Funding comes from family of overdose victim who wanted to counsel others battling addiction.
Alyssa Apostolakis wanted to be a counselor to help children and young adults struggling with drug addiction.
Alyssa's own battle with drug addiction started at age 12, when she was prescribed opiates after surgery to repair a leg she broke on a trampoline. She then underwent a series of oral surgeries after she hit her head coming down a water slide at Disney World.
Her drug use escalated. She had many ups and downs, often staying clean for long lengths of time, said her parents, Lea Heidman and Brian Malone.
But even access to some of the best treatment programs in the country couldn't save her.
Now her parents are fulfilling her desire to help others by donating $300,000 in her memory toward an effort to launch an Addiction Services Program at Akron Children's Hospital.
The program, announced Wednesday afternoon, is focusing its first phase on education, prevention, screening care coordination, community outreach and referrals at Children's locations throughout Ohio, including the facility coming to North Canton. It also will offer medically assisted treatment for opiate addiction and an outpatient clinic as the program grows.
Ohio has the second-highest rate of overdose deaths in the country and is at the epicenter of the opioid epidemic, Children's Hospital President Grace Wakulchik said.
"As a leader in pediatric care, we felt the need to be more strategic in our services — with the ultimate goal of preventing today's children and teens from becoming the next generation of adults struggling with lifelong addiction," she said.
For Alyssa, her drug use became worse in high school.
She overdosed when she was 16 and spent time in Akron Children's Hospital's partial hospitalization program. She left that program and went directly to a residential program in Utah, where she stayed for 11 months. She then transitioned to a behavioral boarding school in North Carolina, where she graduated and went to college in North Carolina.
Her parents tried to be strict with her, limiting her access to money and requiring her to take a drug test every other week and meet with a psychologist.
Still, Alyssa struggled and hid her addictions from those closest to her, said Heidman, president and CEO of Golden Alliance Inc., which owns five McDonald's locations in the Akron area.
In March 2015, Alyssa seemed to be doing well, said Malone, Alyssa's stepdad who raised her and two siblings since they were young.
Her family thought she was clean.
"We knew that she had a couple of lapses, but we did not know that the addiction had taken her so severely as it did. She was so stealth in hiding her addiction, even from her closest friends," her mother said.
On St. Patrick's Day that year, Alyssa stayed in her dorm room in North Carolina and studied instead of going out drinking, even though she had turned 21 the month before.
The next day, March 18, Heidman and Malone received a phone call from the sheriff.
Alyssa was dead from a heroin overdose.
Her family is unsure what happened. They only know that she overdosed on straight heroin. She was supposed to see the family for vacation in five days.
"What was ironic about Alyssa," said Malone, "was she wanted to help others rather than help herself. Even when she was going through all of this addiction, she'd be helping others through addiction, helping homeless people, but not looking at herself in the mirror and saying, 'I need help myself.'"
Nonprofit established
The family quickly turned their grief into action. They established a nonprofit organization, Fighting for Alyssa (FightingForAlyssa.org), which is dedicated to the awareness, prevention and treatment of substance abuse and addiction.
The foundation is issuing its largest gift, $100,000, to support the new addiction services at Children's. Heidman and Malone also are personally giving $200,000 to the effort, to total $300,000 from their family and foundation over a five-year-period.
A total of $800,000 has been donated to the hospital to start the program, including a $250,000 donation from FedEx Custom Critical and contributions from Marci Matthews, Harvey and Kim Nelson, Friends of Akron Children's Hospital, Bob and Regina Cooper and Don Sitts.
The opioid crisis "is having a major effect on our community, and we must address it with the highest sense of urgency," said Virginia Addicott, president and CEO of FedEx Custom Critical.
The funds will be enough to support a new case manager, Stephanie Strader, who will connect patients with resources and services at the hospital and in the community.
Younger children and teens tend to experiment with other substance and move to opioids as young adults, said Dr. Sarah Friebert, founder and medical director of the hospital's Haslinger Center Palliative Care Center.
But hospital staff are seeing the effects of the opioid epidemic, from addicted pregnant moms and their babies to toddlers accidentally ingesting drugs and school-age children "who live in homes where drug use is rampant and they're not getting their basic needs met," Friebert said.
The new program will centralize some of the hospital's inpatient and outpatient efforts and services at its pediatric offices to screen for substance abuse and offer assistance, she said.
The program can be reached at 330-543-3343.