Amy Eloge lived hard and fast for a dozen years before she got busted four times by Lincoln police in 2007 for stealing to support a meth habit.
The 35-year-old said she had tried a few times to quit, but she was in too deep.
She was scared and facing prison time on felony charges, but what happened next helped her turn her life around, Eloge said.
She got accepted into Lancaster County Adult Drug Court.
More than five years after she graduated from the problem-solving court that is an alternative to prison and had her charges dismissed, Eloge is hoping to graduate from Southeast Community College within the year and start working in a treatment center with people struggling with addiction or recently released from prison.
"I just want to say thank you to Judge (Paul) Merritt and Judge (Karen) Flowers, and to everyone who saw something in me when I didn't," she said.
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When she learned both of the judges -- who led drug court when she went through it -- had retired, Eloge contacted the Journal Star, wanting to know how to thank them.
And she shared her story.
Eloge said what started not long after she dropped out of high school in Mead at age 16, feeling bullied over her weight and like she didn't fit in, quickly escalated from booze to meth.
That first time, she said, was "scary as hell." But at the same time, it was a feeling she'd never felt before and she wanted to know if it would feel the same a second time.
"Before I knew it, I was wrapped up in it," Eloge said. "It was the worst decision I made."
An addict lives life like a robot, she said. You get up, get high and try to figure out how to stay high.
The poison she put in her body took its toll.
And the legal troubles followed.
In July 2004, a Saunders County judge sent her to prison in York for a short stint on a possession charge. But she was back using meth two days after she got out.
By May 2006, Eloge was in trouble again, the start of a string of misdemeanor arrests.
"I was too far gone into it," she said. "When it came to the point I couldn't look myself in the mirror to brush my hair, I knew I had gone too far."
She started praying to God to make it stop.
About a week later, she was charged with two felonies, facing prison time and scared.
Eloge said her public defenders, Chris Eickholt and Elizabeth Elliott, knew prison wasn't the answer and fought to get her in drug court. So did her husband, Darrell. But she didn't see it going anywhere.
"I wanted to get out right away," she said of that first day. "But something made me stick around."
Eloge said she learned to hold herself accountable in the months of weekly Friday meetings. When she screwed up, she knew there would be consequences, and the "way to gos" from the judges made her feel good.
"I felt I needed to do right by them because they were investing their time in me," she said of Merritt and Flowers.
But Eloge said she was doing it for herself, too, and her family. She remembers her mom, close to the end, sick with cancer, scolding her for pumping poison in her body to try to kill herself, while she was forced to pump poison in her body to stay alive.
"From then on, I knew I needed to fight, and I knew I needed to get it right," she said.
Eloge's mom died at 59, while she was still in drug court. Then, she lost her father-in-law, followed by her mother-in-law.
It's been hard, she said, and she's had to fight brief thoughts that it'd be easier just to get high.
"But you're just covering up a mess. You have to face it sooner or later. That's one thing that drug court taught me," Eloge said.
She knows it's better to go head-on into problems and deal with them. When she struggled with the deaths, she started going to grief counseling.
"There will be major speed bumps," she said of life after drug court. "But it's how you deal with them."
Eloge graduated from drug court on an August day in 2009, with her dad, two of her three kids, her brother and her nephew in the crowd. Today, it still makes her feel good to see the certificate hanging on the wall in her dad's room.
To the latest drug court graduates and the new class just getting started this month, she said, hold on.
"I know it's hard. You want to throw in the towel. Don't," Eloge said.
There's a method to what they're doing, she said. And if it didn't work, "I wouldn't be here."
"They gave me a life back. They gave me a family."