‘It can happen to anyone’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/03/2017 (3145 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The emergency call about a fentanyl overdose came too late.

Paramedics reached Ashten Cook March 1 in a hotel room at a Canad Inns in the south end of the city. The 31-year-old Winnipeg woman was already in cardiac arrest, unresponsive. CPR didn’t help and she’d stopped breathing, so naloxone kits, the kind that reverse opioid overdoses, weren’t an option. She would be transported to Victoria General Hospital in critical condition.

At the time, the call would be remembered as notable because a paramedic at the scene accidentally breathed in some white powder; it became airborne from Ashten’s purse as paramedics searched for clues to her identity. He ended up in hospital himself. “To my knowledge this is the first time a responder was treated for opioid exposure in hospital,” said Ryan Woiden, local 911 union president for the Paramedics of Winnipeg.

In the days that followed, Ashten’s overdose unfolded into a story that was beyond tragic as family and friends came to terms with her sudden death.

Jen Storm, a Winnipeg author, agreed to share the story after checking with the women’s family in Grand Rapids on the Misipawistik Cree Nation. For them, what happened is a cautionary tale. Ashten was a trained correctional officer; her mother was a teacher.

“It can happen to anyone of us,” Storm said.

Last spring, on May 23, Ashten’s mother, Daneen, was found dead in a house in downtown Winnipeg. Cause of death was eventually pinned down to a fentanyl overdose, the beginning of a spike in opioid-related deaths in 2016 that would alarm health authorities and raise concerns all the way to the health minister’s office. By last fall, public concern seemed to reach a new peak in Manitoba. The epidemic’s epicentre, meanwhile, had claimed hundreds of lives in British Columbia and Alberta.

For the Cook family, Daneen’s death would set in motion a series of events that would ultimately claim her daughter.

Daneen’s death at 49 had a dreadful impact on her daughter. Even a substantial inheritance Daneen left Ashten — a life insurance policy worth $180,000 — would turn into something disastrous.

“Her mother’s death, it really did shake her up. All of this was about her grief and anger,” Storm said. “I don’t want Ashten to come across as a stereotype. She wasn’t. She was the one out of everyone who you’d think wouldn’t fall into this trap. She had all the qualities you’d want in a sister or a daughter and the one bad quality that led to this,” Storm said.

When Ashten learned about the inheritance, her first thought was to buy a home. “She wasn’t on the streets. She was a strong girl and she had dreams, goals,” Storm said.

The problem was a fentanyl addiction that claimed both mother and daughter.

“I worried she’d blow all that money and be back to square one or that she’d die. Which is what happened. She had a lot of people reaching out, wanting her to get help. But she couldn’t do it. That was the frustrating part…I don’t think she wanted to die. But she didn’t know how to live,” Storm said.

Cook had just turned 31 the week before her death and by that point, she’d been essentially missing for nearly three months, off the grid and out of contact with her regular circle of friends and family. A month into her disappearance she finally reached out, calling a cousin and then some of her closest friends.

Storm, probably Ashten’s oldest and closest friend and one of the few who got a call from her, recalled the mother and daughter she remembered.

Jen and Ashten grew up together in Winnipeg, sometimes under the same roof when Ashten stayed with Jen and her mother during the years Ashten’s mother took teaching jobs in Grand Rapids.

For years, their mothers were close friends and fiercely loyal, until Daneen’s addictions derailed her about 15 years ago.

Ashten was about 16 then and determined to escape her mother’s drug lifestyle, even taking her mother to court, said Storm, to “divorce” her of her parental rights. It was the only way she could get social assistance as a teenager to rent her own apartment, Storm said.

“They stayed close even through all the fighting. Ashten was really loyal to her mom and she was crazy loyal to her family,” Storm said.

The court case was successful and Ashten got her apartment the same year. She buckled down, holding two jobs and taking night classes at Gordon Bell High School to qualify for her high school diploma.

Within four or five years, when Ashten was 21, it looked like she had everything on course and under control.

“She had everything she wanted. A car, a good job at the Manitoba Youth Centre. She was a corrections officer. And she was very anti-drugs… because of her mom. I remember I was always looking up to her, she was so driven. All my friends saw Ashten as the mother of the group, she’d lecture us, give us (heck) if we did anything bad,” Storm said.

Then in 2009 or 2010, Ashten was in a car accident and hurt her back. The injury wasn’t serious but she had whiplash.

Storm remembered the crash because of what happened next.

A doctor prescribed Ashten Oxycontin, a powerful opioid. For years, Oxycontin, a semi-synthetic form of morphine, would be the drug of choice prescribed for injuries, cancer and chronic conditions like back pain. The problem with opioids are the side-effects: patients can become tolerant in mere days, and, within weeks, physically dependent on them.

Ashten got hooked quickly, and perfected her skills of doctor-shopping for pills.

Fast forward to about a month ago and Storm was out searching the streets for Ashten, sharing shifts with her friends, putting up missing-person’s posters, updating social media posts and sending Ashten endless emails, begging for a response.

“Jan. 30 ended up being the day she phoned me. She was upset. She said ‘Hi’ and she was very meek and I instantly started crying. I told her I’d been worried sick… I just wanted to keep her on the phone,” said Storm. Ashten denied she was using but broke down on the phone.

Looking back, Storm said, “I had such high expectations of her. I was tougher on her than I would have been on somebody else because I expected so much. I was under the impression that addiction is something that happens to somone who’s weak. That the stereotypes… were true. Until it happened to her,” Storm said.

That day, Storm talked Ashten into a coffee date and got a phone number. “We were both crying and we both said ‘I love you.’ Right after we got off the phone, I somehow knew we’d never talk again.”

The coffee date never happened. And the number was an untraceable burner phone.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca