Tag: Recovery Capital

One Couple’s Long, Bumpy Road From Opioid Addiction to Sober Living

Posted on by robbie

It’s just before 7 p.m. in Huntington, W.V., and the street lights have turned on for the night. The east side of the city is illuminated by a deep orange that cascades over the roads and trickles onto the large lawns of two-story homes that line these streets.
Justin Ponton sits with his girlfriend, Jami Bamberger, on the stoop of Newness of Life, the recovery home Ponton runs. Both finish cigarettes (they smoke Newports) as they talk about the homemade cooking — much of it deep fried — they missed by not attending church that Sunday.
Ponton sports skinny jeans, a tight-fitted “Kanye West for President 2020” shirt and black sneakers that are impeccably clean. His arms are tattooed into sleeves of crosses, roman numerals and cartoonish lettering. His bombastic, urban style is very much out of place. Ponton knows — and doesn’t care.
“From where I stand, the skinny jeans make me stand out,” he says.
In front of the couple, a group of five men wearing baseball caps and baggy pants slip out of the shadows and walk side by side in the street. Ponton raises his hand and gives a wave.  
They acknowledge him with nods, but continue walking.
“Probably have a meeting or something they need to get to,” Bamberger says as the men walk into Recovery Point, a drug addiction and alcoholism recovery center, at the end of the street.
Bamberger should know. At the time, she was the coordinator for another Recovery Point location about 35 miles away in Charleston, W.V. It follows the same schedule, though that facility is all women.
“Everybody — news outlets, politicians — keep coming to Huntington and talking about how bad it is here. It kills me that Huntington has been reduced to a city that has this dark side to it,” says Ponton. “Dead-ass, we have a problem, but there is so much recovery in Huntington. And nobody ever talks about that.”
In August 2016, Huntington was thrown into the international spotlight when 26 people overdosed on heroin within a five-hour timespan. Since then, a barrage of news outlets have trekked to Huntington — a small city in a rural state that’s experienced the demise of its main industry — to tell the story of how it became the poster child for the nation’s opioid epidemic, nicknaming it the “Overdose Capital of America.”
Residents and public officials resent that moniker. When asked to speak with NationSwell, both the mayor’s office and Huntington Police Department declined to be interviewed, with one member of the mayor’s administrative staff saying that, “even good press is bad press at this point.”
But with a number of options for recovery that are giving thousands of addicts a second chance at life, including peer-mentor models like the ones that Ponton and Bamberger operate, locals have come up with a different moniker for their city: The Recovery Capital.

