Distance traveled: from drug addict to doctor

18:51 Distance traveled: from drug addict to doctor 0 Comments

Among the 104 students graduating from medical school in Portland on Monday are the straight arrows who flew from loving homes across the top of their high school and college classes, past examinations and rotations, to Oregon Health & Science University’s most hallowed stage.

And then there is girl in orange velour hot pants.

Her trajectory began in Eugene where she first snorted black-tar heroin in the spring of eighth grade. She smoked meth, tried speedballs and sold hallucinogenic mushrooms in high school. She started college classes after a stop at a methadone clinic.

At Arlene Schnitzer Hall on Monday, Aleka Spurgeon-Heinrici will be among the 59 women and 45 men who will don the green-trimmed hood, with gold tassel, of a doctor of medicine.

Next week, she begins her residency in family and community medicine at the University of California San Francisco — her first choice.

“Aleka has overcome obstacles, become a medical school success and now wants to go out and make a difference,” says Dr. Molly Osborne, associate dean for student affairs.

Admissions counselors call it the theory of distance traveled, that a student who starts out so much lower and still manages great heights, will continue to rise. Nearly a third of medical students at OHSU are nontraditional in that they didn’t study pre-med or arrive straight from college. Instead, they earned degrees in English, history or music or worked in other careers. Most come with a history of community service.

“We want more than just people who can learn the science,” says Osborne. “We want the people who can bring to the profession an ability to overcome obstacles.”

Still, a doctor with a history of drug addiction challenges some of medicine’s deepest stereotypes. Among them: that addicts bring harm onto themselves and don’t deserve medical treatment. More commonly, “once a junkie, always a junkie.”

“That is why it was important to come to terms with my story and just be open about it,” says the 29-year-old Spurgeon-Heinrici. “I know that people can change. We can recover. We can heal.”

Says her friend, and medical student Ana Hilde: “What she brings to medicine is what medicine needs.”

She was born into an idyllic childhood: a dad who worked in Manhattan, a loving mom at home, two brothers, doting grandparents, dinners together, and on time.

Then when she was 8, her mother moved with the children and a new man to Eugene. A few weeks later Aleka recalls feeling overwhelmed at the raucous Oregon Country Fair.

“Just the smell of patchouli oil and pot and body odor was very distinct, and I remember thinking we had gone somewhere back in time. I had heard about the 1960s and seen pictures, but I was so confused that this existed.”

While her mother pursued a new life, the lonely girl retreated to the Eugene Public Library where she read books on folk medicine, making her own teas and tinctures. Her Austrian grandma called her “Kleine Hexe” — Little Witch.

But by seventh grade, her refuge was middle school outliers with whom she started guzzling Boone’s Farm wine, smoking cigarettes and sleeping every night at the Masonic cemetery. She followed the Grateful Dead and Phish across the country, and by 18, was in California cashing fake checks for gang members and shooting heroin.

Then one day her visiting brother walked in on her shooting up. Her mother got her into treatment. But treatment was no straight line. Altogether, she went to outpatient treatment four times and inpatient treatment three times before she succeeded. OutsideIn and De Paul Treatment Centers repeatedly helped, but she also credits Portland’s 12-step community for the critical support that stuck.

“I remember laughing for the first time, really laughing. We were girls who hadn’t felt emotions wholly in years,” she says. “And we would laugh until our stomach hurt, and when we would cry, it was a real cry. We called it the pink cloud.”

Sober, she enrolled at Portland State University at 19, plunging into biology, chemistry, genetics and anthropology classes, with job training and scholarships from Janus Youth programs. She reclaimed her girlhood dream of becoming a doctor. With a 3.9 grade point average and hundreds of hours of volunteer work, she applied to medical schools. She wrote frankly about her years as a street kid.

Then she and her high school sweetheart went to Costa Rica, where she drank a glass of wine to celebrate.

“I just wanted to be normal,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to start medical school and be who I was.”

Soon she was drinking, then using drugs. Then the letter came. She was accepted to OHSU.

“It was both the happiest and saddest day of my life,” she says. “I’d finally gotten the thing I’d wanted most and I knew it was totally ruined.”

She applied for a deferred entry and left Oregon. She drifted back to New York and became involved with a man who didn’t use drugs but sold them in Harlem. He told her one morning that she didn’t belong on the street. That she had too many gifts to waste them.

Filled with guilt and shame, something profound turned inside. She returned to Portland and went to Hooper Detox. From there, she went into Central City Concern’s recovery mentoring program, where a permanent community of support proved the key. She started OHSU two years later, living in a halfway house. Her medical school classmates seemed from another planet.

“Their parents were still married, I’m like, ‘Are you serious? This is amazing.’ I actually didn’t know those kind of people.”

She made it.

Through that terrifying first year of med school when, $25,000 in debt, she felt the panic of not being able to quit. Through the lectures, exams, then in the third year, intense hospital rotations. Throughout, she kept going to 12-step meetings and kept sponsoring other women in recovery. She found a study group. Her confidence grew as she realized eventually some classmates would face their own addictions, but she was daily handling hers.

And she found mentors.

Dean Osborne says a student’s ability to cultivate a good relationship with a mentor is a strong predictor of who will succeed. It takes students with the charisma to make the mentorship beneficial. Osborne calls it the “sparkle factor.”

“Aleka is brilliant at it,” Osborne says.

She leaned on Dr. Nicholas Gideonse and Dr. Marc Gosselin who saw her connecting to patients and understanding of addiction as a huge plus for a family physician. Gideonse says unlike many students who felt too competitive to admit need, she was open about her struggles. She also scored the highest grade of the year on the family medicine rotation.

Med student Migdalia Ordonez met Aleka in an anatomy lab, drawn by her plunge-ahead attitude and willingess to help.

“She came in with so much street experience, that anyone who took the time to listen to her stories or advice about addiction learned what you can’t learn in a book,” Ordonez says. “Doctors, nurses, patients, we have all learned.”

Cheering her commencement Monday will be mother, family and friends from her 12-step program who say she is a living example that those in recovery can dream big. Says one recovering addict: “Her graduating from medical school is in many ways, like we all have.”