Addict tries to cope, turn her life around

"I'd pretty much been living on the streets," she says. "I wanted to be out running and doing the drugs and staying high. I really didn't care about my children."

She says she does now and speaks openly about the homes in which they are all living. Her oldest boy is 16 now and living in a proctor home. Her 10-year-old daughter is about to be adopted by her foster family. Her 6-year-old lives with his aunt in Moab, and little Valerie is being adopted by another foster family.

Gage, she says, is her last chance. "It's my last chance of being a mom."

For the first time in years, she is looking at a sober life. In a rare circumstance, she is getting methadone delivered to Odyssey House. In order to be there, she needs to taper off the drug.

She's on a slow detox, which means doctors are tapering her down off the drug by one milligram a day.

She's scared, nervous about the withdrawal from methadone. "I'm worried about it," she admits. "I just don't know if I'm ready to get off them.

"I haven't been completely without anything for years. So that's a whole other issue. I don't know myself when I'm not on any kind of opiates."

She also knows at some point she may feel some symptoms of withdrawal. She remembers how awful it is when the drugs start making their way out of her system. She kicked methadone cold turkey once, and it just about killed her.

She was pregnant, living in Moab at the time, and trying to get clean from a formidable heroin and methadone habit on her own. She was spending $150 a day on heroin and taking 155 milligrams of methadone a day. The average daily dose is 40 mg to 120 mg. The familiar sweating, shaking, aching, nausea and diarrhea started a day into her self-detox.

"I was so sick, I went to the emergency room. I told them I needed something to help me." But she was pregnant, and hospital officials wouldn't give her anything.

"I left the hospital and laid in bed for a month," she says. "As soon as I wasn't sick any more I stole a car to get back to Salt Lake to get back to the drugs."

This is a life Bradley says she must put behind her. "I don't want to be that person anymore." So she's working hard at treatment, leaning hard on her support system at Odyssey House and revelling in each additional hour she earns back with her son Gage. It's time, she says, finally.

"I don't want to be 50 years old, sitting in prison, with nothing."

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E-mail: lucy@desnews.com