It was just a running injury.
Last spring, Jessica Grubb felt some pain in her left hip.
But she loved to run - "Run like a girl," she would say - so she kept going.
It didn't get better. Swelling developed into a bacterial infection and she had surgery in the summer to fix it.
Last month the infection came back. Another surgery was required - certainly not the best thing, but not too serious.
Her parents drove from Charleston to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to be with her.
They were very careful. Jessie Grubb was in recovery. She had battled heroin addiction for nearly seven years.
Opioid painkillers have an almost identical molecular makeup to heroin. Jessie should not be given opioids after the surgery, her parents told her doctors. If opioids were absolutely necessary, they should be administered under the strictest supervision.
They told the nurses. They told the orthopedist. They told the infectious- disease people. They told the surgeon.
Jessie had the surgery on Feb. 24. It went well. She was discharged a week later, on March 1.
No one had spoken to her discharging doctor.
He wrote Jessie a prescription for 50 oxycodone pills. She filled it at the hospital pharmacy.
That night, she called her parents back in Charleston. After eight days in the hospital, she was tired, she said. She just wanted a good night's sleep.
They never spoke to her again.
Jessie Grubb died in her sleep.
When the police searched her apartment, eight of the 50 oxycodone tablets were missing.
Jessie's family drove back to Ann Arbor to clean out her apartment. "The hardest thing I've ever had to do," said David Grubb, her father.
He called the discharging doctor. Why? Why had he prescribed the opioids?
According to Grubb, the doctor said that was normal, post-surgery.
But didn't you know she was an addict in recovery, Grubb asked?
There was a long pause. "I had no idea," the doctor said.
"For a recovering addict, it's like putting a bottle of bourbon in front of an alcoholic; it's just too great a temptation and it's just a thing that never, ever should have been put in front of her," David Grubb said. "She went home with, in essence, a loaded gun."
David Grubb had told his daughter's story before, in happier times.
In October 2015, during President Barack Obama's visit to Charleston, Grubb told him that Jessie was in her fourth bout of rehab, but "we are full of hope."
He told Obama about her overdose in August, when she stopped breathing and her mother's CPR and quick-responding EMTs saved her life.
He talked about her addiction and the toll it had taken on their family, on her four sisters.
He pleaded for more treatment options for those battling addiction.
"Where do you get the treatment? How do you get the treatment?" Grubb asked the president. "The bottom line is, we need resources and we need to find a way to put those resources into effect so that we have the facilities, because there's so many people that want help, like our daughter, but it took forever to find a place for her."
By all accounts, Grubb's story had a profound impact on Obama.
"Since that day, whenever Obama has privately discussed the heroin and opioid epidemic with lawmakers, advisers or other White House visitors, the conversation drifted back to the Grubb family," The Huffington Post reported.
Among the hundreds of notes and letters that the Grubb family has received since Jessie's death were two from Obama.
"I was heartbroken by your daughter's passing," Obama wrote in early March, a week after Jessie died. "I was deeply moved by her story when I visited Charleston."
On Monday, another note from the president arrived; this one was handwritten.
"Michelle and I want to offer our deepest condolences for the tragic loss of Jessie," the president wrote. "Your willingness to share your family's story left a powerful impression on me, and has helped accelerate efforts to deal with this national epidemic of addiction. Please know you are in our thoughts and prayers, and that your advocacy will make a difference."
Jessie Grubb was in Ann Arbor for rehab because her family couldn't find a facility in West Virginia with an open spot.
The president's proposed budget, released after his visit to Charleston, includes an additional $1.1 billion for treatment to battle the opioid epidemic.
Jessie was in a rehab facility that advocated sobriety for opioid addiction, as opposed to medically-assisted treatment with a buprenorphine-based drug.
"A lot of the statistics show that the more effective thing is to provide medication at the same time," David Grubb said. But they went with the rehab facility they could find.
She was doing well. She had checked out of rehab; moved into an apartment with a friend; had a job at a sandwich shop.
