Experiences of Overdose

So I went into this girl’s room and I had a shot of heroin, and because [I had been using] naltrexone [a prescription drug used to manage alcohol or opioid use], I hadn’t been using [heroin], so I was as good as clean. [I] then had a shot and [because] my tolerance was zero, I overdosed. No one was home [at the time]. [Eventually] one of the girls [I lived with] came home, saw me passed out on the floor, assumed correctly it was heroin, and called the ambulance. It was the same [paramedic who] had seen me, like, a couple of weeks ago [when I called them for someone else’s overdose] and recognised me. So, I don’t know, I just thought that was a bit kind of sad in hindsight [to have a paramedic recognise me for that reason].

So, I was locked up for a period of time and then I got out, and I never knew about tolerance levels and stuff. So I went out and used the exact same amount [of heroin] that I was using prior to being locked up. Luckily I was at a friend’s place, and his sister was there and she was a [heroin user] too. So, I’ve [taken the heroin], and then the next thing I know, I’m waking up in […] hospital throwing up all over, like the instant withdrawal and all that kind of stuff. Just didn’t know how I got there. That was the first time [I overdosed].

Once when I was in my 20s, I had too much to drink and I was with a friend who had some, you know, it wasn’t bad dope, and I had a taste […] We were in this hotel room and he was mucking around with his girlfriend, and I was just reading a magazine or something on the other side of the room. He noticed that I started to nod off and stopped breathing and he was saying to me, ‘[Zippy], [Zippy], wake up, you’re [starting to go] blue,’ and I go, ‘No, I’ll be all right mate,’ the usual response. […] But if he wasn’t there to [say], ‘Hey, hey, come on,’ and [if he hadn’t] walked me around, took me outside, got me some air and kept me walking around, I would have died for sure. I would have just gone to sleep and stopped breathing, and there would be another person on the statistics, because that’s how easy it is to OD.

They could be a bit nicer. It’s their job to save people, you know, and [drug use is] a part of life. I don’t like the way that people get looked at and treated by most paramedics and police officers, because they come a lot too and they’re nasty. You know, the last time [an overdose] happened to me, one of the police officers called me an oxygen thief. As he was walking out, he said to his partner, or whatever, something about an oxygen thief and it wasn’t very nice. And I was still out of it, but I knew it was being said. It wasn’t nice at all, and I don’t think people need to be treated that way. I think it’s really rude, you know.

There’s a lot of other times where my overdoses have come through mixing alcohol and heroin or pills and heroin. That’s what’s got me in trouble, the combination, or the using by myself. When I was younger, I had more using partners, but I’ve had a lot of overdoses because there’s that fine line between getting stoned enough but not waking up, do you know what I mean?

I don’t use in a locked toilet any more. So I’ve learned, because I’ve overdosed in toilets before and I’ve woken up, luckily, and thought ‘Mate, I should maybe be dead.’ No one’s going to find you in there. They [would] just think [that] there’s someone in there going to the toilet.

This was actually at my parents’ house, which I stayed at occasionally. I can very vividly remember the bathroom, and I had a little ritual in terms of how I used [heroin] in that house. The bathroom had a lock on the door, so that’s good, I had privacy to use […] It’s sort of rare for me to have had heroin on me and, you know, buy more than what I was going to use at that exact moment, but at that time I did have more. I’d been drinking – I’d been at a pub and drunk quite a lot of alcohol – and a couple of the other times I’ve overdosed [it] has involved alcohol [too]. I’m not a big drinker, really. So I’d come home from the pub and remembered I still had heroin. I used to sit on the toilet and there was like a shower which had a little tub in it, so there was the edge of that, and you could sit on the toilet. It was a perfect little tray for spoon and everything. Yeah, I did that successfully many times, but, yeah, on this particular occasion I just remember there was very frantic sort of knocking on the door and screaming. My younger brother was there and obviously had become very worried and called my parents, and, you know, I sort of came to. In that situation I’d smashed the toilet seat somehow and I’d bashed my head and I was covered in blood, there was a bent fit in my arm and my mum and dad were hammering on the door.

I have had an overdose experience that was caused by a mixture of opiates and Xanax that somebody put in my mouth. [They] told me it was a Valium and I didn’t know until after I had had a double-overdose experience. I call it a double-overdose experience – it was basically the same overdose but I dropped, was administered naloxone, came good, came clear, and an hour and a half later, I dropped again […] One minute I’m sitting there observing the environment and the next minute, I’m in a medical clinic room, lying on a table with an oxygen mask on. I don’t know whether the oxygen wasn’t flowing properly or if it’s just me, but I was struggling to breathe. I was trying to rip the oxygen mask off, and I’ve got a nurse and the doctor going, ‘No, no, keep the mask on, your oxygen level is really low. We need to get oxygen into you.’

It wasn’t that recent, but there was this guy who told me he’d been using a lot [of heroin] and I believed him. He had a shot and dropped. [We were] sitting there with all these drugs and money and I’m like, the telephone box is over there, and I’m thinking, ‘I’ve got to get that phone, but I can’t leave him.’ I […] ran to the phone box and got an ambulance on the way, and ran back to him and made sure he was alive and partially breathing. Because I had [arrest] warrants at the time, I didn’t want to be around when the ambulance [and police] got there, so I had to sort of hide in the background.

So I was at a high-rise building, which is a government building [public housing] where lots of overdoses occur. This particular time there was a guy and he was lying on the floor in the stairwell, and I thought that he was asleep. I thought he was stoned, and I spoke to him and asked him, ‘Are you okay? Are you okay?’ And there was no response, and I’m not the sort of person that just walks off and leaves a person there, whether they’re stoned, or whether I think that they’re dead or half alive or whatever it is. It’s scary, it’s horrible, and it’s not nice to be around. Yeah, but I shook the person and I actually felt their pulse, and there wasn’t a pulse. I had water in my bag and I threw it over him, and I don’t know how, but one minute later that person came to.

And I just sort of looked at him and thought ‘shit’, and I just pulled him into the stairwell, because he said, ‘Just get me away from these [other] people. I don’t want anyone to see me.’ I just said […] ‘What’s going on?’ And I pulled up his sleeve and it was like, ‘Aaaah, okay’. I just stayed with him all night, just kept trying to talk to him, because I was fairly young then, I was probably only 24, and I call that young in my drug-taking days. So I didn’t exactly know what to do. There certainly wasn’t any phones with internet on them or anything like that back then, and so if I thought he was sleeping too much, I would just nudge him and say ‘wake up’. He was nodding off, and he had his head in his hands, and stuff like that.