CHILLICOTHE, OH (WCMH) — Jess Lutz had just given birth to her third child last fall when she relapsed.
“I overdosed,” Lutz said. “I had my children with me and I collapsed in a public location so it’s been a very traumatic event.”
A few days later members of a Ross County PORT (post overdose response team) knocked on her door. The teams are made up of both law enforcement and treatment professionals. The idea of the house visit is to make sure that overdose victims are aware of the resources that are available in the community.
Tracy Minshall, a case manager with The Recovery Council was on the team that knocked on Lutz’s door. “Our goal is to help that individual,” Minshall said. “It’s going to take more than one agency or one resource to help anyone. So if we come together and help one another as a community – then it just opens the doors up for so much help in different places.
Lutz tells NBC4 she had been addicted to heroin for about four years.
She credits that visit from the PORT team with saving her life and she refers to Minshall as “my angel”. “She was the first person to make sense to me when she spoke and it literally took five minutes and I was buckled on my knees in my front yard begging her to help me,” Lutz said.
Lutz did get help. Now after a detox and treatment program, Lutz says she has been clean for six months.
The PORT program was developed as part of the Heroin Partnership Project in Ross County. The partnership combines the resources of federal, state and local agencies in an attempt to reduce the number of heroin deaths.
Teri Minney, executive director of the partnership calls it a “movement.” She says one thing they’ve learned is that it has to be a community wide effort. “Everybody has to be at the table because everybody has something to offer and everybody is being impacted,” Minney said.
Minney says sharing perspectives helps everyone understand that this is not a moral issue – it’s a public health issue.
For Lutz, it was a life and death issue. “If they wouldn’t have knocked on my door I don’t know that I would even be alive today. I honestly don’t believe that I would.”