The Argument for Abstinence

Ponton’s recovery home is well known in Huntington for its underdog  approach to recovery. Newness of Life doesn’t turn anyone away; most of its male residents don’t have any money, and many don’t have stable employment. They are exactly how Ponton was when he was in rehab years earlier.  
Today, community leaders embrace the 33-year-old former addict. But when he was just 10 years old, Ponton was slinging drugs and living on the streets of a Washington, D.C., suburb.
“There’s something about Justin,” says Kim Miller, a close friend of Ponton’s and director of corporate development for Prestera Center, a rehab clinic. “People just gravitate toward him, and they trust him.”
In and out of prison and rehabs for over a decade, Ponton found himself in Huntington at a faith-based recovery center where he turned his life around.
“I was actually kicked out for selling drugs within the rehab,” he says. “But I came back, got clean and started working for the program. And that’s when I wanted to go out and go on my own.”
Newness of Life is an abstinence-only halfway house that operates out of two houses located next door to each other on the eastern side of Huntington — not far from Marshall University and the local hospital. Setting it apart from the numerous other two-story dwellings in the neighborhood: The vending machine dispensing Monster Energy, a heavily caffeinated drink, sitting on the front porch.
Residents are required to stick to a regimen. Morning chores and attendance at 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and a weekly house get-together are mandatory. No one is allowed visitors, and everyone must have a job.
“I came to Newness and didn’t have anything, didn’t know how to take care of myself or my family,” says Matthew Thompson, a former resident at Newness of Life. “Yeah, it was tough, but with Justin’s help, I was able to get back on track.”
And being tough is exactly what Ponton wants.
“We don’t want you getting too comfortable,” Ponton says. “The point is to become a productive member of society, pay for your child’s bills and get a real home.”
Most importantly, it’s mandatory that every individual living at Newness remain sober — even medically-assisted treatment (MAT) like methadone or Suboxone, which prevents users from suffering withdrawal symptoms like nausea or severe cramping, is not allowed.
MAT is considered the gold standard for recovery treatment. The Centers for Disease Control, The National Institute of Health and dozens of other medical leaders support the use of MAT, and multiple studies have found MAT has reduced opioid deaths from relapsed users by more than half.
“The importance of offering a variety of medication assisted treatment modalities is really that we’re keeping people alive,” says Miller.
But many former addicts reject it.
“You’re just swapping methadone or whatever you’re given for the original drug,” says Ponton. “But not to throw shade on [MAT]… We like to say that not one solution is for everyone.”
In warmer months, Ponton may see only a dozen guys at a time taking shelter at Newness. But once the cold sets in, Ponton usually has a full house, with almost 35 men staying at the facility.
Typically, inpatient rehabilitation centers can cost up to $6,000 a month for residents. Ponton charges just $100 a week for people to stay at Newness of Life, but most of the time, people can’t even afford that. As a result, Newness operates primarily in the red, as Ponton’s mantra is “never turn anyone away, even if they can’t pay.” The houses are in desperate need of maintenance, and shoestring budgets aren’t enough to keep the electricity from being turned off on occasion.
“Somehow, he figures it out. Every single month, the guy has no cash, and he is still able to get those guys heat and water and a roof,” says Ryan Navy, a close friend and executive pastor of New Heights Church, which provides religious counseling for many of the guys at Newness of Life.  
“Everyone in the church knows about Newness and Justin, and they’re right alongside them every Sunday,” he says. “They’re willing to help, which kinda shows you what this community has been doing since the news has come out on the problems here — how we’ve tried to address it.”

How Heroin Took Hold

Huntington’s decline is no different than other towns in the Appalachian region of America. Once filled with miners and coal workers, the city found itself struggling in the early 2000s as the clean energy and technology industries decreased the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and highly-educated Millennials flocked to urban centers along both coasts.
It’s easy to blame the economic downturn for why people started using drugs. But that’s leaving a key point out of the narrative: How the drugs found their way into Huntington in the first place.
Workers’ compensation claims over the past two decades have fueled an increased use of opiates nationally, and West Virginia has been flooded with pain killers at a higher rate than other states, according to an investigation done by the Gazette Mail. Since Huntington is a former city of industry, a significant number of its residents incurred injuries on-the-job. Initially prescribed drugs for legitimate pain management — surgery, injury rehabilitation — many later turned to a cheaper alternative, heroin, as states began cracking down on unnecessary  prescriptions.
“You had this situation where you had large numbers of people abusing prescription opioids and then we took measures to reduce the availability of those pills,” says Robin Pollini, associate director of the West Virginia University Injury Control Research Center in Morgantown, which studies opioid use in the region. “At the same time, heroin traffickers were looking to these places and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve saturated the urban markets, let’s start going into these smaller markets.’ And what they had was a population that was looking for a cheaper, more available opioid for the pills they were using.”
Bamberger, Ponton’s girlfriend, was one such person. At 21, she was prescribed Oxycontin after undergoing surgery for a sports injury.
“[Prescription] drugs did save my life, at first. They did. Honestly,” she says. “I had knee surgery, but from there — and that’s how it started — it only took about five months, and I was already using a needle.”
Originally from Tennessee, Bamberger excelled in staying clean at Liberty’s Place, a rehab in Richmond, Ky. That success led her to the Charleston, W.V., Recovery Point location, which houses close to 100 women fighting for their sobriety without MAT.
The opportunity to work at a rehab center was something Bamberger, 24, always wanted to do. Before falling into addiction, she was attending school to be a drug counselor.
A tour of Recovery Point Charleston reveals that the women live a militaristic lifestyle. Beds are perfectly made, and there’s a limit on personal items. Residents are confined to the building, strictly monitored and have a schedule that includes daily chores, classes and “trudging” — a practice that requires the women to walk miles each day.
Bamberger explains the practice as, “If we could walk for our drugs, we’re going to walk for our recovery.”
Success is rewarded with a paid gig as a peer mentor, a position that pays minimum wage. Recovery Point claims that more than 60 percent of its former residents remain clean. That number is controversial, however, as critics argue that the organization cherry picks data from its alumni events.
“This program, when you come in, they start you from the bottom and you work your way up. You’re taught responsibility, you get jobs, you have to wake up, you have to you know, do a chore here, you go to classes, you learn a lot more,” says Hailey Miller, 24, who is one of Bamberger’s close friends and a resident at Recovery Point.

