Health Care Alternative Systems
Client: Health Care Alternative Systems
Salvadore: Profile of a [Recovering] Addict
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After 20 years in America, Salvador had struck the perfect balance of work, cocaine, marijuana and alcohol. As a waiter at various Italian restaurants around Chicago, he could make $200 a day, enough to pay the rent and cover his habits. Salvador was often too tired and hung over from his late nights in after-hours joints all over town to work the lucrative lunch hours, but he had enough to get by on. It was the AVM, or Arterial Venal Malformation, that landed him in Stroger Hospital with a series of four brain surgeries to alleviate the debilitating headaches caused by the disease.
After reviewing his drug and alcohol use, the staff at Stroger told Salvador he was going to die if he didn’t stop. He figured he was going to die anyway.
“I told them to get out of my face,” he said. “Don’t talk to me about this.” Then he went home, he prayed and he called Healthcare Alternative Systems. In the beginning, he needed a ride and assistance to walk into the facility, but he kept coming. Eventually he progressed from individual to group sessions, and H.A.S. introduced him to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.
“All of the people were there because of the courts,” he said. “I thought, well I’m on the right path. Nobody pushed me. I’m going because I want to.”
Salvador finished the program in a year and is now clean, sober and running his own retail sales business. He’s now on a payment plan to improve his credit and bought a new car for the first time. He says it’s a miracle that he’s walking and that he doesn’t suffer from cravings, even for cigarettes. In fact, when he walks past bars he used to frequent, he actually feels a headache coming on.
One of Salvador’s sisters came from Mexico to take care of him after his surgery. Her children and grandchildren, who call him Tio Loco (Crazy Uncle – a name he taught them years ago), came to visit recently, so he took them to Chicago’s museums and parks, and then drove to the Wisconsin Dells.
“I keep thinking I wasted half of my life and I’m going to take advantage of the other half,” he said. “I’m very lucky every way you see it!”