News

Nik's Run seeks to raise addiction awareness

Nik Fredrick died of a heroin overdose in October 2013 at age 22.

By Bill Moss, Published: April 10, 2017

Patti Fredrick-Enloe kept hoping for the best. Her son, a star athlete in high school, had fallen into addiction, first with alcohol, then pain pills and finally heroin. She hoped he would not become a statistic, one of 13,000 North Carolinians since 1999 to die of an accidental overdose. That hope was dashed when a law officer knocked on the family’s door on Oct. 29, 2013.

“The sheriff came to the house in Goldsboro and told my husband he was found dead on a railroad track with a needle in his arm,” Fredrick-Enloe said.
Nikolas Stephen Fredrick was 22.
Although she knows she can’t bring her son back, Fredrick-Enloe hopes by raising awareness of the deadly consequences of opioid abuse — and courageously and publicly owning her own struggle with alcoholism — she might save one more kid from becoming a statistic and breaking a family’s heart.
The second annual Nik’s Run for Addiction Awareness, a 5k and 1-mile run or walk, will take place at 10 a.m. May 13 at Patton Park. The fundraiser benefits PATHS, the Psychiatric and Addictions Therapeutic Healing Services unit at Pardee Hospital.
“Nik was a normal child, very outgoing, very friendly,” said Fredrick-Enloe, who moved with her husband back to Hendersonville after he had been transferred to a plant in Eastern North Carolina. “When he was in high school (in Goldsboro) he was the Southeast Conference runner of the year.”

Two strikes

Active in the DECA club and Young Life, Nik was voted best looking in his graduating class in 2009 at Charles D. Aycock High School. His path toward substance abuse began after a traumatic accident.
“He was giving a friend a ride home on a country road,” Fredrick-Enloe said. “He missed a stop sign and the person he hit passed away at the scene.”
She figures that was strike 2. She owns strike 1.
“Nik was raised in an alcoholic home,” she said. “I’m a recovering alcoholic.”
Nik started drinking to dull the pain of the crash that took a life.
“Things kind of started changing,” his mom said. “It was his teenage years and coming from a generation of an addicted family, that kind of started that ball rolling.”
“He went to East Carolina University and the partying kind of picked up there,” she said. “At East Carolina they had a drunk bus that would bring you home from downtown.”
Free rides made drinking more convenient. Nik spiraled further into addition.
“We had him go to the Wilmington treatment center, but he had broken his hand and had been on pain pills, and in between his clean and sober time he would look for the pain pills,” his mom said. “They had gotten so expensive and people said, ‘Why don’t you just try heroine?’ ”
It was advice that would eventually kill him. Strike 3.
“I guess when my son passed away I was kind of at a turning point of do I just say screw it and go back and drink, or do I carry this message forward in order to make the living amends? So I’m going forward and my goal is to at least save one alcoholic. A lot of people think they can go back out one more time (and get high) and that one time may be the one time they don’t come back.”
Nik left behind his parents, family and friends and a girlfriend.

70 pills per person

As the death toll rises, schools and the medical community are putting greater emphasis on addiction awareness. This week, middle and high school students are taking a public stand against substance abuse during the weeklong “We Are Hope” campaign. Events include a Parent University at Blue Ridge Community College on Thursday, April 6, to help parents, foster parents, grandparents and other adults navigate the current climate, recognize warning signs of substance abuse and get answers to questions. The week culminates with the hanging of banners from four middle schools and six high schools at noon Friday, April 7, at the Historic Courthouse.
During a presentation at last week’s Pardee Hospital Board on spinal cord stimulation, an alternative to pain medications, physicians talked about the epidemic of opioid abuse.
“Last year the number of narcotics prescribed in Henderson County was 70 per person,” said Dr. David Ellis, chief medical officer at Pardee.
In a letter last month, North Carolina’s Health and Human Services secretary, Mandy Cohen, described the epidemic as a crisis.
“I need your help,” she said. Twenty years ago, physicians “were encouraged to treat pain more aggressively, sometimes without proper safety guidelines and training. Similarly, patients were incorrectly counseled that all pain could be readily and quickly controlled without long-term negative impacts. We now know that these along with complex social and economic factors and the highly addictive properties of opioids have created a perfect storm resulting in this crisis. The results have been devastating.”
Doctors wrote nearly 10 million opioid prescriptions last year. “Yet pain severity reported by patients remains unchanged,” Cohen said.
Last year, the Nik’s Run for Addiction Awareness raised $600 for the PATHS unit.
“This year the PATHS unit money will be used for particular items like A.A. Big Books and recovery material for the patients as well as educational materials for the staff and the public,” Fredrick-Enloe said. As a recovering alcoholic, “we have service work and part of that is taking an A.A. meeting to the PATH unit.”
“Every morning I awake to the heart-breaking reality that my son has died,” she said. Totally out of the blue, she and her husband, Greg, got word that Nik had left behind a blessing.
“Six months after Nik passed away, we were contacted that his daughter was born,” she said. “So out of the whole thing, when God closes a door he opens at least window.”
Raegan Nikolette turns 3 on April 16.

Nik’s Run for Addiction Awareness

In memory of Nikolas Stephen Fredrick (Jan. 31, 1991-Oct. 29, 2013)
5k and 1-mile run/walk
10 a.m. Saturday, May 13
Patton Park
Benefits PATHS unit at Pardee Hospital
To donate visit pardeehospitalfoundation.org (Nik’s Run)
‘Donations Optional. Awareness Mandatory’
More information: Patti Fredrick-Enloe, pfred333@yahoo.com.