For Lacy Sisk, 40, the lowest moment in her opioid addiction was watching her family pack their belongings because she could no longer afford to pay the rent. All of her money had gone to pain pills from street dealers.
Broke and without a home, Sisk feared she would never get clean.
“I felt like a failure,” says Sisk, a married mother of two from Dahlonega, Georgia. “We had to pick up and move because my addiction was so strong, it was a financial strain on my family. I felt hopeless.”
Then, 6 months ago, a stroke put her in the hospital. There, she connected with a unique type of hospital-based addiction specialist that would help her turn her life around.
Years of Addiction
Years before, Sisk had been prescribed opiates for a back injury. At the time, she was in her mid-20s and horsing around with her husband when she damaged three lower vertebrae. The medication helped relieve the excruciating pain caused by the injury, she says.
But soon, Sisk was dependent on the drugs and craved more.
For the next 15 years, Sisk battled opioid addiction and made countless attempts at recovery. She tried quitting cold turkey, but the stints never lasted long. She tried methadone and suboxone to relieve her cravings. But “it was just replacing one narcotic with another,” says Sisk, who then became addicted to the maintenance medications.
She felt rejected and judged many times by health professionals, the very group of people who had prescribed her the drugs in the first place.
In October 2024, a stroke landed Sisk in the hospital and later a rehabilitation facility in Rabun County, Georgia. That’s where she met Mandy Kuntz, a life care specialist (LCS) with the Christopher Wolf Crusade (CWC Alliance). The alliance provides opioid education, resources, and mental wellness skills training to hospital inpatients and outpatients.
The life care specialist was unlike anyone Sisk had met during her addiction journey, she says. Kuntz counseled Sisk about her options for recovery, she listened to Sisk’s concerns, and she connected Sisk to resources she never knew existed. She guided Sisk to a therapeutic program that provides monthly injections of naltrexone to treat Sisk’s opioid dependence, and she continues to consult with her on her progress and recovery. Sisk has been opioid-free for six months and counting.
“I was in a dark place when I met Mandy,” Sisk says. “She was very persistent. She made me realize that there are other options out there; there are other choices that I can make. She showed compassion and understanding. She absolutely changed my life.”
A Dangerous Road: From Prescription Drugs to Street Drugs
Sisk’s history is not unique.
An estimated 3% to 19% of patients who take prescription pain medications develop an addiction to them, according to the American Medical Association (AMA). Once addiction starts, people frequently switch from prescription pain pills to heroin or other street drugs. About 45% of those addicted to heroin started with prescription opioids.
Though it’s harder to get an opioid prescription than in past years, doctors still too frequently prescribe opioids to people with pain without considering other pain treatment alternatives, says John David Prologo, MD, an interventional radiologist for Emory Healthcare in Atlanta who specializes in pain management and the treatment of cancer pain.
Prologo says he often encounters patients addicted to opioids who believe pain medication is their only option for relief.
“The greatest challenge is that the person, whose procedure is now over, or their pain is now resolved, they're now tied to these drugs,” he says. “They may not even realize they have a drug addiction. Their brain is tricking them into thinking they have this unbearable pain because it has figured out that if you say this, you might end up in the ER with the intravenously delivered drugs that you're actually after.”
That’s why Prologo thinks interventions like the CWC’s LCS coaches can make such a difference. He has seen it in his own patients.
For example, a recent 20-year-old patient had spent weeks in the hospital being treated for his injuries, which included severe nerve damage to his arm, after a van hit him on his moped. By the time the young man and his family came to Prologo for help, he was on a litany of prescription pain medication and was deeply addicted, Prologo says.
“I was blown away,” he says. “I can't believe somebody gave this kid this many drugs.”
Prologo immediately contacted the CWC Alliance, who dispatched a life care specialist to the hospital. Together with Prologo, the specialist helped the young man develop a safe tapering plan for his pain medications. She counseled the patient and his family, helped connect them to resources, and continues to follow them to ensure ongoing support for his recovery, Prologo says.
“Without her, he's out there alone,” he says. “She is keeping him on track and keeping his focus on the goal. And she's also a liaison to me, to let me know if things are headed in the wrong direction and if we need to do something else. Her presence has been critical to his recovery.”
Addiction Treatment in Hospitals: Filling the Void
That’s exactly what Cammie Wolf Rice had in mind when she founded the CWC Alliance in 2018. The group is named for her son, Christopher, who died from a heroin overdose after struggling with opioid dependency for 14 years.
Christopher was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in middle school, which led to many surgeries and prescriptions for pain. “So many times, addiction starts in the hospital with a health crisis,” Wolf Rice says.
