Do you know what it is like to be an addict? (Not to see one but to actually be one)

A story about a woman who calls herself Teacup (part of what was reported by NPR about a woman named Andrea Towson)...

she used for over 30 years and now is helping to aid recovery efforts in the opioid epidemic.

"I want this chapter of my life to close. Just end. I'm just — I'm done. And it's not happening fast enough," she told us. "I just want to wake up and eat breakfast and be normal, whatever that might be."

What followed may sound familiar to people who struggle with addiction. Towson sought treatment, only to find herself on a waiting list. Other times, she missed appointments with rehabilitation programs.

...

"Nowadays, everybody's scared. That fentanyl — that's death," she said. "I thank God I chose when I did — or He appointed me to be chosen — to change my mind when I did, because I know I wouldn't have made it. ... Thank God for another day."

Towson had her own near-death experience with fentanyl more than a year and a half ago, during a blizzard that dropped more than 2 feet of snow on Baltimore. She was getting high with a group of people, she told us. She and another woman were given the task of testing a new batch of dope. She wouldn't know until later that it was laced with fentanyl. It would be her first and last taste of the drug.

"When I opened my eyes, I was being lifted in the air," she recalled. "All I kept saying was 'I'm so cold.' They had set us outside and left us — didn't call an ambulance or nothing."

Towson was lucky. She said a police helicopter spotted her and called an ambulance. By the end of the night, she had been revived twice and hospitalized.

Still, she didn't stop getting high. It took more than six months — and seeing more and more people around her dying of overdoses — for her to finally commit to treatment.

"This is my truth. When you ready, you ready, and when you not, you not," said Towson. "And only you know that."

Recovery has its share of challenges. Towson needs to find a long-term place to live. She needs steady work. And she has to stay off drugs while living in the same neighborhood where she spent so many years getting high.