‘It’s not right’: Sauk County to be without addiction recovery center with Tellurian to close

Amy Reid by Amy Reid

Sauk County is soon to be without another addiction resource center.

More than three years after it opened, Tellurian will close.

Just last year, SSM closed its addiction recovery facility, and Tellurian was supposed to make up for that. Now that none of them are there, the community is left wondering.

Charlotte Huelsemann knows the struggle firsthand. For more than 30 years, she’s been recovering from an alcohol addiction.

“Thank God the help was there when I needed it,” Huelsemann said. “I was pretty low in my life too, and thank the Lord they had the help because I benefited from it greatly.”

Soon others won’t have that, at least not in the same way.

“The need is very much a real issue,” said Kevin Florek, the CEO of Tellurian. “It’s a major epidemic. When the other programs closed, Tellurian was hopeful that we could come in and fill a need.”

Unfortunately funding and getting the right, qualified people to stay in Sauk County instead of taking a job in Madison got the best of them.

“It makes me angry,” Huelsemann said. “It makes me feel like they don’t care about our communities.”

She doesn’t want to see them go. She knows how badly it’s needed by people all over rural Wisconsin.

People like her son.

“He had a terrible, terrible drug and alcohol problem, and he just couldn’t get past it,” she said. “It was a major blow, but I’m getting through it.”

She’s far from the only person in Wisconsin that’s dealing with a loss from addiction, and those people say if we want a solution, the burden of recovery needs to sit on a community’s shoulders. Just like we rally for a person with cancer, the same mentality should exist with addiction.

“(People battling cancer) are in the fight of their life, and everyone around them is in that fight,” said Tom Farley, who has become an advocate for addiction recovery after his brother died from an overdose. “Addiction is such a lonely disease. There (are) so few people around that person fighting that fight with them. And that’s been the case for as long as I’ve been in the fight.”

Farley works with organizations like Tellurian to try and solve this problem too.

Even though the group has to move out of Sauk County, Florek is still figuring out how to help by trying to organize transportation for those struggling to come to Madison for treatment.

“We’re working really hard to let people know that just because you live in a rural community doesn’t mean you don’t deserve the same quality of care and length of stay that you would if you lived in Dane County or Milwaukee County,” Florek said.

Huelsemann hopes they come up with something, though preferably a new facility close to home.

Especially before it’s too late for someone else.

“There (are) people that are dying, and to just leave them, just drop them and leave them, it’s not right,” Huelsemann said. “It’s just not right. It’s not the human thing to do.”

The Sauk County facility won’t close until June.

To raise money for its other facilities, Tellurian has a charity golf tournament coming up at the end of the month.

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