Get to Huntington

Some states — including those outside the Appalachian region — have started to look at ways proactively to combat opiate addiction. For example, Washington, Colorado and Vermont have discussed legislation that would allow safe injection facilities where users could receive sterile injections while under supervision.
Those programs have come under fire for a host of reasons, including the assumption that they lead to endorsement of drug usage. But safe injection sites are known to be effective in curbing opioid use and overdose. In one study, their use lowered the number overdoses in addition to reducing the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C.
The research, though promising, is so controversial in America that even doctors have conducted studies in complete secrecy without federal approval.
For now, recovery homes and rehabs are the primary go-tos for people seeking help in Huntington. That’s primarily because the city has become very well-versed in triage, but not in prevention or identifying those who are currently in need of help.
“When you’re in the midst of what has been labeled an epidemic, you kind of get in emergency response mode,” says Prestera’s Miller. “What we’re doing is putting out fires a lot. We’re helping the people that we know are coming in seeking our services, and we’re throwing everything at them.”
The work doesn’t stop once someone is clean. Relapse is imminent for many; up to 60 percent of those in recovery will abuse drugs again, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, part of the National Institute of Health.
Miller says that there’s no “best solution” to solve for addiction or eliminate the chance of relapse, including MAT. In multiple instances nationwide, addicts placed into abstinence-only recovery programs by drug courts wound up dead because they started using again.
This is why Ponton doesn’t claim Newness of Life residents achieve success, only a chance at it. And it’s why he keeps fighting for others.
On the Sunday morning that NationSwell is with Ponton, he receives a call from an old friend who is using drugs again. The guy is high and called Justin in a moment of weakness, wanting to get help and come back into the program. It’s a phone call Ponton gets often — sometimes daily — he says.
“Alright,” Ponton tells the friend. “Get to Huntington.”
The friend arrived, as promised, but used again the very next day.

A Winter Gift

This past November, Ponton’s heating systems at Newness of Life were shot, and the guys were at risk of having to spend the entire winter with no heat — a scary prospect considering Huntington’s winters are brutal.
“I don’t know where we’re gonna get the money to fix this,” Ponton says under his breath as he analyzes a spreadsheet that reveals in angry red ink the thousands of dollars he’s behind on his bills.
Two days later, Ponton and Navy, the pastor, meet in the back of Lafayette’s, a cigar and wine shop located in downtown Huntington. Navy had news that could only be announced over a Romeo y Julieta cigar: An anonymous donation had been made to Newness in the form of a new heating system.
Less than a week later, the guys at Newness of Life were living in a warm place again.  They may still be battling addiction, but at least they wouldn’t be spending the winter in the cold.
Correction: A previous version of this video incorrectly stated that Ponton and Bamberger opened a new recovery facility in January 2018.
Homepage photo by Joseph Darius Jaafari for NationSwell.

