Life After Graduating High School at 16, Selling Coke in Strip Clubs, and 2 Dead Boyfriends

Life After Graduating High School at 16, Selling Coke in Strip Clubs, and 2 Dead Boyfriends

Apurva L. Vanguri-Weeks was the first American-born child in her family — raised by South Indian immigrant parents who didn't let her wear jeans, didn't let her date, and didn't let her cut her hair until senior year of high school. She was supposed to be a doctor. While at William & Mary on scholarship, she started drinking. The night she got drunk for real at a frat party, she came to with a 45-year-old recently-paroled man following her toward her dorm. Her RA got her to the hospital. Shortly after, she got kicked out of school for grades. Back in Houston, she met Ryan while working at Foley's, started smoking, started drinking heavily, then started doing — and selling — cocaine in strip clubs with him at night while working a pharmacy tech job by day and waiting tables at Pappacitos in between.  At 22, she was used as a straw buyer for two properties worth $1.5 million in a Houston mortgage fraud scheme that totaled $13 million.  The FBI came to her parents' house. She and Ryan lived out of hotels on Hillcroft to support an eight-ball-a-night habit. One night Ryan got paranoid on cocaine, ran onto the hotel roof, fell from the fourth floor, and died from a brain bleed. After the police searched the room, she finished what was left of the cocaine. She quit cocaine, but only because she'd moved on to drinking around the clock with Andy — a BMW finance director who was 20 years older, possessive, and married with two kids when they met. She got her second DWI driving his BMW drunk.  On a family trip to India for her sister's wedding, she had four or five 25-minute alcohol withdrawal seizures at a cousin's wedding before anyone knew what was happening to her. She woke up in ICU strapped to a bed and started drinking again before she left the country — hiding Kingfisher beers under the bed in her dad's hotel room. Three rehabs followed, plus repeated weekends in Fort Bend County jail. She got sober the second time to stay out of prison, met a vet named Donnie with untreated PTSD at her second rehab, and watched him relapse over and over until he tried heroin for the first time and died at a motel.  Four days after her one-year chip, she relapsed and spent the next two and a half months drinking in motel rooms, waiting to die. A 12-step call got her back into treatment for the third and final time. Today, Apurva is a nurse practitioner specializing in addiction medicine, runs her own clinic, and works alongside Dr. Shah at Harmony Grove Behavioral Health. She's been sober eleven years. She met her husband Richard — who has thirteen years sober — in AA, and they have a three-year-old son. APURVA L. VANGURI-WEEKS Apurva L. Vanguri-Weeks is a nurse practitioner in Houston specializing in addiction medicine. She runs her own clinic and works alongside Dr. Shah at Harmony Grove Behavioral Health. The first American-born child in her family, she got sober at 31 after three rehabs, two DWIs, the deaths of two boyfriends, and seizures at a cousin's wedding in India. She lives in Sugar Land with her husband Richard — whom she met in AA — and their three-year-old son. Matt Handy is the founder of Harmony Grove Behavioral Health in Houston, Texas, where their mission is to provide compassionate, evidence-based care for anyone facing addiction, mental health challenges, and co-occurring disorders. My Last Relapse explores what everyone is thinking but no one is saying about addiction and recovery through conversations with those whose lives have changed. For anyone disillusioned with traditional recovery and feeling left out, misunderstood, or weighed down by unrealistic expectations, this podcast looks ahead—rejecting the lies and dogma that keep people from imagining life without using. Got a question for us? Leave us a message or voicemail at mylastrelapse.com [https://mylastrelapse.com/] Follow Matt on Instagram @matthew.handy.17 [https://www.instagram.com/matthew.handy.17] About Harmony Grove Behavioral Health Harmony Grove delivers outpatient addiction and mental health treatment focused on wellness, creativity, and authentic human connection—providing a supportive space for healing that extends beyond traditional clinical care. Find out more at http://harmonygrovebh.com/ [http://harmonygrovebh.com/] Harmony Grove's IOP in Houston, Texas, is more than a program; it's a lifeline for those ready to take the next step in their recovery. We are ready to meet you where you are and find your unique path to change. If you're feeling overwhelmed or struggling, you don't have to face it alone. Reaching out for support is a sign of strength, and help is always available. If you or anyone you know needs help, give us a call 24 hours a day at 844-430-3060. Host: Matthew Handy Producer: Eva Sheie Assistant Producers: Mary Ellen Clarkson Engineering: Chris Mann Theme music: Survive The Tide, Machina Aeon Cover Art: DMARK My Last Relapse is a production of Kind Creative: kindcreative.com [https://kindcreative.com/]

