This week’s edition to the Faces of Recovery Series — where we feature local individuals who have struggled with and overcome addiction — focuses on Middlesboro native Jessica Sulfridge.

In 2002, Sulfridge was working as a Certified Nursing Assistant when she hurt her back on the job. She started taking prescribed pain medication for the injury. Unfortunately, she stated, it “got out of hand very quickly because I liked the way they made me feel.”

Her narcotics of choice were pain and nerve pills.

“My day-to-day was waking up, looking for my next one, constantly worrying about my next fix and manipulating to get the next one. I wouldn’t eat, barely slept and was constantly obsessed with it. I would wake up extremely sick if I didn’t have it. I couldn’t function without it,” she said.

Sulfridge describes her rock bottom as the night she fought her best friend and mother for her mother’s pills. She ended up in jail due to the altercation.

“I knew I wanted off of them for a while, but every time I got pill sick I would go right back to it. I got sick and tired of being sick and tired all the time,” she said.

Sulfridge decided to get help after detoxing in jail.

“I knew it was time to do something different. I was court ordered to do a 30 day in-house treatment. I completed it, already clean, at Recovery Works in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. I now attend NA meetings, have an amazing sponsor and working the steps,” said Sulfridge. “I have some truly amazing friends that I have met during this process. I am grateful for God’s grace and mercy, my beautiful daughters, my family and clean friends. I couldn’t imagine my life any other way now.”

Sulfridge has been clean for nine months.