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Recovery in the News
Life after rehab: Man shares his story of recovery
Teri Greene
Montgomery Advertiser
July 22, 2009
After the loose ends are tied, an addict re-enters life after rehab equipped with new coping tools and new faith. What then?
In Quad Dunn's case, he married Emily, the love of his life on July 11 -- more than a year after he called his parents in desperation, saying he was headed to jail in Los Angeles after once again failing to beat his addiction to alcohol.
The wedding ceremony in Emily's small Michigan hometown was a joyous occasion, as most weddings are, but Dunn was celebrating not just a new life together with his bride, but a new life.
Overseeing the exchange of vows was the man who helped Dunn create that new life.
Randy Cox is the co-founder of Rivers of Hope in Prattville, a faith-based, inpatient recovery program that helped Quad reclaim his life after hitting bottom less than two years ago. Quad (so nicknamed because he's Henry Jackson Dunn IV), spent five months in the program, which he says not only helped him transform himself but save his own life.
Now Randy Cox and his wife, Kim, both addiction counselors, are among Quad's closest friends and the core of his support system.
In May 2008, Quad graduated from the program.
After healing
It's a new life. But it's not one without challenges, questions, adjustments, frustration.
Before the wedding and after finishing Rivers of Hope, Quad spent months living with his parents, Jack Dunn III and Margaret Dunn, in their Hope Hull home.
"Sometimes, it was like walking on eggshells," Margaret Dunn said.
Along with the relief that a potentially deadly phase of Quad's life had passed came caution, worry and paranoia.
After regaining his driver's license in the wake of a DUI arrest a year before, Quad finally took to the road in his Ford Ranger for the first time to go down to Moseley's gas station, just down the road in Hope Hull, to pick up a soda. His mom tried to keep her cool, but fretted nonetheless.
On U.S. 31, a police cruiser appeared just behind Quad. He called his dad -- "You're never going to guess what's happening,'" he said. "I'm so freakin' nervous. I'm going the speed limit, my taillights are good, I have insurance. Everything's valid."
Nothing happened.
His mom said, "It's almost like he wanted the policeman to pull him over so he could say, 'It's OK! Everything's good!'"
"It was so random," Quad said, one of those "crazy and gnarly things" that have happened since he finished Rivers of Hope.
Soon after settling in his parents' house, he requested they put a lock on the liquor cabinet above the fridge. They did.
Past and present
After rehab, occasionally Quad visited Emily in West Palm Beach, Fla., where they'd once lived together, and Panama City. But it was hard going, passing places on every corner where he could remember, "Yeah, I got wasted there so many times."
A musician, he loves seeing bands perform, and though he will still go to bars to hear live music, he never touches alcohol. Unlike the old days, there aren't trips to bars "just to go to a bar." Besides the temptation, he found it's not much fun watching other people get drunk while you're sober.
A band in L.A. that he used to play with is still waiting for him to lay down vocals for their next CD.
But one recent evening as he sat at his parents' kitchen table, he pored over pages of music -- a guitar set he would play the next Sunday as he led the music service at a friend's church.
He said of all the times he'd been on stage at clubs such as the world famous Whisky A Go Go in L.A., this gig was by far the most nerve-wracking.
Quad is a likeable guy, offering visitors first a tilapia dish he's got cooking, then asking if they'd like to take home some venison he just brought in -- hunting is a new, post-rehab pastime, one he pursues in a section of woods behind his parents' acreage.
"It's so peaceful, a meditative thing, the sun setting through the trees, the creeks built up so the water is babbling," he said of the shaded outdoor space. "Like an Alabama Zen garden -- until you hear the 'boom.'"
He laughed.
He jokes, he roughhouses with Sonoma, a yellow Lab who's "the best dog ever." He's affable, both laid back and constantly moving about -- the kind of guy, if you didn't know his story, you might want to buy a drink.
"I can't tell you how many times I've had drinking dreams," Quad said of his recent life. It's a common post-recovery phenomenon that Montgomery therapist Jerrel Ivey calls "romancing the drug." Especially in the early post-rehab phase, the addict retains the specific memory of the high, even as he pursues as a life of sobriety. That remaining fragment, however deeply hidden, is always there, waiting to come out.
