Laying on the concrete driveway of an Indianapolis drug den, Shayna Wheeler watched as demons swarmed around her.
For several weeks, Wheeler had been on a nonstop drug use binge, shooting methamphetamine and heroin intravenously. Though she didn’t know it at the time, a blood infection had developed from where she had repeatedly poked a needle into her arm.
The constant drug use and infection roiled together until she couldn’t take it anymore, and she collapsed.
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“I could literally feel the life draining out of me,” she said. “As I laid down on the pavement, with those demons all around me, I heard a quiet voice say, ‘Get up, or you’re going to die.’”
That moment was the lowest point of Wheeler’s life. For more than 16 years, the Edinburgh resident was lost in an abyss of addiction. She was in and out of jail. At times, she was living on the street. To support her habit, she prostituted herself. Any time she needed something from the store, she stole it.
Worse yet, the people around her suffered. She missed the first four years of her son’s life after she lost custody of him. Her mother, Jan Grider, planned for Wheeler’s funeral, knowing that it was only a matter of time before she overdosed and died.
“As a mom, you’re laying there in bed every night, praying that your child makes it home and they don’t kill themselves, or they don’t have an accident where they hurt someone else,” Grider said. “It destroyed our home.”
Wheeler, 37, has been sober for five years, harnessing her faith and relying on her relationship with Christ to keep her away from the devastating lifestyle that she once lived. She has regained custody of her son, works full-time for Atterbury Job Corps and is about to start working toward her master’s degree in organizational leadership.
Maintaining sobriety and piecing her life together seemed unfathomable during the 16 years she was addicted to drugs and alcohol. But the obstacles she faced throughout her addiction, and the will it took to break out of that, has convinced her she can achieve anything she wants to.
“My life is just so different. I am the person I always dreamed I’d be,” she said through tears. “This girl I am today, this is who I wanted to be, and addiction got in my way.”
IN THE BEGINNING
Wheeler was energetic and talkative growing up, and ultimately a good kid, Grider said. But starting about the time she was 14 or 15, she started drinking beer and smoking pot, like most of her classmates and friends at Edinburgh Community High School.
But where her friends could stop, Wheeler found that she was driven to use even more. She was arrested during her senior year for possession and driving under the influence.
In the years following graduation, even though she was working and attending school, she would drink alcohol nearly every day. More and more, she would take Vicodin and other pain pills.
Over time, she tried crack, then meth, and finally began shooting heroin intravenously.
“Every choice I made during the day revolved around, ‘How was I going to get my drug?’” she said.
Wheeler had tried recovery programs before, getting clean for a short time before falling back into addiction. She didn’t realize the depths of her addiction in a single, horrifying night, or a multi-day bender. She wallowed in the worst situation of her life for almost a year.
The incident that instigated the worst of her drug use was supposed to be a happy one. When she became pregnant with her son, Liam, she thought it would force her to be sober. She had visions of being a good mother, leaving drugs and alcohol behind and having a perfect life.
When she couldn’t give drugs up after he was born, she was devastated.
“It broke my heart. So I ran from my little boy,” she said.
Grider was also increasingly fearful. She was used to worrying constantly about her own daughter; now, the life of a baby was at stake. Immediately after Liam’s birth, she drove to where Wheeler was living in Southport every day to check on both of them.
“Here I have her that I’m worrying about, and the baby,” Grider said. “It seemed like it steadily got worse and worse.”
Increasingly, Liam would stay at Grider’s house in Edinburgh while Wheeler left to go get high for hours and days at a time. She was heavily using intravenous drugs, including heroin and meth. During a several-week bender of shooting up heroin and meth, Wheeler collapsed.
Unsanitary needles and repeated use in the same veins led to an infection that festered and went septic. She had a blood clot in her arm, and when she arrived at the emergency room, her temperature was 105 degrees.
FINDING RECOVERY
After she collapsed outside a crack house in Indianapolis, she knew she had to get to a hospital. She was admitted for the infection. Doctors had to put a catheter into her neck to flood her system with medication, because the veins in her arms were blown out from drug use.
