Faith Fueled Her Recovery from Opioid Addiction

Hi Guideposts. My name is Linda Maher and on November 2nd, 2015 I was involved in a car crash that nearly took my life. I was T-Boned by a distracted driver. Over 8 surgeries, 22 units of blood loss and put on a lot of drugs.

As far as what we weren’t informed of on the pain medication by the time Linda was even conscious she was too weak. She really didn’t know anything that was going on. She was already totally addicted to the opioids and painkillers. They were needed to control the pain and save her life but through the whole process, the weeks after she was always told ‘Take as much as you can’ and ‘Whenever you can’ as much as prescribed to control the pain. She was taught a lot of stuff before she went home—how to get in and out of the bathtub and make a cheese sandwich, how to put a sock on. Nobody ever really told her that she was going home a full blown physically addicted drug addict to opioids and nobody ever told her that the road to recovery was going to be very, very long and not an easy road.

You know it was prayer, just prayer. Even though I know sometimes it was jumbled in my mind but I just knew praying to God like ‘God give me this strength to do this on my own.’ Fortunately, I knew that and I felt it—the prayers from everybody. And it was just something that was you know incredible surgeons but they all knew. They just said, “Your faith is what got you through what was going on” and the love of my family. My comfort was with my Lord and I knew that he was not going to let me go through this by myself and I knew wasn’t going through this by myself. I was just drawing on my faith and prayer and the words that would come that it was just ‘I’m giving this over to you. I’m surrendering this over to you.

Just give me the strength to get through it and really making sure that I could do this and the days that I knew I couldn’t even lift up my head. He was holding it up for me. And I just knew that his strength was going to keep me through it. The advice I would give to anybody who is going through that road and going through that path is: never give up and continue to fight. And even though you may not have the energy or the strength to do it just rely on the people who love you. And just rely on God and know that he’s going to help you go through the direction that needs to be done. His plan is bigger than ours and recognizing that and again just have drawn that face, but again never, never give up.