What do you do when you find out that someone made a mistake that would have killed you, had not someone else noticed that mistake and could contact you in time?
If you had decided not to answer your phone that morning (you let it ring out twice, the boss isn't keen on personal calls you know), or if, like your boyfriend often does, you'd innocently left it at home in the rush to get out the door and onto the bus. What would have happened then?
Well, this is a real life situation that happened to my friend today. And not wanting to underplay it by summing it up in a couple of lines, I thought I would set down the details as they happened. And I should point out that the main protagonist in this fable is not myself, but gal S, yes, shock, that same gal i panned mercilessly in my last posting, 140209...Irony hey. Imagine if that blog had been my last missive on the subject of our love. What a way to remember her....
I know worse things happen. I know you could weigh my words over the years and come up with some sort of "love average" and I am hoping this would weigh on the side of plus rather than minus...but then there is the possibility that I am more motivated to write when i am pissed off, rather than when I am dopey with lerv....
How to fix that? Something for the future I guess.
Like that last paragraph, today prompted a few questions that were not easily or glibly answered. Yes it is a cliche that close shaves make you focus on your own mortality and relationship, but cliches are cliches for a reason, as they say.
So how did it start?
For me, I had a five day 'bender' from last Tuesday the tenth to Saturday the 14th, Valentines Day. And two on Friday the 13th. You'd think if something bad was going to happen it would have been then, but no. Expect the unexpected.
Anyway, being a regular at these debacles, I knew that this morning would be my seedy morning and stocked up accordingly. I could not sleep a lot of Sunday night so watched the first two Battlestar Galactica miniseries - shows I had not even known existed until a friend (B) lent me a hard drive of media goodies, and i found this buried in a subdirectory, very dungeons and dragons like, but with less orcs.
Watched that from 1am to around 330, left the last half hour for the morning. I drank a couple of milligrams of metro at the start of the miniseries, hoping it would knock me out but it failed to. So at 2:30am I crawled into bed and tossed and turned until I awoke to a brushcutter outside. It was 740am, I had to be at work in 50 minutes, but that was okay. A fifteen minute drive, a 3 minutes shower, so a little time there to watch another ten minutes of BSG! Like I said, I had watched the entire BSG series 1-4 without knowing there were these two gems of backstory....
Anyway, shuffle off to work, feeling more dead than alive as they say. Sat at my desk doing the minimal eye-contact and gruff responses t queries of weekend activities and Valentines Day dos. I have logged in, reset a password for a co-worker, started remoting in to the main sbs03server and Carrie puts a call through, from S.
"You left your phone at home.." (S)
"Yeah, I realised halfway to the car then thought 'Who's gonna ring me?'" (Me)
"Well, okay, anyway, my chemist overdosed me this morning and I have to go to hospital."
"What!?"
"Yeah, they made a mistake and gave me a hundred times the dose they were meant to. Peel Street rang me and said I have to go to hospital, and I'm in a taxi on the way now"
"How did....um..where are you going?"
"Mater Hospital, um, emergency ward."
"I'll come there now."
"No don't baby, I'll be fine"
"No I'm coming."
"No don't, I'll be fine, I just don't know what to tell work"
"Um, tell them, um, don't worry about that for now, just get looked after.I'll see you there soon."
It was not until I'd been sitting with S for close to an hour at the Mater before I managed to say that she wouldn't be dying from this accident.
"Are you sure? How do you know?"
I had completely missed the incredibly obvious concern that must have been eating away at her - was she about to die?
I had not even thought to reassure her of this most basic fact. She was in a hospital. Metro is not toxic - unlike paracetamol or alcohol overdoses, there is no organ damage that goes along with the increased dose - what kills you is the depressive effect of metro. It shuts down your lungs then your heart. You just fall asleep and stop breathing.
So even if this happened being at a hospital was the best place for it to happen - you could have oxygen pumped to your brain whilst your lungs slumbered, and whilst this is happening, narcane can be injected which reverses the effects of narcotics.
"Not that they'd let you get that close - as soon as they see you unresponsive they'll be pumping Narcane into you and you'll be straight as a rod in moments. In fact, more than straight - you'll be plunged into instant withdrawal and..."
Sometimes I say too much, when less would do.
Anyway, we sat side by side, closer than we have been in a long time. Was it the fear? Was it the intensity of S's stone? But whatever, she rested her hand on mine, she looked to me for comfort and reassurance. Fond yet distant memories stirred. I forced myself to not get encouraged. This was an extreme situation. People look at anyone in extreme situations. Bank tellers embrace account holders during a robbery, IT MEANS NOTHING.