After finding steady work through Rivers of Hope, Quad has had to go on the road for weeks at a time to perform the kind of work he never imagined himself doing -- construction, installing metal framing, drywall, sheet rock, tile ceilings.
"Some parts are really tedious, but I'm looking at it as if there's a future in it," he said. "God puts you where you're supposed to be. It's a good trade to learn. It's kind of cool to get it done and say, 'Yeah, we built that.'"
Which could be a metaphor for his life.
Getting help
An estimated eight million Americans suffer from alcohol dependence, and six million more meet diagnostic criteria for alcohol abuse disorder, a pattern of harmful drinking that stops just short of dependence, reports University of Alabama Birmingham's Addictions Recovery Program.
Most people who seek treatment are young, from 18-34, according to the non-profit rehabilitation program Chemical Addictions Program in Montgomery; most have both primary and secondary -- or multiple -- addictions.
Quad started early, sniffing Freon with a friend while still in grade school, getting into pot as a freshman in high school and then graduating to hard drinking.
If you've seen the A&E TV series "Intervention," you might have a grasp on how these situations usually unfold: An addict is coerced by a room full of friends and family to get treatment for addiction. Most often, the addicts relent, seemingly just to get family or friends off their backs.
Quad's intervention bore no resemblance to that.
In the past, he'd spent time in many rehab facilities, five or six of them arranged by his mom. One of them was little more than a homeless shelter. He didn't complete any of the programs. Rehab wasn't worth giving up the life he knew so well, he reasoned.
He'd had a mental routine: After a night of getting wasted, "I'd wake up super-hung-over and say, 'I never want to do this again. I'm finally going to get help.' I would look into some (rehab) places, and then, the next day, I would feel better. I'd think well, I really don't want to go away. I'll be all right. Same cycle, over and over again."
Quad inherited his dad's wanderlust -- Jack Dunn III, who'd grown up in a military family, was by nature an adventurer, relocating the family from one area of the country to another, exploring. It gave his children -- Quad and his younger sister, who is now married with three children in Atlanta -- myriad experiences and new environments.
As an adult, Quad moved from Alabama to the Midwest to Florida to California. Back to Florida, back to California, back to Florida again, on and on. He was following his passions, music and surfing.
In L.A., he was in a metal band. He hit the waves every chance he could. He supported himself with restaurant jobs, where he became a pretty good cook, specializing in sushi. After hours, the booze flowed freely.
"I really started partying hard when I moved to L.A.," he said. "From '95 to 2008. I was having a blast."
A wake-up call
Drinking heavily became a way of life, then a necessity.
From across the country, Jack and Margaret Dunn were introduced to a Quad they'd never known.
"When Quad was drinking hard in California, he would call us at four in the morning," Jack Dunn said.
"Wasted," his son added.
"Slurring," Jack said. "It was difficult even to respond sometimes." Afterward, Margaret Dunn lost hours of sleep, just worrying. Would he end up in jail? Would he die?
Early last year, they got another call from California.
It wasn't another drunken, incoherent rant. This was the Quad his parents knew, clear-headed -- but frightened. He'd been on "summary probation" after a DUI arrest in California. The conditions were simple: during probation, don't drink or do drugs.
Quad didn't stop drinking, and soon after, the Torrence, Calif., police picked him up for public drunkenness. He'd been arraigned and was in a holding cell, headed for the L.A. County Jail.
"I was pretty much broken," he said. "The world I was living in was not a good place to be. I didn't know how to get out of it. Me getting arrested was probably the best thing that happened."
This time, he reached out to the only people he knew who truly cared for him -- his family.
Finding a place
Six weeks before, Margaret, an ER nurse, had treated a woman with a broken leg. The two women started talking about their children.
The injured woman was Dottie Mitchell, Kim Cox's mother. She said her daughter and son-in-law, both counselors, had -- after a year of intense research and visits to recovery facilities across the country -- started a non-traditional, faith-based, long-term and affordable addiction treatment program in Prattville.
Margaret Dunn was taken aback. Her son, she told Mitchell, was an addict in dire need of help.
Mitchell gave her a brochure about Rivers of Hope. Margaret Dunn held on to it.
Jack Dunn got on the phone with the judge in Quad's case. If he could secure a rehab facility for Quad immediately, the judge said, Quad could be given another chance, avoiding jail time.
