Overdose Awareness: My Story

Today, Overdose Awareness Day, is somewhat of a sobering day for me as I read stories associated with #endoverdose and #overdoseawareness. Many of these stories are about addicts who overdosed and died or were injured because of it. But on April 6, 2019, my husband overdosed and medically died but lived.

He didn’t live because I discovered him, had Narcan at the ready, and called emergency services. In fact, at the time, I was unaware of how serious his problem really was. I would have been totally unprepared to handle an overdose had it occurred in our home. I can say with almost complete certainty that if he had overdosed at home, he would not have lived.

By the grace of God, we were already in the hospital for some scheduled testing for me that week. That’s pretty much the best place to be for something as awful as an overdose to happen. He had been acting strange that week- dosing off easily, acting highly irritable, unable to sit still, sweating a lot, breathing heavily. But I had no idea that any of those things were signs of drug abuse. 

On the last night I was scheduled to be there, I heard him collapse in the bathroom. The door was locked but thankfully hospital bathrooms can unlock from the outside. I found him lying face down on the floor. He spoke to me at first. When I asked him if he was okay, he simply said, “Yeah, I’m just going to the bathroom.” I calmly called for the nurses and one showed up. He was able to talk to even that nurse, telling him, “Yeah, I’m okay man.” “You don’t look okay,” the nurse responded. He left to go get a lift to try and get my husband up.

That’s when I started hearing him make the gurgling noises. But still, I didn’t realize he wasn’t breathing. It took a second team of nurses coming in to assess the situation, then hear the gurgling noise, to realize he was suffocating and needed to be turned over immediately. I backed up and watched as one nurse went into the hall to hit an alarm to call any available nurses and doctors into my room. The nurses that were already there began working to turn over my husband, the fact that he was incredibly overweight and lying face down in a small bathroom was working against them. It felt like it took forever but finally some other hospital staff began filtering into my hospital room. 

Once they finally got him flipped over, I heard words mentioned like, “Not breathing” and “no pulse.” I’m grateful that in that moment, even though I understood that there was a serious risk of losing my husband forever, I didn’t understand that for those few minutes he was medically dead. Someone started doing chest compressions on him and someone else grabbed a large oxygen tank off the wall and put a mask over his blue face to get him to start breathing again. After several short minutes that felt like forever, the doctors and nurses in the hospital were able to revive my husband.  After this, the doctors asked me what I thought might have happened and all I could tell them was that he had been complaining about a leg cramp. 

I was clueless to the signs of drug abuse and even more clueless to the signs of overdose. If I had discovered my husband collapsed on the bathroom in our home, I would have debated for several minutes before finally calling emergency services, especially because he was able to hold a conversation for quite a while. By the time I would have finally made the phone call and emergency services got to us, it would have been too late and my husband would have been past the point of being able to be revived and would have been gone forever.

As hard and painful as it has been for me with him going through a year of rehab, I am so grateful that he still has a chance at getting sober and starting over. Because he has a chance, we still have a chance at starting over, healing, and allowing God to use this story for his glory. But I realize so many overdose victims don’t have the luxury of a second chance and neither do their spouses or families.

I praise God that even though I was completely unprepared to handle my husband’s drug problem and overdose, he placed us in the perfect place of protection to give us this second chance. I don’t know why he chose to give that second chance to us, but I can only imagine it is because he has a purpose and plan for the suffering we have endured through this season of life.

Overdose Awareness Day is important to me because I was so unaware. If not for God’s grace, my husband would be gone. Addiction is a widespread epidemic in our nation, so whether you currently have an addict in your life or not, take a second to read up on “Overdose Basics” on overdoseday.com, it could save a life.