ADDICTED to drugs and shooting up 16 times a day, Jocelyn James resorted to stealing to fund her habit.
She wound up in jail twice, and was even on her state’s ‘most wanted’ list alongside murderers and violent offenders.
Her life spiralling out of control, she now looks back and questions how she survived.
“I was in such a dark place,”; Jocelyn, 45, from Alabama, USA, tells Sun Health.
“I lost my car, my driving license, and my job too.
“I was addicted to drugs – shooting up 16 times a day – and I was breaking into places and stealing things to fund my habit.
“It was a really bad life – I was doing lots of bad things and I had really lost my way.
“For five years I lived my life like that, stealing, getting locked up. It was a vicious cycle for me, and I couldn’t break it.
“I didn’t know if I was even going to survive.”;
Then in 2013, she was doing six months in a halfway house after being released from jail, when she decided enough was enough.
“I was sick of living that life, and I wanted to do something different,”; Jocelyn recalls.
“So I started to clean up my life, and I even set up an organisation to help other women like me, to help them learn life skills necessary to beat their addiction.
“It was such an amazing and rewarding thing to do.
“I wanted these women to realise that there is help out there for them, and it doesn’t matter what happens in your life, you can always turn it around.”;
Years later, in December 2019, now clean from Oxycontin (a painkiller available in the US only by prescription), Jocelyn was scrolling through Facebook when she suddenly came across a face that she recognised.
It was Terrell Potter – a cop, 68, who had put her behind bars twice after she’d been caught stealing.
He needed a kidney transplant, and Jocelyn didn’t hesitate to step forward.
“I may have been a drug addict but I still remembered his face,”; she says. “He’d arrested me several times and put me in jail.
“Intrigued, I read the post. It was from his family, desperately searching for a kidney to save his life.
“They were begging people to come forward, to see if they could be a possible match.
“I stared at the post and re-read it several times. And then it hit me. I could be the one to give Terrell a kidney.
“He may have put me in jail, but it helped me turn my life around.
“I just had this feeling, that saving Terrell’s life was what I was meant to do.”;
So Jocelyn replied to the post and, much to Terrell’s amazement, offered up her organ.
“He said that if he’d had to guess 100 people who may have come forward to help him, it would have never been me,”; she says.
“He was totally stunned – and said that he found it unbelievable that I was willing to do that for him, after everything that happened.
“But he was only doing his job, trying to make the world a better place.”;
Jocelyn went for tests at Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, to confirm her kidney was suitable, and doctors reportedly said they had “never come across a better match for a transplant”;.
“It was definitely meant to be,”; Jocelyn says.
He was totally stunned – and said that he found it unbelievable that I was willing to do that for him, after everything that happened.
“Terrell was overcome. The last time he’d seen me I was a drug addict, just desperate for her next fix. Now I was there, offering to save his life.
“It was amazing that after all the drug abuse, my kidneys were healthy enough to help him, but they were.
“And it was especially poignant for me – that I could use a part of my body that I’d abused for so long, to save someone else.
“And it just happened to be the cop who locked me up!”;
The transplant went ahead at the same hospital in July 2020.
Jocelyn, who now runs an organisation called The Place of Grace that works to aid women battling opioid addiction, says: “I wasn’t nervous – I was just glad to be able to help.
“Doctors wheeled me down to the operating theatre, where they took my healthy kidney out, and it was transplanted into Terrell, who was waiting in an adjoining room.
“When I groggily came around from the operation, all I could ask was: ‘Has it been a success? Has it worked?’
“The doctors told me that things were looking good and it had already started working well, which was such a relief.
“When I was finally able to see Terrell, he thanked me, with tears in his eyes.”;
Despite the distressing start, the pair now have a “great”; relationship, and even think of one another as family.
“We see each other regularly, and he tells me that he considers me as one of his daughters,”; Jocelyn says.
“It’s amazing to think that I have this relationship now – which started out by him throwing me behind bars.
“But I thank God he did – as it really helped me turn my life around.
“By rights, I should be dead now, from drug use. Instead I’ve been able to save a life.
“And to watch Terrell now with his family, enjoying a healthy life and many more years ahead of him, is such an amazing feeling.
