DOSE:	repeated	oral	Alcohol
	repeated	smoked	Cannabis
	1 hit	IV	Heroin

BODY WEIGHT:

250 lb

1st Time Heroin OD

A couple weeks ago I had been out late drinking and smoking bud at a friends house. We went through quite a bit of beer and some hard liquor. I had called another friend that lived down the street, and decided to go pick him and his girlfriend up so they could come party with us. They stayed for a little bit and once the party died down a little bit I gave them a ride home and chill at their pad for a bit.

First a little bit of insight on my previous drug usage, I had smoked heroin somewhat regularly for a brief period some years back but never a daily user and never shot up. Prior to this evening I had not used heroin in probably 7 years.

To continue, my friend's girlfriend uses heroin on a frequent basis. This particular night she was shooting up. My judgement was poor due to the large amounts of alcohol consumed that evening so I told her I wanted to shoot up. She went and got a clean needle and made me up a dose. Probably on the low side of a typical daily user's dose. She tied my arm off, shot me up and that was about the end of it. Apparently I laid down on the floor right after shooting up.

The next thing I remember is being completely disoriented in the ER Triage about five hours later with IVs and all sorts of tubes and sensors and shit hooked up to me. I was talking to the nurse about what I did for a living and some other random topics as she was trying to explain to me that my Pneumonia was starting to subside. At the time it didn't make much sense to me and was more of a dream than a reality in my perception. Eventually I did realize that I must have OD'd the night before. Right around this time my buddy whose house I was at and his girlfriend came to visit me. They brought me some clean clothes and he proceeded to tell me that I had literally died the night before. My heart had come to a complete stop, I vomited and stopped breathing. They performed chest compressions on me to revive my heart and called an ambulance. My heart started back up again and I was barely breathing by the time the paramedics arrived. My skin and lips were completely blue. They had told the hospital that I had choked on my puke while asleep due to alcohol so there were no police reports filed or any thing to that extent.

In the hospital after my friend had come to visit and explain to me what the hell was going on. They moved me into an overnight room at the hospital. I was on IV throughout most of the day and was unable to keep food down for a while. Eventually I gained enough strength back that I felt I was well enough to leave. I took off all of my sensors and left the IV because I did not want to take it out myself. Eventually the alarms saying that I no longer had a pulse got the RN to show up to my room. He asked if we could put the sensors back on and I said I wanted to check about getting discharged. He said that it was against advisement as they wanted to keep me overnight and run blood tests in the morning. This did not sit well with me as I had to work the next morning. If this had been a Saturday and not a Sunday I probably would have taken them up on their hospitable yet expensive suggestion. I told him that I would follow up with my primary care physician for any additional blood work. He showed up about thirty minutes later with a discharge waiver advising that I was being discharged against the doctors suggestion.

After being discharged I did suffer from some terrible mucus problems due to the Aspiration Pneumonia (from breathing in vomit, the pneumonia diagnosis did not make sense to me originally but did after realizing that it was Aspiration Pneumonia). I also had Anosmia (Loss of sense of smell) in which I completely lost my sense of smell for about two days before any remote sensation of a smell came back to me. Also a ruptured blood vessel in my eye and a loss of appetite for a while.

Only the people who were there that night and a couple of very close friends and a family member know that this occurred. I showed up to work the next day and acted as if nothing happened.

Its been about a week since this happened and I do not feel that the reality of it has even sunk in yet. I'm successful in my job and my academia but have a propensity to do stupid fucking things sometimes. This was a lesson to me, don't shoot heroin... duh... but I am still trying to figure out what effects this particular event will have on me.

Exp Year: 2013	ExpID: 99388
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 30
Published: Sep 3, 2019	Views: 5,280
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Alcohol (61), Heroin (27) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Hangover / Days After (46), Overdose (29), Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters (7), Combinations (3)