Jaimie came from a small family with a mom, a brother, and a stepfather who was Dad in every important way to her. Both of her parents were pastors, and she was alwayson the move and choking down new churches as a kid. However, when she was very young, her father was a victim of alcoholism, and she was placed with her family on a rehab farm while he sought treatment. Now, she is a sober and devoted man with a strong religious commitment, and this experience has always stuck with her like a motto. Drugs and alcohol are simply not a part of her upbringing and continued into adulthood.
Jaimie had always been the kind of person who had a plan and stuck to it. In her early twenties, she followed that plan. She went to college, became a nurse, and enjoyed the job. At age twenty-one, she met the man she would marry, and at twenty-two, she had a life that was settled and full of hope. Just three months into married life, she found herself pregnant. Even though unplanned, the baby’s arrival brought both women joy. But that joy had been short-lived as she began experiencing lightheadedness and difficulty breathing at thirty-three weeks pregnant. Diagnosed at the hospital with pulmonary emboli in both lungs, she lived through something that many didn’t. Her baby, born as a healthy baby girl named Bailee, brought Jaimie the one thing she could feel safe for the baby.
Only after Bailee’s birth did pain in his chest resurface. Although his clots had dissolved, he had continuing chest pains. His doctors suspected scar tissue or infection, which they treated with pain medicine. Months. A year. The pains continued, along with the medicine.
In 2011, Jaimie got pregnant with her third child and stopped taking all of her medicines, choosing to do what was best for her unborn child. There was no heartbeat during the first sonogram. Two weeks later, Jaimie learned about the miscarriage of her unborn child. Jaimie carried her unborn child for six weeks without her body expelling it. She was living a lifetime of grief and fear, raising a toddler while awaiting some calamitous event to occur. It was during this period of her life when her physician started her on her pain medicines again. She soon learned that those medicines not only alleviated her pain but also her emotions.
That numbness became something she sought out. Her threshold for pain increased, and so did her deceit. She saw numerous doctors, palmed pills around the house, and overdosed on an alarming amount of prescription and non-prescription medication. “By 2017, she was a mother of three and a full-blown addict.” The detox, rehab, and broken vows jumbled together until she was at her worst, “taking in her own estimate over a thousand milligrams a day of oxycodone.” “She was driving while high, with her children in the car, because she believed, correctly, her youngest was too young to understand.”
Shortly after turning thirty, the jig was up, and she was left alone with the children. This was rock bottom. One night, with pills and booze in hand, she contemplated taking her own life. A birthday was all that prevented it. She asked for help. She went into a three-month inpatient rehab. There, she began to confront the hurts beneath her addiction. There, she began the process of rebuilding trust. Her marriage, torn apart, is now restored. Today, Jaimie has been sober for more than a year. She lives with her family, enjoys her job, and has her faith. While her story includes addiction, it does not determine her destination.
