It's hard to say just how many nurses are affected by substance abuse, according to Maureen Sullivan Dinnan, executive director of Health Assistance Intervention Education Network — but based on her experience with the confidential health network for medical professionals, she said nurses suffer substance abuse disorders at least at the same rate as the general population.

New London, Conn. ? For 48-year-old Kate, two things run in the family: nursing and addiction.

After overcoming alcohol and cocaine addiction in her early 20s to become a registered nurse in her late 20s, she thought she was in the clear.

But within four years of getting her license, a downward spiral that went from a pelvic fracture to an ugly divorce found Kate sneaking into the waste medication closet of the nursing home where she worked, lifting oxycodone and Xanax.

Kate agreed to share her story on the condition The Day maintains her anonymity.

“It was kind of subtle,” Kate said of the years leading up to when she was caught stealing drugs. “I never had the idea, ‘Well, I think I’m going to end up being an addict,’ but ultimately that’s where it led.”

Now more than a year-and-a-half sober, Kate said people still are surprised when they hear her story, wondering how a nurse could wind up an addict.

But Kate said the access nurses have, coupled with their mentality, should make it less than shocking.

“In nursing, we’re taught that medication solves problems,” she said. “That’s what we do. We change meds. We start meds. We stop meds. It’s very much an ingrained idea in many nurses’ thought processes. Even when I was using I was acutely aware of other nurses with similar problems — you know, it takes one to know one.”

It’s hard to say just how many nurses are affected by substance abuse, according to Maureen Sullivan Dinnan, executive director of Health Assistance Intervention Education Network, or HAVEN.

But, based on her experience with the confidential health network for medical professionals, she said nurses suffer substance abuse disorders at least at the same rate as the general population.

According to a state Department of Public Health roster, 384 of about 62,063 registered nurses with active licenses, or 0.62 percent, have licenses that have been disciplined in the past or currently are suspended, restricted, on probation or facing charges.

The roster doesn’t specify what led to disciplinary action for those 384 nurses, but of the 266 individuals who have been sanctioned in the past five years, at least 57 percent underwent or are undergoing disciplinary action for a substance abuse-related case.

Many of the nurses’ records tell a similar story: They diverted a controlled substance — Vicodin, Percocet, Valium, Xanax, diazepam, oxycodone — from a medical center’s stock or directly from a patient on one or more occasions and fudged records to cover it up.

In one case, a nurse overdosed while on the job.

Others faced disciplinary action after being convicted of one or more DUIs.

Some of them go through the standard four-year probation, successfully. Others appear to relapse again and again until they either voluntarily give up their licenses or have them revoked.

The 384 nurses named in the active registered nurse roster don’t include those whose licenses are inactive because they’ve been revoked or not renewed as a result of substance abuse or for any other reason.

Additionally, more than 200 registered nurses and advanced practice registered nurses choose each year to use HAVEN’s confidential services rather than entering the state’s public license regulatory action process.

As a result, while HAVEN’s annual reports show more than 90 percent of those nurses are dealing with a substance abuse disorder, there’s no indication of that in publicly available records.

“Having lived through the middle of it, it’s hard to imagine why (addiction) wouldn’t be a huge problem” among nurses, Kate said. “It is a huge problem.”

At first, when the prescriptions for the medications Kate had after her pelvic fracture and the two resulting back surgeries ran out in the early 2000s, she went “doctor shopping.” With similar prescriptions from two or more doctors in hand, she’d charge one to her insurance and pay for others in cash.

But after she went through “one of the worst divorces that I’ve heard of” about 12 years ago, she started using benzodiazepines in addition to opiates so she could sleep at night.

That went on for a couple of years before drug control, through an audit, caught her stealing from the closet of the nursing home where she worked at the time. She was fired.

Addicted, income-less and without insurance — not to mention the alienation from her two disappointed daughters she faced at the time — Kate said the thought of using heroin crossed her mind, but the realization of how bad her situation already was stopped it in its tracks.

She entered into HAVEN, began going to meetings and getting screened for drugs and eventually was hired at another nursing home where colleagues she knew from years past were willing to give her a second chance.

But then, a few years ago, a second injury and the resulting opiates she received forced Kate to confront her addiction. She was contemplating stealing from patients’ drug supplies — something she’d never done and never ended up doing — and decided to resign.

“I had to realize, I am not the person I want to be — I am far from it. I can’t even trust myself anymore,” Kate said. “That was it. That was my rock bottom moment.”

She voluntarily began going through the public state DPH license regulatory action process, overcoming the immediate and longer-term physical symptoms of withdrawal, meeting other nurses in recovery and learning she was far from the only one struggling.

Chris Andresen, chief of practitioner licensing and investigations for the state DPH, broke down the regulatory action process in a telephone interview last week.

He said that although his department gathers pertinent information about nurses facing allegations, it’s up to the Board of Examiners for Nursing to determine what action, if any, is brought against them.

Andresen said DPH officials look at a nurse’s records, collect testimonies from the nurse and those close to the nurse and examine any past actions taken against the nurse when investigating.

From there, if the allegations are found to be credible, one of two things can happen: Either the officials will work with the nurse to come up with a consent order that has various probationary measures, or the nurse will opt to go to a public hearing in front of the board.

In the case of the latter, the board, rather than the DPH investigators, dictates the terms of what is called a memorandum of decision.

In many cases, a nurse is placed on suspension for a period of time before beginning probation.

Andresen said it’s hard for him to say how big of an issue, if an issue at all, substance abuse among nurses is, but he acknowledged that substance abuse makes up a “large” portion of the types of cases his department investigates among nurses.

For Kate, the terms of the consent order to which she agreed were just what she needed to stay clean.

“I tried probably a hundred times to stop on my own and I just didn’t have the courage to tell someone,” she said. “I was really scared. I didn’t know what happened to nurses that end up with this problem. I didn’t know there was an organization specifically for it, or that there were many other nurses out there with the same issue.”

Now, about a year-and-a-half and 26 job interviews later, Kate works as a nurse manager helping those in recovery. It’s a different type of nursing — mental health, rather than sub-acute — but she loves it.

Kate, who still is drug screened weekly, said she thinks about the path she took “every day” and is thankful the DPH gave her another chance.

“I really don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t be a nurse — there’s not really anything else I want to do,” Kate said. “If that were taken away permanently … maybe I wouldn’t be clean.”