Life After Abu Ghraib, an HPD Officer's Knee on My Neck and Losing My Sheriff's Badge

Edwin Henderson is 45, an Army veteran with one Iraq deployment, and a former Harris County deputy who watched his law-enforcement career end on the ground outside a Houston club. He now works in business development at West Oaks Hospital's Patriot Support Program for veterans and runs Chefs in the City as an executive chef on the side. He grew up the latchkey son of a single mother in north Houston, helping look after an older brother who was born blind while his mom worked hourly jobs and played piano for Pastor John Osteen's Lakewood Church back before Joel took it over. His father was almost entirely absent — Edwin can count the encounters on one hand — but the men of the church stepped in and taught him trades, work ethic, and the bones of an entrepreneur. He enlisted at 19, was in AIT at Fort Lee, Virginia on September 11, 2001, and deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom — a thirteen-month tour at Forward Operating Base Abu Ghraib in West Baghdad, the base taking rounds at 0300 on a routine. The unit's first translator turned out to be a spy. Edwin came home with night tremors and started drinking in Fayetteville before the deployment patches were unsewn. Back in Houston he spent two and a half years as a Harris County detention officer waiting for an academy seat, then five and a half years on patrol. The chapter that ended his law-enforcement career started outside a Houston club, off duty: he identified himself to two off-duty HPD officers working extra job, refused to be talked to with disrespect, and ended up cuffed in the gravel with his off-duty weapon pulled — a lieutenant who would later become HPD's Chief of Police standing over him saying "Deputy Henderson, I don't know what you did to be able to piss off my officers." The termination was overturned to a resignation. He never got back into law enforcement. What followed has been a long, still-unfinished stretch of unrecognized PTSD, drinking he didn't call addiction until he started sitting in on West Oaks treatment sessions and recognized himself in them, and recurring suicidal thoughts he is still actively working on with the VA. The trip that broke something open was a Heroes to Heroes pilgrimage to Israel shortly after — a baptism in the river Jordan that made the language he grew up in real for the first time. Edwin talks with Matt about being addicted without calling it that for over a decade, the destruction of the family unit and the inheritance left to men in this country, a generation of kids he sees making sober and chaste commitments their own parents never modeled, and why he keeps showing up to a service career that has fired him in every form it could. EDWIN HENDERSON is a U.S. Army veteran who deployed to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 and a former Harris County Sheriff's deputy. He serves as Veteran Business Development Representative for the Patriot Support Program at West Oaks Hospital in Houston, and is the executive chef and founder of Chefs in the City — Culinary Institute of America–trained through the Wounded Warrior Project. He is open about his ongoing work with the VA on PTSD and suicidal ideation, and about the long road of being a man trying to take his own advice. Follow Edwin on Instagram @chefsinthecity713 [https://www.instagram.com/chefsinthecity713/] Connect with Edwin on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwin-henderson-35a42b74] Learn more about West Oaks Hospital at westoakshospital.com [https://westoakshospital.com/] Matt Handy is the founder of Harmony Grove Behavioral Health in Houston, Texas, where their mission is to provide compassionate, evidence-based care for anyone facing addiction, mental health challenges, and co-occurring disorders. My Last Relapse explores what everyone is thinking but no one is saying about addiction and recovery through conversations with those whose lives have changed. For anyone disillusioned with traditional recovery and feeling left out, misunderstood, or weighed down by unrealistic expectations, this podcast looks ahead—rejecting the lies and dogma that keep people from imagining life without using. Got a question for us? Leave us a message or voicemail at mylastrelapse.com [https://mylastrelapse.com/] Follow Matt on Instagram @matthew.handy.17 [https://www.instagram.com/matthew.handy.17] About Harmony Grove Behavioral Health Harmony Grove delivers outpatient addiction and mental health treatment focused on wellness, creativity, and authentic human connection—providing a supportive space for healing that extends beyond traditional clinical care. Find out more at http://harmonygrovebh.com/ [http://harmonygrovebh.com/] Harmony Grove's IOP in Houston, Texas, is more than a program; it's a lifeline for those ready to take the next step in their recovery. We are ready to meet you where you are and find your unique path to change. If you're feeling overwhelmed or struggling, you don't have to face it alone. Reaching out for support is a sign of strength, and help is always available. If you or anyone you know needs help, give us a call 24 hours a day at 844-430-3060. Host: Matthew Handy Producer: Eva Sheie Assistant Producers: Mary Ellen Clarkson Engineering: Chris Mann Theme music: Survive The Tide, Machina Aeon Cover Art: DMARK

