A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,51
house. We reach the bathroom and there, on the tile floor, is our patient. There’s a pulse, but he’s not breathing.
“I don’t know what happened,” the guy says.
I suggest perhaps he fell from the sky. The guy looks at me, incredulous, and says, “You don’t think it was an overdose?”
“Could be.”
An overdose is almost mystical. It hinges on the slightest variation in dose or concentration or bad luck or something so inexplicable that we peg it to a full moon. It’s one of Donald Rumsfeld’s known unknowns. But there are hints. The trick is figuring out what the patient has taken based on what’s lying around, since bystanders, friends, and family, however concerned they are, aren’t going to rat out their friends.
Among the most popular drugs in Atlanta for plunging to the bottom of an ugly rabbit hole is GHB. It is, inconceivably, both a party drug and a date-rape drug. What got you high today may leave you unconscious tomorrow. Except more than unconscious—dead and unwakeable, a zombie in the depths of Haitian voodoo. On an ambulance, GHB appears in the form of a lifeless stripper we drag from the floor of a men’s room, or a twenty-year-old we find facedown behind a midtown bathhouse. GHB is ingested and leaves no trace. We never know it’s GHB but guess because the story fits. This story—a guy in his own house at five in the afternoon—doesn’t fit.
That leaves opiates. They come in prescription form, but heroin is a whole lot cheaper, so that’s usually what we see. Heroin is sold in black neighborhoods, but for whatever reason, it’s consumed mostly by whites—cooks and waiters, generally, but also the occasional bored high school kid. What heroin does is calm the central nervous system. It says everything’s okay, just slow down and don’t worry. About anything. Not even that nagging voice somewhere deep inside that says it’s been a while since I took a breath and maybe I ought to go ahead and take another. Just enough heroin is being kissed by God. Too much is a gentle ride to a breathless sleep.
This is what has happened to our patient, and upon seeing him, his friend has gotten dizzy. I push past, and he slumps against the doorway as we do our initial assessment. A quick scan of the room reveals a patient—painted asphyxiation blue—and a canvas shaving kit someone has tried to kick behind the toilet. I go for the shaving kit as Marty kneels over the patient, who’s flat on his back, arms draped over his face—a giant despondent Smurf. I peek in the bag. Marty opens the airway. The bag is full of needles and heroin’s powdery shadow; the airway is full of fluid.
When Marty asks if our patient does drugs, the friend, shocked and terrified, just stares. Marty flips on the suction unit and asks again, louder. The friend feels a police report coming and shakes his head, backing up, eyes locked on the vomit and spit swirling around the clear suction tubing. It’s right here that most EMS crews begin ignoring the bystander or maybe get mad at him and start yelling. Marty shrugs. “Okay,” he says, voice casual as if he might fall asleep midsentence. “Well, your buddy here? He’s dead.”
The friend goes pale and sweaty.
“I could probably do something,” Marty says, “maybe even save him, if I knew what happened.”
The friend’s getting antsy because we’re not doing anything, just waiting, so he asks if being high, is, well, if it’s illegal. Marty grabs our ventilator and connects it to the oxygen as I reach into the drug bag and grab the Narcan. Marty tells him it’s not illegal to be under the influence, just in possession. The friend turns to me, because I’m holding the canvas bag.
“If he stays dead,” Marty says as he puffs a much needed breath of air into our patient’s lungs, “the police will come. But if we know what’s wrong and we treat him? Then we go to the hospital and the cops are none the wiser. You feel me?”
The friend feels him and it all comes gushing out. Everything we need to know plus a bunch more we really don’t. We get to work in earnest but keep listening, because how addicted our patient is affects what happens next. What we need to know now is whether he’s a casual user, once or twice a week, or does he do this every day? Because the guy who does this