From a Pawn to a King
At the beginning of last spring, Ryan Adams, 38, found himself belly up on an operating table at Camden Clark Medical Center in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Hours before, he had been hanging out at a Sheetz where he normally went to use methamphetamines. The workers there didn’t mind his frequent presence.
“They liked me. I was cordial with them and not trying to take their shit… I was just trying to get high in their bathroom,” Ryan laughed. Incidentally, it wasn’t an overdose that sent him to the emergency room. Appendicitis struck his body and he bellied over in the bathroom. The Sheetz employees called for an ambulance, probably expecting to see Ryan’s face reappear in a few days for his usual patronage.
But that day, as he lay there on the table, caught in the sobering moment of sudden surgery, surrounded by doctors and nurses, their concerned faces staring down at him, he felt the tides of his life turning.
“This was my wakeup call… I felt like near death, I felt like I was doing this to myself, and I recognized I was destroying myself. When that hit me, the shock of it, that was my eye opener, that people do care and that I’m looking at things all wrong.” Ryan was never exactly in a good position to think the ‘right’ way. “I was definitely destined to be some sort of troublemaker,” he said, recalling the wearisome journey that led him to the epiphany on the operating table. Growing up, addiction permeated Ryan’s life. His mother used cocaine the entire duration of her pregnancy with him, lending to immediate withdrawals upon birth and adolescent impulse disorders.
“I was born addicted,” he said. With uncontrollable impulses in an unstructured environment, his mind focused more on survival than planning out his life, he got caught up in a world of crime, and then, as logically follows in our society, incarceration. Luckily, when he was in prison in his early twenties, he was introduced to the game of chess. For the first time in his life, he was forced to think of the endgame.
“To develop a stronger game, you learn how to think ahead. I wasn’t able to do that until I learned how to play chess,” he explained. Still, this new way of thinking couldn’t solve the problems that led him to prison in the first place, and he lived for a long time barely making ends meet, navigating a path mired with crime and drug use. He had a breakthrough at the age of 33 when he obtained a Class A CDL and started driving for J.B. Hunt.
“I made it out of a crime-oriented lifestyle to get in that truck… that was my biggest achievement,” he said. His situation improved and he lived a more comfortable lifestyle, despite the fact that he was homeless and living out of his truck.
Then, in 2017, while on the job in Arkansas, he was in a car accident, to no fault of his own. The Jaws of Life were used to remove his body from the vehicle, and he suffered a torn rotator cuff and nerve damage. First responders instantly pumped his body with fentanyl to reduce his pain, Ryan said, and after recovering, he was sent home with bottles full of Dilaudid, morphine, and Vicodin.
He received a $125,000 settlement following the crash, but he wasn’t in the proper state of mind to handle such a huge sum of money. “That just fueled my addiction. I bought a bunch of stuff, but I ended up losing it. The pain pills had turned into other things to kind of keep me going because my rock bottom started to happen.” Ryan’s life was in danger. If addiction was a chess piece, it’d be the devil’s queen, and he was being chased across the board.
“I lost everything. The drugs… the addiction was so bad. It kicked off from the pain pills, and my pain, and then it just went into poor pity me.” Homeless again, he lived for a year on the streets, struggling within active addiction. Following the death of his mother, he moved to Parkersburg, West Virginia, where his sister lived. Their relationship was one of toxicity, both battling demons of poverty and drug-use. He fell further and further towards rock bottom, bingeing on methamphetamines and running with the wrong crowds.
Then, in 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic captured the world and held it hostage in its static grip, Ryan’s life trajectory turned upwards as he lay on the operating table. A new element was introduced into his game of life: compassion. Still, Ryan hadn’t toppled the devil’s queen just yet.
Directly following his bout with appendicitis, Ryan completed a 28-day detox at The Amity Center in Parkersburg. Normally, following treatment, you’re set up in a recovery home or another facility to help maintain sobriety. However, just as he was regaining control, the entire world lost its sense of order.
“COVID hit and they kicked me out, there was nowhere for me to go. I went back on the streets and I made it two weeks without using.”
Once more in active addiction, nearly out of money, and surrounded by all the wrong people, he realized he needed to leave Parkersburg altogether to better position himself for success.
Ryan went back to the crisis unit and was then transferred to Northwood in Wheeling to begin another detox. This time around, however, all the pieces were there: the logic to think of his future, and the compassion to care for his king, his life, and others’ as well.
He finally found the upper hand he needed at Miracles Happen, an addiction treatment center in Wheeling. A Peer Recovery Support Specialist (PRSS) named Sarah W. broke down his last walls, her empathy shining a new light on him. “There’s a person in there, Sarah W. She not only introduced me to recovery, but she gave me recovery.” He thought he was being manipulated, not used to this kind of love and care being showered over him.
“My judgement, my everything was off, and I didn’t trust nobody. I was at a point I didn’t care. And when she gave it to me, all those things stopped, disappeared, and I was faced with myself, and I cared.”
Having grown up in Albany, Georgia, Ryan hasn’t exactly fallen in love with these West Virginian hills just yet. But, he has fallen in love with the recovery community here. He participates in a Twelve Step program and meets at least three times a week with others battling addiction. There, he finds connection, purpose, support, and love.
After nine months of homelessness, Ryan recently obtained housing and secured a position as a Peer Recovery Coach through Youth Services Systems. He was placed with HoH-Share Inc., and contributes to Mustard Seed Mountain as the Vendor Program Coordinator. His ultimate goal is to become a PRSS and implement his own ideas on recovery. On May 17th, 2021, he celebrated one year clean.
“You don’t wanna lose your recovery. With chess you can play again. You can’t do that with life.”