He strived to get sober for years but succumbed to his addiction in 2016 while on a mission trip with his mom.
After her son’s death, Wolf Rice realized that despite spending countless hours in the hospital with Christopher, no professional on his medical team had ever educated them about the risks of opioid addiction.
Wolf Rice and her team developed the life care specialist to try and fill that void. Life care specialists educate patients and caregivers about the risks of opioids and offer them evidence-based pain management alternatives – along with helping addicts, they aim to help hospital patients with their pain before opioid use becomes a problem. To become a specialist you must complete an accredited six-week training course that covers addiction, mental wellness, pain management, recovery, and toxic stress.
“I built this position around everything that I felt like Christopher did not have as a patient and I did not have as his caretaker,” Wolf Rice says. “I truly feel like it was an instrumental piece that's missing from health care teams.”
Today, life care specialists are in seven hospitals in Georgia and Arkansas, and studies show they are making a positive impact on patients’ lives.
In a pilot study of the life care specialist role at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, for example, people who had operations reported less pain when working with life care specialists. The study, which assessed 121 patients in the orthopedic trauma unit, also found that patients who worked with life care specialists took fewer opioids during their hospitalization than historically measured in Grady’s level 1 trauma center, according to results published in the journal Pain Management Nursing. Average morphine dosage in the group was 20% lower than normal, according to the study.
“An important lesson was that LCSs helped to validate patients’ pain,” Mara Schenker, MD, chief of orthopedics at Grady, says in the case study. “As surgeons, we’re focused on treating the problem in front of us, whereas the LCS makes patients feel more like people and less like patients. They sat down and listened to them, and that was enough for a lot of people.”
Because they’re great at building rapport and trust, life care specialists often pick up on other problems patients have, such as domestic violence at home or food insecurity, says Wolf Rice.
“All of our life care specialists are trained in coping skills to deal with anxiety, stress, and depression because there's the mental side of being sick,” she says. “And then their job is to educate patients on the medication, really teach them to be their own health advocates because in our country today, we all need to be our own educated health advocates.”
For example, in 2024, one LCS (Mandy Kuntz) at a small North Georgia hospital helped connect 179 people to resources, such as homeless shelters, mental health inpatient services, domestic violence shelters, and addiction treatment centers, according to statistics provided by Wolf Rice and her team. And that’s just at one location.
That kind of outreach, says Wolf Rice, can help keep at bay the problems that exacerbate opioid addiction.
The Role of Mental Health
A rise in mental health problems among Americans is deeply intertwined with opioid misuse and other drug use, says Erin Bonar, PhD, a clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
“People, including youth, often turn to substances to improve how they are feeling,” says Bonar, director of research strategy for the university’s Michigan Innovations in Addiction Care Through Research & Education (MI-ACRE).
“The stress, anxiety, and depression that is so prevalent in today’s world, compounded by the difficulties in accessing good treatment and the stigma, are powerful drivers of substance use.”
And stigma is still a serious barrier to getting care for opioid addiction, says Aaron Quiggle, MD, a psychiatrist and medical director of the Addiction Recovery Management Service (ARMS) at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
“Negative attitudes toward individuals with substance use disorders can delay and hinder access to treatment.” That’s true both inside and outside the hospital, Quiggle says.
Finding Hope in Darkness
That has certainly been the case for Lacy Sisk. After being dominated by her addiction for 15 years, Sisk finally feels she has control of her life again, she says. She has never felt healthier, she can afford her home, and best of all, her family is proud of how far she’s come.
“I take every day, one day at a time, and really just focus on my children and making up for lost time,” she says. “I’m really focused right now on doing better for my kids.”
Sisk says Kuntz still checks in regularly to see how she’s doing and offers help if needed.
“I hope more people out there get to experience having a life care specialist,” Sisk says. “More people in active addiction need to understand there are resources out there to help them.”
Wolf Rice’s hope is for every hospital in the country to have a life care specialist. Her first goal, however, is to have the specialists in all Georgia hospitals. To that end, Wolf Rice recently spoke to the Georgia House of Representatives about the role of life care specialists and their importance. She also met with leaders of the Technical College System of Georgia, who have agreed to include the life care specialist practicum in the state’s technical colleges.
“That's going to give scalability because, just like you can get a CNA certification or an LPN certification, you will now be able to get a LCS certification through a technical school,” she says.
In hindsight, Wolf Rice is convinced that if Christopher had had a life care specialist during his medical journey, he would be alive today. But she takes solace in the thought that her son sacrificed his life so that others could be saved.
And, says Wolf Rice, “Christopher is up there, guiding my path.”