Life After Marrying for Bricks of Cocaine, Smoking Meth On My Way to a C-Section & Being Homeless With 2 Toddlers

Kimberley Brooke is 19 years clean from methamphetamine and has spent the last twelve of those years sitting across from people on the worst day of their lives. She got there the long way. Raised in Amarillo by parents she calls “hippies practicing free love,” Kimberley was molested by an uncle starting at age five and grew up inside what she calls "the land of the great pretenders" — picket fence, two dogs, upper-middle-class home, none of it close to the truth. By middle school she had decided all she had to offer was what was between her legs, and she started running. At 17 she was waiting tables. At 18 she was driving the getaway car while a friend threw a smaller guy through Toot 'n Totum windows all summer long, the whole crew on acid, the convenience stores eventually putting bars on every window in town. Meth came later.  She married her daughter's father after a quick scan of his garage, used through both her pregnancies, and was smoking on the way to her son's planned C-section — narrowly missing the year Texas began testing newborns. By her late thirties she was homeless, going hotel to hotel with two small kids in tow. In one moment of clarity she dropped her daughter off with one side of the family and her son with the other, then kept using for two more years.  The arrest that finally caught her in 2006 was the absurd one: a bright yellow shirt fleeing a Walmart shoplifting run in Canyon, Texas, an unlocked back door left open for a dog, a frantic dive under a stranger's bed, and a cop who pulled a shirt out of the closet to make her decent for transport — which is how a shoplifting charge became burglary of habitation. She did 13 months of a four-year sentence across three Texas prisons, watched women in her dorm act out elaborate make-believe family systems with mommies and daddies and kids in dog-ear ponytails, saw a woman's face slashed open with a razor blade in the shower her first week, and was protected the whole time through one connection.  Her grandfather refused to bail her out and she has thanked him for it ever since. She paroled out December 6, 2007, and never touched meth again. Her sister followed her into recovery a year and a half later after Kimberley stood at a door and refused to let her leave. Today, Kimberley is an LCDC and Program Manager at Altura Recovery in Houston, where she runs an adolescent SOP for 13- to 17-year-olds and adult IOP groups. She has worked everywhere — a men's prison, a methadone-Suboxone clinic as clinical director for nearly six years, and a luxury women's program that healed her more than any of her own treatment ever did.  She is writing a memoir titled "Fight Bitch," named after the line a man in county jail used to slap her out of her self-pity in November 2006.  KIMBERLEY BROOKE is an LCDC (Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor) and Program Manager at Altura Recovery in Houston, Texas, where she runs adult IOP groups and an adolescent SOP for 13- to 17-year-olds. She has worked in addiction treatment for nearly twelve years, including roles as a counselor intern inside a Texas men's prison, clinical director of a methadone-Suboxone clinic, and lead counselor at a women's luxury treatment center. She is 19 years clean from methamphetamine and is currently writing a memoir titled "Fight Bitch." Connect with Kimberley on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberley-brooke-b8425794/] Learn more about Altura Recovery at alturarecovery.com [https://alturarecovery.com/] Matt Handy is the founder of Harmony Grove Behavioral Health in Houston, Texas, where their mission is to provide compassionate, evidence-based care for anyone facing addiction, mental health challenges, and co-occurring disorders. My Last Relapse explores what everyone is thinking but no one is saying about addiction and recovery through conversations with those whose lives have changed. For anyone disillusioned with traditional recovery and feeling left out, misunderstood, or weighed down by unrealistic expectations, this podcast looks ahead—rejecting the lies and dogma that keep people from imagining life without using. Got a question for us? Leave us a message or voicemail at mylastrelapse.com [http://mylastrelapse.com/] Find us on YouTube @MyLastRelapse [https://www.youtube.com/@MyLastRelapse] Follow Matt on Instagram @matthew.handy.17 [https://www.instagram.com/matthew.handy.17/] About Harmony Grove Behavioral Health Harmony Grove delivers outpatient addiction and mental health treatment focused on wellness, creativity, and authentic human connection—providing a supportive space for healing that extends beyond traditional clinical care. Find out more at http://harmonygrovebh.com/ [http://harmonygrovebh.com/] Harmony Grove's IOP in Houston, Texas, is more than a program; it's a lifeline for those ready to take the next step in their recovery. We are ready to meet you where you are and find your unique path to change. If you're feeling overwhelmed or struggling, you don't have to face it alone. Reaching out for support is a sign of strength, and help is always available. If you or anyone you know needs help, give us a call 24 hours a day at 844-430-3060. Host: Matthew Handy Producer: Eva Sheie Assistant Producers: Mary Ellen Clarkson Engineering: Chris Mann Theme music: Survive The Tide, Machina Aeon [https://www.youtube.com/@MachinaAeonAI] Cover Art: DMARK [https://www.instagram.com/dmarkgraffiti/?hl=en] My Last Relapse is a production of Kind Creative: kindcreative.com [http://kindcreative.com/]

