Grateful and clean together: Mon Valley couple helps addicts find recovery through SPHS
Joey Pagano and Jodie Koget met at a 12-step meeting as recovering heroin addicts and now serve as care navigators for Southwestern Pennsylvania Human Services, connecting addicts in the community with treatment while also providing them emotional support and transportation on an as-needed basis. "What’s shared from the heart touches the heart," Pagano said. "And they feel that."
Joey Pagano and Jodie Koget walk out of a Southwestern Pennsylvania Human Services office in Charleroi after reflecting on how their recovery journeys led them to each other. They plan to get married on Labor Day, a few days after attending a recovery convention in Orlando.
Joey Pagano and Jodie Koget take an hour to reflect on how they’ve stayed alive, how they’ve saved lives and why they’re together.
They say the word “recovery” 39 times.
As recovering heroin addicts, Pagano and Koget met at a 12-step recovery meeting and served together on the board of Club Serenity, a Charleroi-based recovery club. Pagano proposed to Koget last June at a KeyBank Pavilion gathering of the Wharf Rats, a group of Grateful Dead concertgoers who live free of drugs and alcohol. Koget and Pagano will get married on Labor Day in Clearwater Beach, Fla. — days after attending a recovery convention in Orlando.
“You have to be able to just not give up,” Pagano said.
Now Pagano, 42, of Charleroi and Koget, 38, of Carroll Township are care navigators for Southwestern Pennsylvania Human Services, working at SPHS’s Centers of Excellence in Monessen and Washington, Pa. respectively, from which they go out into the community to connect those in active addiction with appropriate treatment resources, often having to track down addicts who don’t want to be found.
Pagano has been clean for five and a half years, but he keeps the memory of his addiction close. He remembers not traveling outside of his block, enslaved to heroin, his mind telling him he didn’t need to eat or bathe as long as he got his fix.
“Hell isn’t just a place where you can go to,” Pagano said, with Koget sitting at his side in a SPHS conference room in Charleroi. “It’s something I carried around for a long time.”
Koget recalls that prior to her getting clean two years ago, her sister told her that she could be “the girl version of Joey P.” Pagano had already become president of Club Serenity, a position he stepped away from earlier this year.
“She said, ‘I can see it. If you get some clean time, you’ll be doing stuff like he is,'” Koget remembered.
They’re doing the same thing now at SPHS. They sit in on 9 a.m. staff meetings, going over the latest developments with clients, brainstorming client-care navigator combinations and other potential outreach methods. They brainstorm some more later in the day.
But it’s in between that they make the most impact, going out in the community to locate clients and then convince them that recovery is possible, even amid the lowest of lows ranging from weighing 80 pounds after no longer eating regularly to living in a crack house for a year.
Pagano’s voice drops to a whisper as he recalls moments when hopelessness gave way to healing before his eyes, like when he convinced a girlfriend of one of his clients in Belle Vernon who was crying in despair over her addiction to get help.
“We got her in the car,” Pagano said. “She’s now in treatment.”
HELP ALONG A JOURNEY
Scott Cummins was in active addiction at his friend’s Monessen apartment in December when Pagano and fellow care navigator Brett Semich came to take his friend into treatment. Cummins’s friend hesitated to go, asking Pagano and Semich what they would do with Cummins.
They talked Cummins into going to rehab, but Cummins had a special request. He had bought a car stereo system as a Christmas present for his 17-year-old daughter, and he wanted Pagano to get the stereo to her.
Pagano tried but recalled that since Cummins’s ex-wife wouldn’t allow their daughter to have the stereo, he held onto it, keeping it under his office seat and wondering for the next six months what had happened to Cummins.
Pagano had gotten Cummins into inpatient rehab but wasn’t able to reach him afterward.
“I thought this guy was gone,” Pagano said.
Then Pagano got a call from Cummins telling him he was seven months clean, living in Butler but traveling down to Monessen with his daughter for the day.
Pagano told Cummins he still had the stereo.