For two weeks, she was quarantined in the hospital’s psychiatric ward.
“I was flipping out in there. I didn’t know where I was or what was going on,” she said.
Wheeler had to sign over custody of her son to Grider, and stayed in treatment. Though she looks back at that point as the start of her recovery, she wasn’t quite ready to accept that she needed help.
There was no grand spiritual awakening or “seeing the light,” she said. Her first step toward recovery came when her father contacted her saying that he had been handed a flyer for a free rehab center in Cincinnati, suggesting that she go.
At the time, Wheeler didn’t care. She was released from the hospital, stopped taking intravenous drugs but continued drinking and taking pills. Her mother kicked her out of the house when it became clear she was still using drugs, and Wheeler continued to run around with the people she knew from her years of drug use.
After Wheeler was arrested on Halloween for public intoxication, Grider refused to bail her out. She realized that it was time for change. She asked her father about the rehab, a church-based program called Restoration Ministries.
For two years, she lived in the ministry’s dormitory, where they took a Bible-centered approach to breaking away from drugs. The close-knit community walled her off from her old life: her friendships forged through drugs and addiction, but also from her family members.
“You don’t get a lot of communication with anyone. I would only talk to my mom for 10 minutes every Sunday. I only saw my son five times in those two years,” she said.
To supplement the counseling, participants also spread into the community to help others dealing with addiction. She would head into different areas of Cincinnati and preach to people, trying to reach addicted people and spark their faith.
Grider was able to visit on rare occasions, and still is overwhelmed thinking about the transformation that had occurred in her daughter even the first time she saw her.
“She went in on Nov. 7, and we got to visit her for Thanksgiving. It was a totally different person standing there. She’d given her life to the Lord and was learning,” Grider said.
FINDING FAITH
After two years, Wheeler describes herself as being “on fire for the Lord.” She intended to stay in Cincinnati to continue working in the ministry, and as she worked to regain custody of her son, wanted to bring him to Ohio to live with her. A judge would not allow that, so Wheeler moved back to Edinburgh in 2014.
Back in her hometown, she saw the impact of addiction all around her. With her experience, she thought she could help.
“I had seen it happen with other people who suffer from addiction, not just with me but with others, and I knew others who needed it,” she said.
Wheeler was born and raised in Edinburgh, attending school in the town and graduating from Edinburgh Community High School, so she understands the community in a way that transplants and those new to the town cannot.
“All of our parents went to school together, and all of our grandparents went to school together. It’s a very tight community,” she said.
That familiarity has been beneficial as she has helped others around her recover from addiction. She was one of the initial founders of the addiction support group Free Indeed at her church, Who So Ever Will Community Church.
“People that I knew, that I did drugs with, that I ran around like a crazy lady with, drug dealers, in this small community where we’re all tight-knit, they see this huge change in me, and it has sparked their interest,” she said. “We had a lot of people who really came and it started to take hold.”
She and Liam, now 7 years old, live with her mother in Edinburgh. Their next step is to find a home of their own.
Though Wheeler feels in control of her addiction, she realizes that managing it is a lifelong responsibility. She knows she has to be vigilant.
She won’t go into bars. If someone comes to her needing help with addiction, they have to meet her at her church; she won’t go to individuals’ homes. Grider has had to lock her medication in a safe, behind a locked closet door, in her home.
“You have to be wise and protect your sobriety,” Wheeler said. “Be honest with yourself. If your parents have pills in the house, tell them to lock them up, barricade them, put them in a safe. You have to be smart, because you can go back.”
When she finishes her master’s degree in organizational leadership from Indiana Wesleyan University, Wheeler plans to use her skills in some kind of ministry or church role. Her faith is the core foundation of her life, and she wants to use that to take care of others who are drowning in addiction.
“There’s a healing in it. I’m not shy about talking about it,” she said. “It hurts in a good way.”