Judge Juli Mathew: How the Juvenile Mental Health Court She Built Hit an 85% Success Rate

When Judge Juli Mathew took the bench at Fort Bend County Court at Law No. 3 in 2018, she made history twice over — first Indian American woman elected to a bench in the United States, and first Asian American judge in one of the most diverse counties in Texas. Three years later she built something that didn't exist in the state yet: a juvenile court designed around mental health. Born in Kerala, India and raised in Philadelphia after her family immigrated when she was ten, Mathew attended Penn State, earned her JD at Delaware Law School, and spent fifteen years practicing civil litigation in Texas before deciding the bench in her county didn't reflect the people in it. She ran in 2018 with a six-month-old, a year-and-a-half-old, and a twelve-year-old at home, and won the seat outright. Her court handles nearly every kind of case Texas allows: criminal misdemeanors, juvenile cases, civil litigation up to $325,000, probate, guardianships, eminent domain, mental health commitments. The specialty court she created — JIMHS, the Juvenile Intervention and Mental Health Court, named for her husband Jim — pairs the judge, defense, prosecution, juvenile probation, and Texana's mental health team around a single kid who landed in the system with mental health challenges. About half of those kids have a substance abuse issue running underneath the diagnosis. The program reports an 85 percent success rate. On the adult side, Mathew oversees involuntary mental health commitments of 30, 45, 60, or 90 days, hears testimony before authorizing forced medication inside the jail, and takes the bench knowing that Texas's state-run mental health beds carry a wait of six months to a year. She talks with Matt about the cases that stay with her: the seventeen-year-old she had to certify into TDC after assaults, robberies, and pistol-whipping elderly residents during apartment burglaries; the young widow with newborn triplets probating her husband's estate after fentanyl killed him at a party. The conversation moves through the misdiagnosis trap inside addiction treatment, the brain-development cost of starting drugs young, the destruction of the family unit, and what it took for an immigrant kid from Kerala to run a campaign in a red county with three young children at home. Mathew is Syrian Orthodox — her ancestors were among the four families that converted in the year 52, after the apostle Thomas was shipwrecked off the coast of India — and faith runs through how she carries the work. She is currently seeking a third term on the bench. JUDGE JULI A. MATHEW is the Presiding Judge of Fort Bend County Court at Law No. 3 in Texas, where she made history in 2018 as the first Indian American woman elected to the bench in the United States and the first Asian American judge elected countywide in Fort Bend. A proud immigrant from Kerala, India and a Syrian Orthodox Christian, she founded the Juvenile Intervention and Mental Health Court (JIMHS) — the first specialty court of its kind in Texas — and serves as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Houston Law Center teaching Professional Strategic Writing. Follow Juli on Instagram @judgejulimathew [https://www.instagram.com/judgejulimathew/] Learn more about Judge Juli at judgejuli.com [https://judgejuli.com/] Connect with Juli on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/juli-mathew-a565b45/] Matt Handy is the founder of Harmony Grove Behavioral Health in Houston, Texas, where their mission is to provide compassionate, evidence-based care for anyone facing addiction, mental health challenges, and co-occurring disorders. My Last Relapse explores what everyone is thinking but no one is saying about addiction and recovery through conversations with those whose lives have changed. For anyone disillusioned with traditional recovery and feeling left out, misunderstood, or weighed down by unrealistic expectations, this podcast looks ahead—rejecting the lies and dogma that keep people from imagining life without using. Got a question for us? Leave us a message or voicemail at mylastrelapse.com [https://mylastrelapse.com/] Follow Matt on Instagram @matthew.handy.17 [https://www.instagram.com/matthew.handy.17/] About Harmony Grove Behavioral HealthHarmony Grove delivers outpatient addiction and mental health treatment focused on wellness, creativity, and authentic human connection—providing a supportive space for healing that extends beyond traditional clinical care. Find out more at http://harmonygrovebh.com/ [http://harmonygrovebh.com/] Harmony Grove's IOP in Houston, Texas, is more than a program; it's a lifeline for those ready to take the next step in their recovery. We are ready to meet you where you are and find your unique path to change. If you're feeling overwhelmed or struggling, you don't have to face it alone. Reaching out for support is a sign of strength, and help is always available. If you or anyone you know needs help, give us a call 24 hours a day at 844-430-3060. Host: Matthew Handy Producer: Eva Sheie Assistant Producer: Mary Ellen Clarkson Engineering: Chris Mann Theme music: Survive The Tide, Machina Aeon Cover Art: DMARK My Last Relapse is a production of Kind Creative: kindcreative.com [https://kindcreative.com]