Margaret grabbed the brochure and called Kim Cox. The program was up and running. Yes, there was a place for Quad.
His father flew to California, with a plane ticket back for Quad. As soon as he landed in Alabama, he was on his way to the Moses House, the place Rivers of Hope participants call home during their recovery.
"I was going from L.A. to Prattville, Alabama," Quad said. "I was hesitant. I didn't know where the house was. They checked me in at the church, and we started driving on these back country roads, and I'm like, 'Are they going to drop me off in some 'Deliverance' house?" he said, laughing.
It turned out to be, as Quad describes it, a "killer little three-bedroom house," equipped with all the basics and amenities its residents needed.
A Church of the Living Water member donated the house, which had been a rental property. Soon, the long-abandoned house was renovated with volunteered hours and became full of contributed furniture, appliances, food -- everything that was needed -- donated by churchgoers, people in the community, civic organizations, the city of Prattville, and the couple themselves. The organization Angel Food provides food for participants.
Rivers of Hope
At the Rivers of Hope's core is one central belief -- that without faith, there is no recovery from addiction.
Randy and Kim Cox started Rivers of Hope in 2007, with Church of the Living Water as both a physical headquarters and the hub of a community-wide support system.
The components were in place, but Kim and Randy Cox had no idea whether their dream would pan out to restart addicts' lives after they'd hit rock bottom -- or if it would last.
Then came the residents. First, a man named Eddie, who for a while would have the house to himself, along with a mentor -- men from the church volunteered to stay in the house with the residents at night, rotating their duties so that someone was always on hand.
Then, Quad arrived. For a while, it was just Quad and Eddie.
"Kim and Randy had never done this before, so they were working out the kinks. Eddie and I gave them input. It was kind of cool, because it wasn't this thing that was set in stone, or rigid rules, but it was so one-on-one," Quad said. "It's not just, 'Don't drink.' It's 'What are you going to replace it with?' Having a relationship with God is your way of dealing with not drinking."As the weeks went by, others arrived -- Phillip, Jason, and Brandon were just the beginning of a nonstop cycle.
During the day, the men had group counseling sessions and did fix-it work around the community; during Quad's stay, in the aftermath of the 2008 Prattville tornado, there was plenty of that work to do.
And they would study the Bible and pray.
"It's kind of strange to fill that space with His love instead of an outside source or chemical," he said. "It's a key thing for me. It works."
Rivers of Hope now has a second house and program for women in need of recovery.
For Quad's family, after years of searching for standard 28-day programs at established facilities that charged $16,000 and upward for a stay -- and often abruptly stopped treatment once insurance benefits stopped -- finding a 90-day-plus program for $2,500 -- one that actually worked -- was, he said, another "God thing."
Not the end
Phase 2 of Rivers of Hope is an extended period in which participants stay at the Moses House. They work at outside jobs, pay off old debts incurred during their addictions and gear up for life in the real world -- a world void of substances that counselors repeatedly told them, lead either to jail or the graveyard.
Quad keeps almost daily contact with Kim and Randy Cox, even if it's just a quick, "How are you doing?" text message. He didn't complete the traditional Alcoholics Anonymous "90 meetings in 90 days" -- in large part, he says, because he lives "in the sticks," but he makes it to the meetings when he gets edgy.
Though they're now husband and wife, Quad acknowledges that he and Emily have work to do on their relationship; when one half of a couple is an addict, there is co-dependency, his counselors have told him. Plus, Emily is what Quad calls a "normie," able to drink a single martini at social functions -- something he can't do.
"We've been together five years, and she's seen me at my worst," he said of Emily. "It's been a year since we lived together. That break when I was in rehab gave us both a chance to realize how much we were relying on each other. That separation was just what we needed to find out who we were individually, so we could be more."
And now, they have begun married life.
Visiting the Moses House more than a year after completing the program, Quad Dunn stood in the narrow space between two bunk beds in a room he called home for months. He angled his head under the top bed to find an inscription on the wall that he'd made before finishing the program.
It was just his name, and the date he wrote it, and now it has plenty of company. It's become a tradition for participants to leave some kind of mark behind, if only to say, 'I was here,' giving solid evidence that they took a step toward saving their own lives.