The Blips Of My Life

Epilogue 3: The Overdose||2

     When I was 16, I worked at a sonic drive thru. It wasn't anything special, but it was right down the road from where I lived and the job wasn't difficult in the slightest. We lived in a nice area; an area where there was little crime and if it was anything then it was petty crime.
     I was working late one night on a weekend. We were closing, and the lights were still on outside. Around 10pm, a black SUV started doing laps around our shop and so the managers quickly shut off the lights because it looked a little sketchy. For us, it looked like they might be casing out the store and trying to commit a robbery.
     They leave and 5 minutes later an ambulance shows up. They had dumped their friend in the parking lot, because he was having an overdose.
     I watched a complete stranger be revived and die that night.
     A year later, once I had already quit after that traumatic experience, I was with a guy who smoked weed. His name is Max, and I'm still with him. Now, I don't blame him whatsoever for what happened that December when I was 17.
     I had been arguing with my mom that morning, so I drove up to his house and we smoked a joint together. It was fun, and I didn't have any bad reactions with it. Around 9pm, I was offered some weed from his friends.
     Obviously, I didn't turn it down because from my assumptions it was the same weed we had smoked earlier (as in the same dealer). I figured I would be sober enough to drive home before my curfew of 11:30 if I smoked at that time.
     I took one hit out of a gravity bong and didn't feel too great a few minutes later. I decided to go inside, since they were hotboxing a car and I felt like that was making me too high. I went to go try to take a drink of something inside, but felt disgusted at the thought. That's the moment I felt like something was really, really abnormal.
     I stumbled outside to the car again, and knocked on the window. Max rolled it down and asked me if everything was okay, to which I replied "I feel like I'm going to die." He helped me back inside the house, trying to calm me down and tried to explain that maybe I was just too high and not feeling okay.
     "Call the police," I mumbled, sitting down onto the couch. As soon as I laid back, I began convulsing. Max called the police frantically, and I remember bits and pieces as I clung to consciousness repeatedly.
     "Are you going in and out of consciousness?" the operator asked. I blacked out, then came back and screamed yes, then went back out again. Suddenly, I heard my heart beat in my ears and then complete silence.
     I was floating in a black abyss and my consciousness was physical. I felt my dead body lying on the couch behind me. Thinking anything became speaking out loud.
     "Oh my fucking god, I fucking died. I just fucking died in front of my dog. I literally just died," I remember saying/thinking. I can't remember what else I thought, but I had a complete breakdown in that space. I felt that something was on the other end of the void that I was in, but I knew that, that was death itself for some reason.
     "Okay," I whispered, collecting myself finally, "I'm just going to try to jump backwards and back into my body now." Once I flew back toward my body, everything came back. I gasped for air, and screamed that I had died.
     During that time, it had felt like I was dead for 10 minutes. Max explained I stopped moving for maybe 3 seconds, my eyes wide open, and he called my name right before I came back.
     The paramedics arrived and everything returned to normal for me after that. My parents were livid; they thought Max was a junkie because I had been laced with fentanyl and he didn't have a reaction to it.
     From what the officer told me (that responded to the emergency) was that dealers put trace amounts of fentanyl into simple drugs like marijuana that way the clients become slightly addicted to their drugs and come back to only them. He added that 67% of weed they confiscate from drug dealers has small amounts of fentanyl in them. It's enough to make someone addicted, but usually not enough to kill them unless they're being careless.
     Moral of the story is drugs are stupid. Don't do them illegally.