So last Monday, Cummins and his daughter met Pagano and finally picked up her stereo system, which Cummins hopes will help make her trip to the University of Tennessee for her freshman year there later this year a little easier.
“That’s a long trip to make with a crappy stereo,” Cummins said.
“Moments like that I thank God I do what I do,” Pagano said.
Cummins, 43, is amazed by how different his life is now from what it was just seven months ago, when he was at the rock bottom of a two-and-a-half-year slide into active heroin and fentanyl addiction.
After 23 days at Greenbriar Treatment Center in Washington, Cummins went to the Davis Archway halfway house in Butler, spending just under five months there before heading for an Oxford House in Butler, a self-supporting recovery home.
“It’s been a journey,” Cummins said. “One day at a time, stuff is starting to come together.”
Cummins has relapsed before but is determined to make the most out of a new life that could yield a return to construction work for him and the opportunity to be there for his daughter and 15-year-old son. Now he wants recovery not just for the sake of those around him, but for himself too.
“He’s helped me out more than he could ever know,” Cummins said of Pagano.
LIFETIME OF EXPERIENCE
SPHS approached Pagano when he was “winging this stuff” as president of all-volunteer Club Serenity, which provides peer support and mentoring for individuals throughout their recovery process and assist them in finding treatment programs like detoxification, inpatient or outpatient rehabilitation.
“They said, ‘We like what you’re doing here. Why don’t you come help us do that?'” Pagano remembered. ” … It made me feel like I was doing something really good and someone valued that.”
So Pagano started as a care navigator at SPHS in May 2017, with Koget starting two and a half months later. Since then, they’ve taken clients to medical appointments, given them emotional support during troubling court cases and assured them they know how they feel.
“Ninety percent (of people) in this job are in recovery,” Pagano said. “We all have that empathy factor. We all have that experience.”
“We’re successful because we partner with people in recovery,” said Kellie McKevitt, executive director of SPHS Behavioral Health Services. “We have the model and the clinical experience, so when you put us together with people who have a lifetime of experience, that makes us effective. We have synergy.”
Pagano is one of seven care navigators at the SPHS Center of Excellence in Monessen, one of 45 state-funded Centers of Excellence in Pennsylvania designated by Gov. Tom Wolf in 2016 with the aim of getting those with opioid use disorder into treatment sooner and longer.
Since the SPHS Center of Excellence in Monessen began operating in Feb. 2017, 551 total clients have been referred with 414 engaged in service. At the SPHS Center of Excellence in Washington, 514 clients have been referred with 358 engaged in service.
“It definitely saved my life,” Cummins said of SPHS’s mobile outreach.
Highlands Hospital in Connellsville is another Center of Excellence and has seen approximately 200 clients in the same span, according to Marianne Miele, director of health impact at the hospital. Miele added that while the Highlands Hospital Center of Excellence doesn’t track down clients like SPHS, it does connect clients with treatment programs and resources.
“It’s important because we understand,” Koget said.
“Joey and Jodie are two amazing, compassionate individuals who have been able to turn their struggles into something beautiful, which is instilling hope in those who are hopeless,” said Cheryld Emala, certified trauma specialist and executive of innovation and strategic alignment at SPHS. “They inspire me to be better to work harder, and that is someone who you want to be around.”
BELIEVING
“A lot of our dreams are the same.”
That’s how Pagano sums up that he and Koget complement each other as they look forward to marriage, another milestone amid a journey defined by gratitude.
Koget convinced Pagano to start an apparel company in November called Grateful and Clean Clothing, which produces shirts with messages of hope and thankfulness geared toward those in recovery. Pagano has written two books, both about recovery, and he’s pursuing an associate’s degree in human services from Westmoreland County Community College so he can gain more social work skills.
“Lost dreams do awaken when we get clean,” Pagano said. “I believe that.”
“There’s always help out there,” Cummins said.
Pagano thinks his late grandfather and namesake, who owned Pagano’s Shoe Store in Charleroi for decades, would be happy if he were looking down on him now.
“Just like my grandfather was a salesman, so am I today,” Pagano said. “Today, I sell hope.”