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Watch one woman's personal story of heroin addiction

HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. — Caity Woods walked us through her heroin nightmare—a nightmare that started when she was a teenager growing up in Huntersville.

“So, this is where it got bad. This is where it got really bad,” she said as she pointed to a mobile home that had been boarded up.

“This is the place. This is where I used to come get heroin every day,” she said.

Caity is almost 27, and it’s a nightmare that still haunts her today.

“I’ve had four or five people, my friends, die in front of me—a couple of them in my arms,” she said.

Every nightmare starts somewhere, and Caity’s started when she fell off a skateboard and broke her wrist.

“That was the first serious injury I sustained and was prescribed heavy pain pills…and I loved the way they made me feel,” she said. “So instead of taking one, I took two, then I wondered what would happen if I took three...”

Caity was only 12 at the time, but the pills quickly became a habit, then an obsession.

“And they were so easy to find.  Everyone had them, everyone had hundreds.  Doctors would just hand them out,” she recalled.

By the time she was 16, Caity was addicted to painkillers, living in a nice neighborhood in Huntersville and dropping out of high school.

“I was getting my prescriptions at the time and started going to Hopewell, that’s where I met a lot of user friends,” she said.

But when the opioid crisis hit, pills became harder to find. Caity was desperate, and then one of those user friends introduced her to heroin.

“It was the instant, just all over my body, like forced me to relax.  It was like going to heaven and coming back….except, in reality, it was like going to hell and coming back, because that one time turned into years,” she said.

And for years, Caity’s mother was living her own hell.

“My world came crashing down shortly after we moved here,” Debi Bedard said in the living room of their home in Lincoln County.

After a nurse found heroin in Caity’s purse, she called Caity’s sister and told her she was planning a professional intervention which would mean sending Caity to Florida for drug treatment.

“I remember crying on the phone and my daughter saying, 'You don’t have $5,000 to do this intervention.' And I said, 'She’s going to die! She’s going to die,'” she said.

It was the first of two times Caity would go to rehab, and both times she started using again.

“It is literally the cycle of insanity. The insanity of the constant obsession of I need this drug, how am I going to get this drug and when you get this drug you do the drug, you feel great, then you’re like s---t, how am I going to get more for the next time? And it’s every day, all the time,” she said.

When Caity first spoke with us six weeks ago, she was still on the edge. She’d been clean for only about a week and was still wearing the scars of her addiction.

Caity has moved back home with her mother. To start over. Again. They both know there are no guarantees that this time will be different, but they are trying.

“She just came to me the other day with a fistful of needles saying, ‘I just want you see I found these in my room, and I’m discarding them safely,’” Bedard said. “This is like my coming out of the closet. It’s like kind of a relief to me to say my daughter’s an addict. She’s actively in treatment, and I’m doing anything I can to help.”

“I want everyone to know the truth. Not from doctors, not from pharmaceutical companies, not from politicians, from drug addicts,” Caity said.

She is focused on staying clean, and helping others out of their heroin nightmares.

“And I want people who are still sick and suffering to not be afraid, and to reach out for help, and to get their lives back before it’s too late.”

Channel 9 followed up with Caity two months after our original story aired and found she's still drug free. You can hear more about her progress in the story below.

Here are some links for help with heroin addiction: