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‘The Mayor of Maple Avenue’ Episode 6: Addict gets ‘dope sick’ and desperate

Patriot-News - 7/21/2022

For nine years, Shawn Sinisi had battled a drug addiction he said was rooted in the boyhood trauma of being sexually abused by serial child molester Jerry Sandusky.

For his parents, it had been nine years of worry, sleepless nights, arguments and negotiations. And the worst was yet to come.

Episode 6 of “The Mayor of Maple Avenue,” a podcast that tells the story of Shawn’s struggles to overcome his addiction, is available on Apple and Spotify.

Shawn had tried to reconnect with his family but seemed to run into obstacles at every turn. He’d tried halfway and sober houses, looked for a therapist but found none willing to take Medicaid; he tried staying with a relative experienced with addiction. None of it was easy, and none of it seemed to help.

Shawn was pulling his family into his chaos. He began using drugs again, and lost his job. He entered a rehab center, then walked out, then tried another place, with the same results. Shawn became homeless, wandering the streets of Pittsburgh with all his possessions in a garbage bag.

His family was in an impossible position. They didn’t want to enable Shawn’s addiction, but they couldn’t stomach writing him off. His mother, Marianne, remembers more than once calling him to see if he was still alive. She remembers a call from Shawn in which he made no sense, and realizing he was hallucinating.

“He was out back, up against the back of the fence, and he looked like I’ve never seen him,” she recalled. “It was almost like a wild look into his eyes, that he just like he wanted to close them, and he couldn’t. He was sick, physically sick, throwing up, dark circles, awful. He just looked awful, and he said that he had been up for five days and could not sleep.”

Marianne learned what it was to be dope sick — vomiting, diarrhea and more — as he suffered through withdrawal.

Shawn didn’t give up. He always was trying to get into another rehab center. But he was caught in a cycle: he’d check into a rehab facility, and get dope sick. Generally he was allowed a few days, or a week at most, to detox. That meant he’d get violently ill, making him desperate and angry, and more apt to give up and walk away.

In her desperation, believing that her son’s life was at stake, Marianne tried the only thing she could think of: She turned to Penn State — again — to ask for help.

©2022 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit pennlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.