Life After Dying 4x, Getting Fired While on a Ventilator, & Still Being Suicidal at 18 Yrs Sober

Frank Parisi flatlined during heart surgery on May 8, 2023. He came back. Twenty-six days later he received the transplant that gave him a second chance — a heart from a nineteen-year-old donor. He'd grown up in Little Italy, the son of a father tied to organized crime, and spent a decade hooked on opiates before getting sober in 2011. By 2023 he was thirteen years clean, in the gym every day, and doing national marketing for a treatment company.  Four doctors missed what was killing him before someone finally caught the rare pneumonia and sepsis that had moved into his chest. He kept working from the hospital — setting up West Coast Symposium meetings while intubated, dying and coming back four separate times before the new heart arrived. Then, while he was still on the breathing machine, the company he'd given five years to let him go. The decade-long friends he'd brought into his life started showing up at parties thrown by the people who did it. Jason Turner's wake-up call came differently. He got sober in 2003, worked at a private boarding school taking kids to Africa and Peru, then moved to Prescott, Arizona, and woke up one day asking where the industry he thought he'd entered had gone.  A three-hundred-pound powerlifter, he walked into a CrossFit gym thinking he'd dominate and got humbled — until an older stranger pulled up next to him mid-run and said, "I got you." He almost cried. Eighteen years into sobriety, he still came close to taking his own life. Abstinence wasn't wellness, and he knew it. Both men talk with Matt about the conversation Frank had with God on the ventilator, what it means to come back from the dead with a teenager's heart beating in your chest, and why eighteen years of being sober wasn't enough to keep Jason from the edge. FRANK PARISI is an international bestselling author, keynote speaker, and heart transplant survivor who lives in Austin with his wife Kat and their son Sonny. He published Embrace Abundance in August 2024 on the one-year anniversary of his transplant. He is a managing partner and brand ambassador at Emotion Wellness in San Antonio. Follow Frank on Instagram @frankparisi2011 [https://www.instagram.com/frankparisi2011/] Order Embrace Abundance at frank-parisi.com [https://frank-parisi.com/] JASON TURNER is the founder and CEO of Emotion Wellness, an aftercare program in San Antonio built around the idea that the nervous system has to come first. He served ten years in the Air Force, where he trained bomb-sniffing dogs, and is a Pat Tillman Scholar. He has been sober since 2003. Follow Jason on Instagram @e_motionguy [https://www.instagram.com/e_motionguy/] Learn more about Emotion Wellness at emotionwellness.com [https://emotionwellness.com/] Matt Handy is the founder of Harmony Grove Behavioral Health in Houston, Texas, where their mission is to provide compassionate, evidence-based care for anyone facing addiction, mental health challenges, and co-occurring disorders. My Last Relapse explores what everyone is thinking but no one is saying about addiction and recovery through conversations with those whose lives have changed. For anyone disillusioned with traditional recovery and feeling left out, misunderstood, or weighed down by unrealistic expectations, this podcast looks ahead—rejecting the lies and dogma that keep people from imagining life without using. Got a question for us? Leave us a message or voicemail at mylastrelapse.com [https://mylastrelapse.com/] Follow Matt on Instagram @matthew.handy.17 [https://www.instagram.com/matthew.handy.17/] About Harmony Grove Behavioral Health Harmony Grove delivers outpatient addiction and mental health treatment focused on wellness, creativity, and authentic human connection—providing a supportive space for healing that extends beyond traditional clinical care. Find out more at http://harmonygrovebh.com/ [http://harmonygrovebh.com/] Harmony Grove's IOP in Houston, Texas, is more than a program; it's a lifeline for those ready to take the next step in their recovery. We are ready to meet you where you are and find your unique path to change. If you're feeling overwhelmed or struggling, you don't have to face it alone. Reaching out for support is a sign of strength, and help is always available. If you or anyone you know needs help, give us a call 24 hours a day at 844-430-3060. Host: Matthew Handy Producer: Eva Sheie Assistant Producers: Mary Ellen Clarkson Engineering: Chris Mann Theme music: Survive The Tide, Machina Aeon Cover Art: DMARK My Last Relapse is a production of Kind Creative: kindcreative.com