Recovered addict Stephanie Costello is in the business of saving lives, but nearly lost hers to get there.

The former Hudson woman’s drug use began with marijuana when she was a 14-year-old Alvirne High School student and escalated into an obsessive "addiction to more" – more drugs, different drugs, better drugs.

"I was going to school for nursing, and found opiates," Costello, 25, said of moving into the world of prescription pills at age 19.

Lines she said she would never cross disappeared. Oxycontin, Percocet and other narcotics lost their allure after two years. Her drug dealer suggested heroin. She tried it.

"It was probably the best feeling in my life. I fell in love that day," Costello said during an interview at Serenity House in Manchester last spring. She went from snorting heroin to injecting it. She dropped out of nursing school to focus on work – and drugs.

"When you are in active addiction, nothing else matters," she said.

Costello couldn’t accept that she was an addict – even when she nearly died from a needle wound infection that spread to her blood and heart and required two surgeries.

"Every day you are waking up sick. You have to find ways and means to get that drug. No one else matters in the world," she said.

The turning point came when she was 24, doing her third stint in a year at Hillsborough County jail in Manchester, and facing a prison sentence. Then, her mother called.

"My mother told me she expected a phone call saying to prepare for my funeral," Costello said.

Costello was shaken. She signed up for the waiting lists at every substance-abuse treatment center in the state. Two weeks after her release from jail, she was accepted at a 28-day rehabilitation program at Phoenix House in Franklin. She later went to Lynn’s Place, a transitional program for women at Serenity Place, a nonprofit addiction treatment and counseling agency.

What began was not only a journey of recovery, but discovery.

Costello realized she used drugs to numb feelings that haunted her since childhood. Even as a child, she was a "cutter" who sliced her flesh to escape her feelings, she said.

"I didn’t believe in myself. I didn’t like the person I was," she said.

Serenity Place staff "pushed me to … my breaking point (to see) that I was worth it and that it wasn’t worth dying from," she said.

"Lives are saved here," the brunette added with a smile.

Costello has been drug-free for more than a year and now works at Serenity Place helping other addicts in recovery.

"Being in recovery is the ability to help people on a daily basis. Help them save their lives, and help me save mine," she said.

Costello said she is proud to call herself a recovered addict.

Her message to others: "The pain ends. Recovery is possible."

Kathryn Marchocki can be reached at 594-6589, kmarchocki@nashuatelegraph.com, or @Telegraph_KMar.