Fighting Drugs With Drugs in West Virginia

Posted on by robbie

Justin Ponton hit the gas pedal and sped his Dodge Charger up a hill to the parking lot of Hurricane City Park, in rural West Virginia. It was November 2017, and he had just found out that a friend was using drugs. Again. Ponton feared what he’d find when he reached the man.
Ponton, 33, only had a few minutes to get there. He has been through this before. As the owner and operator of a sober-living facility in nearby Huntington, he knows all too well how easy it can be to accidentally overdose and die.
Ponton found his friend sitting in the passenger seat of a parked van — just high, not overdosing. Which was lucky considering Ponton didn’t have any naloxone, the overdose-reversing drug that he often carries with him for occasions like this. Had his pal actually overdosed, Ponton would’ve had to wait for the paramedics to arrive.
America’s heroin and opioid crisis killed more than 60,000 people in 2016, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control. That’s twice the number of fatal shootings for the same year. Put another way, drug overdoses today kill more people each year than the HIV epidemic did at its peak in the mid-1990s.
States have scrambled to find ways to get users clean and halt the spread of heroin and, increasingly, the synthetic opioid fentanyl — a drug that can be up to 100 times more powerful than heroin. Prescription painkillers also remain problematic, especially in rural states.
But now another drug is working to reverse those statistics.
Breathing can slow down or stop completely when someone is overdosing. It’s in that moment when naloxone — more formally referred to by its brand name Narcan — binds to opioid receptors in the brain and reverses or blocks the effects of other opioids. The drug works in seconds to restore normal breathing.
Naloxone is relatively inexpensive. But as the demand for it has increased, so too has its price.
“This is absolutely an epidemic,” says Robin Pollini, associate director of the West Virginia University Injury Control Research Center, which studies opioid abuse. Her state has the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of overdose deaths — 52 per 100,000 people, compared to 19.8 per 100,000 people nationwide. “Have we seen the worst of the drug problem? I don’t think any of us can say, because I don’t think we have a real handle on what’s going on out on the street or in people’s homes.”
Opioid abuse crosses state lines, of course, but recent coverage of the epidemic has put a spotlight on West Virginia — and Huntington in particular. In 2016, the city of just 49,000 made national headlines after 26 people overdosed in one five-hour span. The event launched a federal investigation by the CDC and a media firestorm that was quick to label Huntington as “America’s overdose capital.”
READ MORE: Born Into Rehab: Giving Life to West Virginia’s Tiniest Opioid Victims
As director of outreach of WVU’s Injury Control Research Center, Herb Linn became curious about the effectiveness of take-home naloxone kits. During the heroin scourge of the 1990s, the kits, which typically contain two doses of naloxone, were distributed to drug users in major cities where heroin was prevalent, including New York, Los Angeles and Baltimore. Recipients administered the naloxone themselves when someone nearby overdosed.
Getting an opioid antidote in the hands of drug users in big cities — where you can pinpoint at-risk communities in dense areas and then focus on treatment and prevention — is easier than it would be in the rural environs outside of Huntington. “I became very intrigued about whether this kind of program could translate to a rural population … and whether it would be effective with abusers of opioid pain medicines.”
That’s a legitimate concern, says Pollini, who argues that it’s not enough to simply take a program that worked in a densely populated city and apply it to a remote town of 1,000 people.
“In rural areas, you don’t see [drug users] out in the open as much. There’s not a street scene like you might see in Baltimore or Philly,” she says. “And they’re not accustomed to outreach from harm reduction programs.”
And then there is the stigma of drug dependency, especially in small towns where it can seem like everyone knows your business. For addicts and their families, the fear of public shaming may deter requests for the life-saving kit.
In 2013, Linn published a brief on the effectiveness of naloxone when it’s made widely available in a community. He shared it with public officials in the state, and two years later, the legislature passed a law allowing physicians to prescribe naloxone to anyone who might have to use it — from drug users and their families to first responders answering an emergency call.
“What that did was open up the door to folks who were allowed under that legislation to start programs,” he says. For Linn, that helped local communities start distribution programs from late 2015 through 2016 and led to a collaboration with the state to distribute over 8,250 kits in 2017.
Among those receiving kits were emergency workers in Huntington. They began a pilot program that deploys a quick-response team whenever there’s an overdose. Not only do first responders administer naloxone to revive someone, but they also stay on the case by working to get the victim into a treatment program or a drug court.
Experts say the city has seen a dramatic turnaround in the number of people dying from overdoses.
“We have educated the community about what an overdose looks like,” says Kim Miller, director of corporate development for Prestera, a rehab clinic, and a clinical expert in opioid addiction. “In Huntington, we have allowed access to [naloxone], so that more people are carrying it than ever before. If you’re at a restaurant and someone overdoses in the restroom, for example, and you carrying naloxone, you could save their life.”
That belief has Ponton constantly scrambling to stock up on more of the kits. Currently, he relies on donations to keep a steady supply on hand at his sober-living home.
After the close call with his friend that night in November, Ponton asked the city’s fire chief, Jan Rader, for a kit she had on her.
“I hope we figure out a way to get more of these out there,” he said, before giving her a hug and heading back to his car.
Less than two weeks later, he used that same kit to revive someone else from yet another overdose.
Additional reporting by Kayle Hope.

