Mom held my hand as I regained consciousness in the emergency room, but her blurry body moved as the doctor rushed to extubate me. My throat felt like one of those turtles with a plastic straw embedded in its nose. Mom backed off and my empty hand fell to the side of the hospital bed. I panicked, unable to understand why I couldn’t breathe on my own and, at the same time, I remembered why I woke up in the ER at Morristown Memorial Hospital on October 7, 1998.
I was treated in the pediatric intensive care unit, which embarrassed 19-year-old me. I’d made a dumb choice for an adult; I wasn’t an accidentally poisoned child.
Naloxone stopped the numbing effects of the heroin I had sniffed the night before. I hurt, weakly, as my lungs fought for air, and my mind searched for answers. I knew the answers, but not what I would tell the nurses, doctors, and my parents and friends.
I lied, admitting to haven taken a codeine pill.
“In that era, I went to at least 15 houses to tell their parents their kids were dead,” Tony told me. “I think you were my last one.”
My overdose may have been the last time Detective Tony, who was first on the scene when my parents broke down my bedroom door and called 911. Mom, a nurse, grabbed her stethoscope. I was gurgling.
Tony told me, decades later, that he thought I was a goner, just like the multiple fatal heroin overdose deaths that swept Parsippany, New Jersey, of its druggie children. But I survived.
I convalesced in during the days until I turned 20, on October 11, 1998. My friends weren’t allowed to visit, but my best friend snuck in by swearing she was my sister or maybe she said she was a cousin.
She told the psychiatrist who had diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder, and he, too, made an appearance to wish me well. Dad never visited.
On my birthday, I received mail from the University of Maryland Baltimore County saying that I was accepted to enroll for the term beginning in January, just two and a half months away.
I would have, if I had the strength, jumped for joy. Instead, I spent my remaining time in the hospital breathing out as forcibly as I could to get the ball to the top of the spirometer. I breathed in deeply to increase the number on the pulse oximeter clipped to my index finger. Sometimes, I’d switch and hold my breath to see if the device would think I had died.
On one of the following days, the staff in the pediatric intensive care unit introduced me to a golden Labrador, an emotional support dog. I felt like I was wasting the dog’s time when he could be nuzzling another child who needed him more, but I smiled in the Polaroid as I pet the dog’s head.
Guilt melted me from the inside, while my ashen skin matched the activated charcoal still stuck in my hair. That’s part of what the hospital used to clear me of the poison I’d taken.
My body and my mind were too tired to cry, until Mom picked me up and drove me home.