"It was always one day at a time - avoid triggers," David Grubb said, "but it was just too much when it's in her hand."
Tuesday afternoon in Atlanta, in his first major forum on the opioid epidemic since Charleston, Obama announced more funding for addiction treatment and changes to national drug policy.
He mentioned his town hall in Charleston, and Grubb, as an influence.
"The child of the mayor of Charleston, the child of the minority leader in the House in West Virginia [he meant the Senate], a former state senator [Grubb], all of them had been impacted by opioid abuse," Obama said. "It gave you a sense that this is not something that's just restricted to a small set of communities. This is affecting everybody."
Obama announced that the federal government would ease regulations on doctors that prescribe buprenorphine, doubling the number of patients each doctor can treat.
Obama also announced that more than 60 medical schools, including West Virginia and Marshall universities, have agreed to add instruction in opioid prescribing to their required curriculum.
Dr. Carl Sullivan has run the addiction program at WVU Medicine for 30 years.
He said tragedies like Jessie's, or near tragedies, happen all the time.
Monday morning, he got a call from one of his patients, furious.
She'd had a couple of teeth removed. She had told the attendant three times: "I'm in recovery, I can't have opioids."
They sent her out with a prescription for hydrocodone.
"They don't really get it, so even when a patient tells and they tell and tell, some doctors just don't, they just don't know anything at all about it. And so they revert back to what they know, which is the wrong things," Sullivan said. "I just don't think they get it when a patient tells them 'I'm an opioid addict.' I don't think they know what that really means."
Addiction, doctors say, is not a matter of willpower. It is a disease.
So maybe it was luck. Maybe it was happenstance. Maybe it was because she had been sober for a little longer or because she was taking medication.
Whatever the reason, unlike Jessie Grubb, Sullivan's patient did not fill the prescription. She called him to vent, instead.
"There but for the grace of God . . . ," Obama, who dabbled in drugs as a young man, said last fall in Charleston.
She's changed the president's thinking, but Jessie's parents hope something more can come from her life and death. They've set up a memorial fund online, at www.youcaring.com/JessicaGrubbMemorialFund.
One of Jessie's younger sisters, Emma, has autism and needs near-constant care. Jessie and her sisters had promised to care for her if anything ever happened to their parents.
They'd like to build a new facility near Charleston, a home, for Emma and other adults with developmental disabilities. It would be called Jessa's Place.
They'd also like to fix the hospital communication breakdown that led to Jessie's death.
A patient's electronic medical records can alert doctors if they're about to make a terrible mistake.
"If you tell the hospital that you have an allergic reaction to penicillin, it's part of your medical records; if your doctor tries to write a prescription for penicillin, it blocks it," David Grubb said. "If they had something in the medical record that was similar to that when they tried to prescribe opioids . . ."
He trailed off.
After Jessie's death, Grubb got a call from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. The two had served together in the West Virginia Senate in the 1990s.
They talked about a potential "Jessie's law" that would require medical records to prominently display a patient's opioid addiction.
Manchin spoke about it Monday with the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the director of the Food and Drug Administration, his spokesman said.
All were open to the idea.
When Jessie left the hospital, she also was given an intravenous catheter line in her shoulder, where she would receive antibiotics. Her parents had misgivings. She had a history of IV drug use. The doctors said it was the only way
While the prescription was far more egregious, the IV line was another example of treatment that wasn't designed for someone battling addiction - another potential trigger.
Grubb talked about the CDC's new guidelines on opioid prescribing, an effort to prescribe fewer pills - and only when there are no other options.
Changes in prescribing. Increased funding. More education for doctors. More and better treatment. Better medical records.
They're all facets of the same battle against this epidemic.
"They're just now connecting the dots on some of this stuff," Grubb said. "Addicts are going to have to go into the hospital for back problems or surgeries or stuff. You've got to have a way to prevent this type of tragedy from happening over and over again.
"We're changed forever. We'll never be the same."
Reach David Gutman at david.gutman@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5119 or follow @davidlgutman on Twitter.