We sat, we waited and waited. S stressed about her work. S stressed about the noises a bored little girl a row in front was making - "Why doesn't she (the mum) take her outside?". She stressed about her work again.
Half an hour later S was pulling faces at the same girl making her squeal with laughter.
S stressed about a rack of vals, well one only, in her bag - she palmed them to me in true junkie fashion - "I don't want them finding them on me" she drawled. At this stage, around 10am, she was as badly affected as she would be. 2.5 hours after dosing, being dosed with 5 times the correct dose, so she had 162.5mg of metro, above the legal maximum dose. And all she as doing was drawling, plus her eyes were pinned and a little slow to focus. As a longtime using partner of hers I could see she was well stoned, but to the average Joe she may just have come across as a slightly thick or doughey girl.
That scares me, our tolerance for massive doses of painkillers. What if I was to be in a car accident - would the doc give me 5mg of morphine before operating, thinking that's a nice safe dose? When it seems something like 5 times our daily dose isn't enough to even knock us out? Tolerance is an amazing thing. When I was a child I read stories of paranoid kings in days of old who would take a pinch of a dozen poisons every day to build up a tolerance in case they were poisoned.
Safe was the word the South African doc kept using with me when I would ask what treatment they would give S.
"Yes that's safe. Very safe" he'd respond when I asked if S would be clear of metro intoxication by midday. He just kept using the phrase "Safe.Very Safe" regardless of my original question...It made no sense but I guess he must be excused, he was in a zone of professionalism and dedicating very little of his resources to social interaction. Hence the need for a health advocate in situations like these. Someone independent who can filter out the jargon, phrase questions correctly, and smooth egos at the same time.
But the thing that annoyed me the most of the whole sad long affair was this:
Both S and I had to lie to pretty much everyone about what was happening. We did it unthinkingly, automatically, as if that dormant junkie part of the brain fired up and was employed without conscious effort.
S spent a scary day in a hospital, mostly alone - she could not tell her mum what had happened, her mum doesn't know about S being on the program. She couldn't tell her sister, or even most of her friends. The lying becomes as tiresome as the overdose.
She told her work her brother had attempted suicide. As a result she copped abuse from her boss for taking the second day off - "You weren't sick-that man who rang said you were looking after your brother - we're not going to pay you for that. ". When S told me that I texted her back saying maybe she should walk out - in addition to the boss' insensitivity there was a history of low pay, underpay, late pay and bad treatment of workers.
I think that the lies we tell tell more about us than we think. We both now have a family of lies and information to tender and nurture, whilst at the same time, quietly trying to smother them.
I told my work S had been in a car accident.
"What type of car accident? Oh, an unloading accident at her work. Bolts of fabric fell on her head. Oh, is WorkCover covering it? Yes, definitely, no problem there, all is good. No need for you to ask any more questions about this matter, hey?"
S was stressing as much about her work as she was about the fact she'd been given enough metro to kill most everyone at her workplace. Doctors held her overnight when tachycardia and high blood pressure came became evident - not normal side effects of an overdose - well maybe not, noone at the hospital took the tome to explain to her what she might expect. Whether she'd live or die. The fact she hadn't eaten that day didn't help her health, but she saw no food until four pm.
Why did we have to lie? We are not doing anything illegal by being on the metro program. But it tells of where we have been, like some scummy wake behind the barnacle encrusted dinghy of our life, as it putters up the Styx...
And we don't want anyone seeing that wake, apparently. So lies get produced. And we feel bad telling them, and the hearers hear something not quite right in your story and so the feedback loop starts - you put out bullshit, you receive back incorrectly modulated sympathy, this disgruntles you so you put out more bad shit, and on and on...
Sometimes the only thing keeping me going is the memory that things can be different from how they are now. That I can feel different than I feel now.
Tomorrow the overdose will have worn off and the desire for gear will return. This is as natural to a junkie as childbirth is to the expectant mother. But to us, it is something to be ashamed of, to feel guilty about, to try to deny and fight and rail against. More energy that could go into health reclamation, going to useless emotions like self-hatred and despair.
This suffering will repeat again and again and again until smack is decriminalised. Until it is treated as a health issue not a criminal issue. I would like nothing more than to breathe one breath on the day that happens. Then I would expire happily.