Alla’s story

Alla believes she’s alive today because of MultiCare.

She was born in Belarus and immigrated to the United States when she was 11. Alla worked for airlines most of her adult life, which took her all over the world. It was while she was out of the country for her job that she was first introduced to cocaine.

Alla had watched her younger brother struggle with substance use and die of an overdose, so she had avoided drugs for most of her adult life. But her cocaine use gradually developed into a habit. She began isolating herself from her family and became estranged from her teenage son, and she also started using heroin.

“My family wanted nothing to do with me,” Alla recalls. “They said, ‘You can go into treatment, or you can lose your son.’”

Alla’s journey of recovery through MultiCare began long before she knew it. While at a needle exchange clinic in Spokane, Alla happened to cross paths with a substance use specialist who programmed her number into Alla’s phone and offered to be a lifeline whenever she may need it. Then they went their separate ways.

But after her second overdose, Alla knew she finally needed help. She reached out to that same specialist she had met months earlier, who not only joined Alla at the hospital later that day but also encouraged her to begin taking Suboxone, a medication used to treat opioid dependency that would save her life.

“I don’t know what I would do if I hadn’t met her,” Alla says of the MultiCare specialist. “She’s kind of like my angel.”

It’s that personal touch that Alla now applies to her work as a family navigator at the nonprofit organization Peer Spokane, where she uses her experience with substance use disorder to help others. She is also working alongside some of the very same health care providers who helped her start recovery.

“Everybody’s story is different, but recovery is possible,” she says. “We meet people where they’re at. We don’t judge them.”