Erica hit rock bottom when she showed up drunk to a breakfast with friends. A concerned friend drove her to a counselor, who called the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation , a nonprofit addiction treatment provider with centers throughout the country. Erica made plans to check in. “My family thought I was addicted to alcohol,” she says. They had noticed that her drinking was escalating, and her son told her, “I’m afraid you’re going to get in a car wreck and die.”When Erica went to the treatment center, she finally told her family about the painkillers, saying, “I have a much bigger problem.” Her family was shocked. “My husband was furious when he found out I had been lying,” she says, and her marriage unraveled, eventually ending in divorce. She spent around three months at the center and another month in an outpatient program. Her insurance paid for only a month’s worth of care, and it was a battle to get it. The insurer had initially planned to cover only 13 days, she says, but she filed four appeals over the course of a year to get a month paid. “Insurance companies still don’t treat addiction like a disease, the same as other diseases,” she says. (Costs for drug rehabilitation vary, but can add up to tens of thousands of dollars .)Erica marked a year of sobriety in May of this year. But recovery is a process that can go on long past rehab.One woman who knows that from experience is a former nonprofit worker and mother of four who goes by the nickname CB. (She has asked to keep her full name private, citing the stigma of addiction.) CB has been in recovery for five years, and says it is a daily battle. She keeps count of every single day of sobriety. “It’s 1,814 days today,” she says. The tally helps her ward off temptation: “I don’t want to start over, back at day one.”CB’s problem began when she was in her thirties, after she fell and smacked the back of her head on a marble floor. She suffered a traumatic brain injury that left her with no sense of smell or taste, along with chronic migraines. “I had a headache the size of Texas,” she says.Doctors prescribed painkillers, and she quickly got hooked, she says, sparking “four years of hell.” Like Erica, she was on a “constant quest for the pills,” sometimes downing the entire month’s supply in a week or less. “I justified it, telling myself, I’m using medication, not doing drugs.” She went to several different doctors, manipulating them to keep the prescriptions flowing. “I would fill my hand with pills and swallow them — I didn’t care how many pills were in my hand,” she says. “It felt nefarious and disgusting.” She saw no end to her addiction. Her husband stepped in, driving her to a Caron treatment center and saying, “I can’t take this. I don’t want to have to worry about whether you’re dead under the deck.”At first, she says, she felt like the center was jail. “I was ranting and raving about the stupidity of the place and the people,” she recounts. “I said, ‘Rehab is for people who live under bridges.’ A doctor said, ‘Well, that hasn’t happened to you — yet.’” The warning became a turning point, and she started cooperating with the program.