Born Into Rehab: Giving Life to West Virginia’s Tiniest Opioid Victims

Posted on by robbie

In the rear of the Cabell Huntington Hospital maternity ward is a medium-sized, unlit room. Occasionally, its darkness is pierced with a scream that nurses can only describe as a kind of cat call.
The patients inside suffer from seizures and are hyper-sensitive to bright light. Sometimes, their bodies cramp, stiffening like a board. Other times, they’re fidgety. And the thumb sucking… it’s never ending — unusual, even for newborns.
These babies are the youngest victims of America’s heroin problem. Exposed to opiates while still in the womb, they suffer from Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, or NAS.
In the U.S., the number of babies born with NAS increased by more than 300 percent between 1999 and 2013, according to a report released in 2016 by the Centers for Disease Control. In Huntington, W.V., the problem is exponentially worse. CDC findings reveal nearly 33 cases of NAS per 1,000 hospital births — the highest in the nation. But anecdotally, Cabell Hospital nurses report witnessing more than 100 per 1,000 babies, nearly 16 times the national average.
To be clear, these babies are not born addicted to opiates. Rather, their brains were exposed to opioids in utero, damaging how they’re formed and similar to how alcohol affects brain development in children born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
It’s well documented how FAS impairs childhood development. In sharp contrast, medical professionals have been able to recognize the symptoms and diagnose NAS for decades, but they continue to be perplexed by what happens to these newborns as they age. Many doctors and nurses say they simply don’t know.
“We have so many babies that are being born prenatally exposed to illegal drugs. That’s been a well-documented problem in our community and in our region,” says Robert Hansen, director of addiction services at Marshall University in Huntington. “The question becomes what’s happening to these babies after they withdraw from those drugs, and what’s going to happen with their moms? What’s going to happen to the children as they grow and develop and enter the school system?”
Where Huntington sees a crisis, it also sees a solution. As community leaders do their best to mitigate the opioid epidemic that has gripped their city, members of the medical community and local university are partnering together to care for these newborns by launching the first-of-its-kind childcare program to study the long-term effects of NAS. The hope is that their findings will be used to inform future educational initiatives.

AN END TO THE SUFFERING

The reason why Huntington has such a high number of babies born with NAS is largely due to its location. The city straddles three state lines — Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio — and has one of the only large hospitals in the region. Mothers are more likely to give birth there than anywhere else in the area.
Two years ago, the CDC released a report revealing that women aged 15 to 44 were filling opiate prescriptions at a higher rate than normal. Because of the opioid epidemic in this part of Appalachia, Cabell Huntington Hospital is overrun with drug-exposed babies.
There’s just not enough beds, says Sara Murray, nurse manager in the Neonatal Intensive Therapeutic Unit at Cabell Huntington Hospital. Her unit only has 15 beds, but during the first week of November 2017, nurses were caring for 19 babies with another expected at any moment.
Newborns with NAS remain in the hospital longer — up to 100 days, compared to three to four days with other babies — making overflow inevitable. The extended hospitalization got Murray thinking.
“They were staying for long periods of time, and we just felt like there was something that must be missing in caring for them, thus causing them to stay so long,” Murray says.
In response, Murray and two coworkers, Rhonda Edmunds and Rebecca Crowder, opened Lily’s Place, a NAS clinic that would serve as overflow for the hospital.
Lily’s Place is only the second facility in the U.S. that exclusively cares for NAS babies. It’s modeled after a program in Kent, Wash., that, according to Edmunds, “needed to also be in Huntington.” Since opening in 2014, the facility has cared for more than 300 babies. First Lady Melania Trump and other influential politicians have said that the unique program should be a model for the entire nation.
The care provided to newborns at Lily’s Place mirrors what they’d receive at the hospital. To ease withdrawal symptoms, nurses rely on methadone, an opioid that satisfies the physical cravings of opiate dependency, but doesn’t provide the high that heroin or prescription painkillers do.
Though methadone has been controversial for adults in recovery —  many view it as a substitute for another drug — treating newborns with methadone is widely accepted within neonatal units.
“Any parent will tell you in here that withdrawal is very painful,” says Sarah Murray, who runs the Neonatal Intensive Therapeutic Unit at Cabell County Hospital. “We don’t want the babies to suffer that pain, so we get them through the acute withdrawal.”
By the time each infant goes home from Lily’s Place, it’s been weaned off all opioids, including methadone.
Despite its success in providing overflow for the hospital and counseling and caregiving services to parents of babies with NAS, Lily’s Place faces tremendous difficulties. Funding is a continual problem. The majority of women who give birth to opioid-exposed babies are on Medicaid. With national healthcare on unstable ground, public and private donors could be needed in the future to finance the cost of treating a newborn with NAS, which carries a price tag of more than $60,000, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse.
Because of health insurance and Medicaid complexities, Lily’s Place can only accept babies born to West Virginia residents; those born to mothers from out of state cannot be transferred from Cabell Huntington Hospital to Lily’s Place. For now, the hospital’s maternity ward continues to be overrun.
The clinic has tried to solve this by offering other states guidance on how to open up similar programs, but there have been no successful takers, as of yet.

