Part Two with Karissa Foster: Her Entire Family was Gone in an Instant

Part Two with Karissa Foster: Her Entire Family was Gone in an Instant

How do individuals turn their lives around after addiction? This instalment of Chasing Heroine follows Karissa Foster into the hardest chapter of her life, long after she first got clean.

You’ll hear how Karissa’s recovery began at 21 with a court-ordered trip to AA, a first sponsor, and working the steps until people at meetings started saying, "You've changed" and "You've grown so much." Her sobriety, however, unfolded alongside chaos: six years with a partner in active heroin addiction, nights spent in dealers’ houses as the only sober person, and learning painful lessons about boundaries. The episode then moves into the devastating heart of her story.

Seven and a half months pregnant with twin boys, Karissa gets a call from her aunt: "Your mom, your dad and your brother, they weren't able to revive them... They all three overdosed at the same time." She describes the shock, the panic, and being rushed into hospital in preterm labour, all while begging for medication she couldn’t safely have because of the pregnancy.

From there, it’s survival mode: giving birth to twins a month after the triple overdose, intense postpartum depression and anxiety, homelessness with newborns, losing her possessions when a storage unit was auctioned off, and finally uprooting to Florida to accept family help and start again. Through it all, she stays sober, saying she’d always believed her mum’s death would make her relapse, yet it didn’t.

Karissa also shares how she now parents twin boys with complex needs, copes with ongoing grief, plays pool with gangster rap in her headphones as a form of self-care, leans on her sponsor and AA friendships, and holds onto dreams of writing a book and working in behavioural health. If you’re wondering whether long-term sobriety can survive the unthinkable, Karissa’s story might be the perspective you’ve been waiting for.