Courtesy of the WISH Center
The WISH Center team celebrates its opening. From left to right: Jackie Seabaugh, RN, Donna Spears, Jaye Shyken, MD, and Sylvia Poe-Velasco, NP; back Travis Capers, president of SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital, and Jim Thomson, mayor of Richmond Heights
When Jennifer Kostoff realized that she was pregnant, she faced a dilemma. Until four years ago, she says, “I was a hardcore heroin addict.” She’d stayed sober for three and a half years but “quit doing what was working” and started using again. Then, she “got pregnant and knew it was time to get back on track.”
But to do that, Kostoff needed help. “I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t by myself,” she says. So Kostoff asked for help and was pointed to the Women and Infant Substance Help Center, or WISH Center. Located on the campus of SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital, the center guides pregnant addicts through medication-assisted treatment with buprenorphine or methadone that eases the patient’s withdrawal from narcotics. The staff consider the mother’s addiction as much as they do the child’s future.
“Withdrawal for a newborn is treatable,” says the center’s medical director, Dr. Jaye Shyken, “but if you destroy their family because you can’t manage their addiction, that’s way more difficult to treat.”
After opening part-time in 2014, the center rapidly expanded into full-time hours and a new office space. This summer, the practice is scheduled to double in size. The need is high: We’re in the midst of a heroin epidemic. In 2012, nearly 22,000 newborns in the U.S. were treated for opioid withdrawal, according to one study. Last year, more than 650 people in the St. Louis region died of opioid overdoses.
Between 2005 and 2014, hospitalizations for opioid overuse increased by 162.6 percent, says the Missouri Hospital Association; in the same time period, the incidence of newborns born with withdrawal symptoms related to maternal drug use has increased more than five-fold over the past decade. But pregnancy is also a time when even recovered addicts are highly likely to relapse.
At the WISH Center, Kostoff is a best-case-scenario patient: She was motivated to recovery and had emotional support from her husband and a 12-step program. Outside aid is especially important after delivery, when many women can’t attend support sessions during bed rest.
Not everyone finds such success. Some patients can’t follow treatment plans; others can’t afford buprenorphine when their Medicaid coverage ends, 60 days after delivery. Still others might be afraid to approach the center, fearing that child protective services might learn of their addiction and take their child. (This is rare, says Shyken; social workers help WISH’s patients keep families together.)
But with the help of the WISH Center, Kostoff has had the ideal outcome. Her daughter, Rikki Lynn, was born April 5 and spent a little over a week in the NICU. She’s now growing and happy. “You can have a life,” says Kostoff. “You can have the baby, and you can have your baby at home.”
She plans to spend the next year following up with the WISH Center. “I chase my recovery like I used to chase drugs,” she says, “100 percent, all the time, every day. And I do it one day at a time: I don’t worry about tomorrow; I don’t worry about yesterday.”
