By Jennifer K. Morita

May 12, 2025

Keeley O’Farrell believes preservation is important, which is hardly surprising. She’s a Sacramento State History major.

What makes O’Farrell extraordinary is how she herself persevered, fighting through crippling pain, drug addiction and homelessness to graduate summa cum laude last fall.

“I stomped up and down those History halls for four years. They knew who I was,” O’Farrell said. “I was going to ask questions. I was going to ask about opportunities. What did I have to lose?

“I’ve been through so much other stuff. I mean, I don’t like the word, ‘no.’ But if that’s the worst thing I hear, I’ve been through a lot worse.”

O’Farrell is the College of Arts and Letters Dean’s Award recipient for this academic year. The awards are given at Spring Commencement to the top graduating students in each of Sac State’s seven academic colleges.

“She demonstrated uncommon strength and determination to earn her degree, and her path through Sacramento State changed the trajectory of her life,” History Professor Patrick Ettinger wrote in his letter of recommendation. …

“That Keeley performed impressively in the major – and that she performed so well in and out of the classroom as she came off her medication-assisted addiction program – is extraordinary. To watch her grow intellectually even as she was bravely crawling out from underneath her addiction has inspired her classmates and professors.”

O’Farrell, a Mesa Verde High School graduate who grew up in Citrus Heights, was diagnosed with endometriosis when she was 19 years old. A student at American River College at the time, O’Farrell suffered intense pain caused by tissue growing outside of her uterus.

“I got very, very lucky. I mean, I did work hard. But without my grandfather and his unwavering patience and his ability to pay for medical treatments, I wouldn’t be here.” -- Keeley O’Farrell 

Doctors prescribed an opioid called Norco.

“It was on my bladder, it was everywhere, and I was in horrific pain,” O’Farrell said. “And for a while, the drugs helped. I could work. I could go to school. I could hang out with my friends.

“But that quickly turned into something else.”

It wasn’t long before O’Farrell found herself taking Norco to not only relieve the pain, but stave off withdrawals.

“It’s like the flu times a million, and you want to die,” she said.

Eventually, doctors realized O’Farrell was addicted and stopped prescribing the drug. But by then it was too late.

She dropped out of school and resorted to lying and stealing to get pills, all the while still dealing with terrible pain. O’Farrell wanted a hysterectomy, but her physicians refused, and an obstetrician advised getting pregnant instead.

“I knew from a very young age I didn’t want children. It’s hard to raise a good, productive human being. I’ll stick with my dogs,” O’Farrell said.

She became homeless until her grandfather, Roger Harrison, called to offer her a lifeline. Together, they searched for a doctor who would perform a hysterectomy if she harvested her eggs.

When O’Farrell woke from surgery, the pain was gone. The road to sobriety, however, was just beginning.

With her grandfather’s help, O’Farrell went through intensive therapy and medication-assisted treatment for her addiction.

“You’ve been numb for so long, and no one ever tells you that after the drugs are out of your system, you have to relearn everything,” O’Farrell said. “You’re feeling everything again for the first time in seven years, and it’s incredibly hard, just absolutely insane.

“My grandfather took copious amounts of friendly fire, and he never, ever gave up on me.”

By spring 2020, she was ready to, tentatively, return to school and enrolled in one History class at Sac State, earning an A. She took more classes and began transitioning off Suboxone, the drug used to treat her opioid dependency.

“It was hell,” O’Farrell said. “I was so sick, my body ached, and it took years for my body to regulate from that medication. I honestly don’t remember a lot of that (semester). I was just trying to get through it.”

O’Farrell earned A’s in all of her classes and became active in the History department’s honor society, Phi Alpha Theta. She joined the award-winning journal “Clio” and wrote a grant that secured $1,500 to subsidize its publication.

“I got very, very lucky,” she said. “I mean, I did work hard. But without my grandfather and his unwavering patience and his ability to pay for medical treatments, I wouldn’t be here.”

O’Farrell fell in love with public history after interning with the Placer County Museums Division, where she organized a collection of artifacts from the closed Gold Rush Medical Museum.

“We got to go through all these old medical instruments and old medication, where we had to wear gloves and scrubs and masks because there were things like strychnine and arsenic,” she said. “I was in heaven. It was just weird and exciting, and I learned about how to catalog all of that and how to create a database for people to find information.”

Today, O’Farrell is healthy, sober and on to the next stage of her academic journey. She is in her first semester pursuing her master’s in Library Science at San Jose State. In a full-circle moment, she is also taking care of the grandfather, now 89 and having suffered a series of strokes, who took care of her as she worked to overcome addiction.

Eventually, she hopes to become an archivist.

“Preservation is important. It’s history. We need to know what happened,” she said. “Whether it’s good or bad, history is there. It shaped us. It’s made us who we are.”

Read the inspiring stories of the other Deans' Awards recipients.