My husband survived an overdose. But not two

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This article was published 05/03/2019 (2421 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The first time I saved my husband’s life, his face was the colour of saturated denim. I found him curled on the floor, limbs constricted, shoulders twitching. He snorted desperately as his lungs gasped for oxygen.

I yelled his name, shook his arm, slapped his face. The sputtering sound came less often, and he was so, so blue.

“Has your husband ingested or administered any opioids?” the paramedic asked.

I shook my head no. It felt like a random question. I knew what drug users looked like — dishevelled on street corners, rummaging through cabinets for pills. My husband was vice-president of a tech company. He was no addict.

I told them he was on Klonopin for anxiety and Adderall for ADD, but other than that we were an ibuprofen family. I barely knew what an opioid was, and my husband wouldn’t even take Sudafed for a cold.

Despite my answer, the paramedics gave him naloxone, which counteracts opioid overdose. It revived him in a way that seemed impossible. Propped up in the stretcher wearing his usual T-shirt and gym shorts, he looked like he was ready to binge-watch Battlestar Galactica, not like someone headed to the hospital for an overdose. Driving close behind the ambulance, I couldn’t stop looking at his pink cheeks through the back windows. An instant fix. As if the blue had never happened.

My husband later explained that he bought the opioid drug he had taken online from a laboratory in China that sells synthetics. Since 2013, these “designer” synthetic opioids have caused more overdoses than heroin, oxycodone or hydrocodone. In a recent study, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported synthetic-opioid deaths increased almost 47 per cent, to 28,400 deaths, in 2017, and increased border control or drug raids aren’t the solution. The drugs come through the mail to anyone who can do a Google search.

I didn’t know any of this the night I watched him in the back of the ambulance. I didn’t know that opioid users are the most likely drug abusers to relapse. All I knew that night was how relieved I was when the colour returned to his skin and that I would do anything to help him, because I couldn’t stop picturing the blue.

He tried to explain. “You know when someone has chronic back pain? A massage isn’t going to fix the problem, but it makes it feel so much better for a short time. You know it’s going to hurt again, but relief feels so good. That’s what using is when I’m depressed. For a few minutes, everything is OK.”

He told me how he had found message boards devoted to sharing tips for the perfect high. The drug that had nearly killed him was butyrfentanyl, which he boiled with a spoon and poured into a syringe before injecting. It is an analogue of fentanyl, the drug that killed Prince and Tom Petty. Fentanyl is 80 to 100 times more potent than heroin. In 2018, the CDC named it the deadliest drug in America.

In the days following his overdose, I started unpacking the odd behaviours that hadn’t made sense in recent months. His falling asleep mid-dinner, spoon in hand; the two car accidents in a month; his sudden disdain for our dogs that he normally adored. How, living alongside this man who was my best friend, had I missed his addiction?

My husband was never dishevelled on a street corner. He had enough musical instruments for a one-man-band, ran 5Ks, made this amazing pie-stuffed cake every year for my birthday. He had a master’s in engineering. He invented a device that alerted his blind Boston terrier when she was about to walk into objects. He was the smartest person I’ve ever known — and an addict.

He promised me he would never relapse, but refused to go to in-patient rehab for fear his co-workers would learn his secret. The near-death experience had scared him too, he said, and he’d get it under control. He started therapy and antidepressants. I started monitoring him constantly, and assumed that would be enough. I didn’t understand then how his brain constantly begged for the drug. I didn’t know how much help we needed. When my husband told me I would never find him sputtering and unconscious again, he meant it, and I believed him.

Two weeks later, he picked up a package from China at the post office. A few hours after his appointment with an addiction specialist, he injected the butyrfentanyl. He wasn’t blue when I found him. His skin had a tinge of yellow, except for the patch of burgundy on his forearm where he had pushed the needle.

He was cold, and he was 36 years old.

Lauren Mauldin is a creative non-fiction MFA candidate at UC Riverside and an editor for the Plaid Horse magazine.

— Los Angeles Times