With the board in place, Grohl invited his friends - members of Cheap Trick, Foreigner and Nirvana; artists including Rick Springfield and Paul McCartney - to write and record in the old-fashioned, analog, face-to-face method of Sound City.
It was not an exercise in nostalgia. Grohl hoped to prove a point, summed up in a question: ''If you were to write a love letter to a girl, would you send it in a text? Would you send it in an email? Or would you put pen to paper, stuff a rose in it and wrap it up in a bow and hand it to her?''
In other words, sometimes an old way is still the right way to make art. Or as Grohl puts it when talking about the console: ''That board isn't dead. It may be old and it may seem obsolete and impractical to have something the size of the Rolls-Royce in your studio, but in reality it does something that you can't get anywhere else.''
Grohl tells a story about coming home on a recent afternoon with the massive Beatles vinyl box set: ''My daughter Violet - she's almost seven years old - loves the Beatles. [She] knows all the words, knows all the songs and she says, 'What is that?' I said, 'It's the Beatles records,' and she opened it up and pulled out the albums, holding them in her hands.
"I showed her how to pull them out of the sleeve and I got the record player, put it in her room and told her, 'You put the stem in the hole, you hit start, put the needle down; be careful, be gentle,' and I left her there.
''She sat in her room, listening to all of the Beatles records, with the sleeves scattered over the floor, reading the liner notes. The experience made it so special. It was no different to you and I when we were six years old; it was the exact same thing.
''The world has changed, technology has changed [but] the people really haven't. Children haven't, that's for sure. They live in a world that is much different to the one we grew up in but children are children and one of the reasons I made the movie was to inspire the next generation of musicians to appreciate those things the way that I did. Because it's still entirely possible.''
Sound City is available for download at buy.soundcitymovie.com. The soundtrack, on CD, and the film, on DVD and Blu-ray, will be released on March 8.
Sydney Morning Herald