'If one out of a hundred makes it, it changes the world:' Individuals in recovery seek to help others

OBERLIN — Withdrawing from a mix of heroin and Xanax, Jaremy Crouse started hallucinating. He called the police and was taken to Cleveland's MetroHealth Medical Center, where he had a seizure and was admitted. It had been about a dozen years since he'd had a driver's license, he was on the verge of homelessness, his car had been repossessed. He'd been using for more than 15 years at that point, he said, and was left with little more than the clothes on his back and — somewhere in him — a need for change. He was the demographic for Thrive Peer Recovery Services, he said. Sitting for a week in his hospital room, one of their counselors spent days trying to get him into another program. "If they hadn't existed, I probably would've just ended up back in the street doing my thing. I probably wouldn't be alive today," said Crouse, now 41. "It would be a totally different story now. So the fact that they existed and they had the staff that they did is what started this whole process for me." That process — several years in the making — has ended with Crouse now the regional intake coordinator for The Alpha House, living with his girlfriend and expecting his first child in October. It's not the way he expected things to happen, he said, while sitting in a living room at the original Alpha House location in Oberlin. But he's happy. Avril Chuppa, assistant director of hospital systems for Thrive Peer Recovery Services, sank into one of several couches in the living room, wrapping her arms around a throw pillow while she talked. She'd been working for Thrive for a couple of years when Crouse was taken to MetroHealth, and she escorted him out the day he was discharged and transported to Alpha House to get sober. Chuppa, 29, of Avon Lake, is also in recovery. She grew up in Lorain and, much like Crouse, started smoking marijuana as a teen. Once she was out of the house at 18 years old, she was regularly drinking, using cocaine, ecstasy and Vicodin and staying in a trap house with her then-boyfriend to make it easier to buy and sell drugs. She got sober in December 2014, at 21-and-a-half years old after waiting two weeks to get into an inpatient program. "Thinking about restarting your life can be very overwhelming, so we try to do that for people, make it easy," she said of Thrive. Thrive is in 24 hospitals across Ohio, including several emergency departments in Cuyahoga County. Chuppa started as a peer support counselor, but it was her co-worker who got a reluctant Crouse to go into treatment. He was originally supposed to go to a program in Toledo, but at the last minute there was an opening in Oberlin. The Alpha House, a faith-based addiction resource center opened in 2017 by Brian Wade, started as a space for 24 men seeking sobriety. It has since expanded to include the Georgia House for women in Avon Lake. The program is free to individuals, funded by donations and partnerships, according to its website. It was where Crouse found his faith and his calling. Crouse spent seven months in the program then more than two years living at Alpha House while working in the office — eventually being promoted to regional intake coordinator. It wasn't until he found out his son was due in the fall that he knew it was time to move out. "I was in no rush to go, like this is where I belonged," he said. "Anytime I tried to leave, all my plans fell apart at the last minute and I took it as a sign like 'why am I even trying to leave, God will tell you when it's time to go and I mean he did — like 'now you're going to have a family, it's time to go make a way.'" When he first walked through the doors of the bright yellow house at the end of a winding driveway in 2019, he was a wreck, he said. "I found God here and I realized that nothing had happened by coincidence. It was all like doors that were being presented and I was walking through them by using that intuition, that gut feeling," he said. The pair work to make recovery attainable in different ways — meeting those in addiction where they are and tearing down barriers to help them succeed. "Somebody helped me and now I get to help hundreds of people. One of those hundreds of people was Jaremy," Chuppa said. "And now Jaremy gets to help hundreds of people. "So even if one out of a hundred makes it, it changes the world." Crouse agreed. There's always discussions surrounding the politics of recovery — why is Narcan free if insulin isn't? Why not focus on other social problems like hunger, or homelessness — or how do Chuppa and Crouse keep going when there's always another person addicted, another overdose, another new drug on the streets. "Somebody who is addicted is just somebody that's just lost their path, they don't have control of their life anymore," Crouse said. "Most of the people that recover make a difference in the world. Why save lives? Because a lot of times those broken people end up being the most helpful, the most and meaningful to society." Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.