The Q-View

This is a newspaper article I wrote for the Town and Country’s 8/23/18 edition. It is a remarkable story of bad luck, addiction, redemption.

Almost two years after a tree came crashing down on his family at a campsite, detouring his life and leading to a battle with opioid addiction, Dr. Scott Keeney delivered a message of recovery and hope to a crowded Project Live UP meeting on Monday night.

His unexpected trek began with a family vacation at Knoebels Amusement Resort. After a day of activities, Keeney and his three children and Keeney’s “soon-to-be-future-wife”, Rachel Herman, and her daughter, returned to their tent at about four o’clock as storms were entering the area.

Keeney and Herman, six months pregnant at the time, were getting a meal ready for the four kids when the tree toppled onto the group. “The next thing I knew, I was just waking up to chaos,” Keeney told the audience.

Keeney, a trauma surgeon and surgical ICU doctor in the Lehigh Valley, sustained a skull fracture, a broken neck and a broken back, rendering him helpless to give aid to his family.

His daughter Caitlyn, 12 at the time, was in even worse shape. Herman, an ER and ICU nurse, was trying to revive Caitlyn by administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, successfully it turned out.  

Caitlyn was in a coma for two weeks but is now almost fully recovered from the accident.

“I was given pain medication for my injuries,” Keeney related. “At the time, I was taking my pain medications because I had physical pain.”

He was able to return to work after about six weeks, still experiencing intermittent pain, and still taking pills for pain.

“In typical fashion, the disease of addiction sneaks up on people. I found myself taking the pain medications when I wasn’t having pain.” The opioids, Keeney rationalized, were helping him get through the trauma the family was experiencing.

Keeney’s access to pain medications through his profession facilitated his downward spiral. “I was discovered at work for getting pain medications there, and, at the time, I thought my world was ending.”

Now, he realizes getting caught saved his life.

“After I was discovered at work, I then went on to an in-patient treatment facility at Caron Foundation.” Keeney called Caron, where he spent six weeks, “the best place I never want to go back to.”

At the beginning of his stay, Keeney did not see himself as an addict and felt anger at being in rehab. It took him almost two weeks to finally admit that he had a problem.

“You always think things are under control, when, in fact, they are spiraling out of control. I think I’m a pretty humble person, but there’s certainly a part of me that thought, if I can’t correct this problem by myself, then no one can. That’s the furthest thing from the truth.

“You have to be able to ask for help. If you can’t ask for help, then you’re not going to get better. You can’t fix yourself, like all of us try to do.”

Keeney, who lives in a small community similar to Upper Perk, has experienced some of the stigma that comes with substance use disorder, the kind of misguided judgments that keeps people and families from seeking help.

“Everyone knows what happened to me, but people still, unfortunately, see it as a moral failing, or that I made the wrong decisions, or that I’m a bad person. That’s a hard stigma to break.”

As a member of the medical profession, Keeney has a different perspective. He points out that the always cost conscious medical insurance industry would not cover recovery costs if substance abuse disorder was not medically related.

“There’s a lot of research now that really looks at how addiction changes your brain chemistry,” Keeney said. It is a chronic lifelong condition with, in many cases, a genetic component.

Substance abuse survivors need to stay involved in the recovery community.

Keeney, whose professional life is “getting back on track” attends individual and group therapy, 12-step meetings and two monitoring programs that randomly drug test him.

Keeney lamented the extent of the opioid epidemic, mentioning that Pennsylvania has been one of the hardest hit states in overdose deaths.

“Programs like [Project Live UP] is what’s going to turn those numbers around.”

For the doctor, relationships were one of the keys to his recovery. “I know that I’m lucky in the amount of support that I’ve had in my life.”

His ordeal has given him a new perspective, and Keeney wants his message to resonate with others struggling to overcome substance abuse.

“I feel like this is a story of hope.”