A STEP INTO THE UNKNOWN

The long-term effects of opioids on the babies that leave Lily’s Place or the hospital is anyone’s guess.
“There needs to be a lot more research done about what the children need. That start[s] out with neonatal abstinence syndrome, and really, across the country, there hasn’t been enough research to answer that, so it’s very variable,” Marshall University’s Hansen says. “Some children who start out with NAS may not need much support and services. Others will need different [things]. We just don’t know yet.”
In January 2017, Hansen reached out to Suzi Brodof, owner of a shuttered daycare facility, to discuss what to do about Huntington’s newfound fame as America’s heroin capital.
More specifically, he wanted to talk about babies with NAS.
“I went to a meeting and there were about 30 other people from all different organizations in the community. We all wanted to help because we were concerned about what was going to happen to all these babies that are being born to moms who are addicted,” Brodof says. “Everyone went around and said what they could offer. When it got to me, I said that I have a building that was built to be a childcare center, and if we want to still use it in some way for children, I’m willing to contribute that to the cause.”
Brodof had contemplated turning her building into an office complex, but stopped due to the fact that everything inside was miniaturized.
“We didn’t want to just convert it to some other use if we could use it for something for children,” she says.
Educators estimate that 500 students with NAS will be entering the school system in Huntington alone, but didn’t provide proof of that number. “The concern is that the teachers are not prepared,” Brodof says. “They don’t know what to expect or how to handle them.”
That’s where Brodof’s new childcare facility, River Valley Cares, steps in. The childcare center, which opens this year, is studying NAS children in a controlled environment in conjunction with researchers from Marshall University. One nursery room, for example, has a two-way mirror that researchers can use to observe child interactions without intruding.
The hope is that the program will provide the first-of-its-kind research on how toddlers with NAS interact with other students and how they work in learning environments.
If successful — and it will likely take years to conduct the research — River Valley Cares will be able to give teachers, parents and educators the tools needed to figure out how to manage children with NAS.

A PERSONAL SOLUTION

Ryan Navy, a 26-year-old pastor, adopted a baby boy with NAS after a parishioner in his church, New Heights, relapsed on heroin.
“She was clean for, I think, two years. She was doing well,” Navy tells NationSwell. “Three or four weeks before this baby was supposed to be born, she relapses and started shooting up heroin again.”
This story isn’t uncommon in Huntington. But neither are the examples of city residents demonstrating their belief that it takes a village to raise a child — especially when those children are afflicted with NAS. In many instances, mothers can’t manage a newborn while going through opioid withdrawal themselves and the baby ends up in foster care.
Navy’s New Heights congregation is well known for fostering NAS children. The church has about 18 foster families, Navy says, and a fellow pastor has adopted “two or three kids.”
“I can’t even keep track anymore,” Navy says with a laugh.
The good that results from this village mentality extends far beyond Huntington’s newborns. When Brodof went to that first meeting with Hansen, she immediately recognized the benefit of the community banding together.
“Until we all came together last January, none of us really were interacting,” she says. “We were all doing good things for children and families, but we realized once we all came to the table that we would be able to be much stronger if we worked together.”
Additional reporting by Kayle Hope
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that bright light causes babies with neonatal abstinence syndrome to have seizures. A previous version of the video stated a factual error regarding medical information. NationSwell apologizes for the errors.