Gaiser Center offers stories of recovery, success
The Ellen O'Brien Gaiser Center started holding its annual community celebration luncheons to try to change perceptions about addicts among the major players in the community.
“We wanted the community to understand the recovery aspect of addiction,” said Linda Franiewski, the center's executive director. “A lot of people associate drug and alcohol treatment with addiction. People felt very negatively about having a treatment facility in their community, and that we were somehow causing the problem. It was just a myth.
“So we wanted to educate leaders and decision makers and people who really weren't exposed to this.”
On Wednesday, Butler County political and business leaders gathered for the center's 13th annual community celebration luncheon, hearing people who have struggled with addiction.
Two women shared their recovery stories with the group.
The first, Megan Bannon, spoke about her time as a patient at the Gaiser Center. She said she has been in about 20 rehabilitation programs and five halfway houses.
“You do not find staff like you do at that facility,” Bannon said.
Bannon arrived at the Gaiser Center in 2010. Her first treatment experience, she said, was at a different treatment facility. Upon arriving and feeling inspired, she told staff one day she would work there. She told the luncheon Wednesday that she's now worked at the center for two years.
“I rave to my clients today about the Gaiser Center,” Bannon said. “It really taught me how to sit still with myself.”
The second speaker, physician Jennifer Zampogna, spoke about her own high profile arrest for writing herself prescriptions and her subsequent recovery. Zampogna is now the director of operations for Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers of Pennsylvania, a nonprofit that provides discrete help for lawyers and judges.
Zampogna said she was prescribed hydrocodone for an injury, and from there it snowballed until she was “taking 20 pills a day just to get out of bed.” Then she was arrested in front of her own practice, wearing scrubs. Her patients and staff watched, she said.
“You know you've had a bad day when the attorney general holds a press conference in your honor,” Zampogna said.
She said she still attends several meetings to stay sober.
Before she was arrested, Zampogna said, she never believed she had a problem.
“Those pills became my oxygen,” she said. “The rational part of my brain was offline. Even as a well-trained physician, I had virtually zero insight into my own addiction or behavior.”
After the luncheon, Larry Cicco, chairman of the Butler County Drug and Alcohol Advisory Board, said his own experience at the Gaiser Center set him on the right track.
“I had a tough therapist there, and that's what I needed,” Cicco said.
He echoed the two speakers. All three went from addiction struggles to helping struggling addicts as part of their recovery.
“Now I'm part of the solution, not the problem,” he said.
The Ellen O'Brien Gaiser Center was founded in 1971 as a drug and alcohol treatment center, and added a location dedicated to treating women in Butler in 2017.
