EMS responders go through more wallets than pickpockets. Unresponsive person in an alley. We need to ID them. Check for a wallet. Dead person in a hotel. Got a wallet. Unresponsive in car. Check his pockets. You are looking for the driver’s license, but you can’t help but notice how much cash they are carrying…
Category: Opioid Crisis
Hello Kitty
Spring is here and the city parks are littered with heroin bags, the small glassine envelopes that contain the powdered heroin and sell for $4 or $5 a bag. The users sit on the park benches and tear the bags open and snort the fine powder or go down to the pavilion by the pond and…
Narrative
Upon arrival found a 22 Y/O female unresponsive lying on the floor of her bedroom with her father performing CPR on her. He states that he last saw her alive a hour ago and then found her on the floor unconscious before calling 911. He states she has a history of heroin abuse and there is a used needle…
Killing Time
A new legal strategy is to charge drug dealers with homicide when one of their customers fatally overdoses and it can be proven the customer bought the fatal drug from the dealer. In Rhode Island this week a 25-year-old dealer was convicted of selling $40 worth of “Diesel” to to a 29-year-old customer who died 4…
Don’t Use Alone
61 people died of heroin overdoses in Hartford in 2016 (according to numbers released by the state Medical Examiner’s office on friday), up from 37 in 2015. Based on the first six months of the year, the state estimated 888 people would die statewide, but when the final numbers came out last Friday, the number…
Happy
I ask my patients who are addicted to heroin how they got started. Many tell the same tale. Injury. Prescription for Percocet or Oxycontin. They got addicted. Prescription either went away or couldn’t keep up with their growing tolerance. They started buying pills on the street. Then they learned heroin was cheaper and worked even…
Snowbank
It is six in the morning and we get called for an overdose outside. The address is not a surprise — a side street off Park. Yet when we arrive, we find no one. We are about to clear when a police officer who has also responded finds a backpack in the snow and sure…
A Life Saved
A 24 year old man from one of Hartford’s suburbs had his life saved by a newspaper. He got into heroin five years ago through, in his own words “stupidity.” While many get into it through injury, a doctor’s prescription exposing them to opiates, taking too many, becoming addicted, getting cut off or needing…
Bart Simpson Does Heroin
Bart Simpson is in his parent’s Subaru parked to the side of a gas station in Hartford, Ct near the highway ramps. The car is running, in drive, his foot is on the brake. He is slumped forward against the wheel. This has aroused the attention of passerbys who have called 911. An ambulance arrives…
The Wolf and the Sheepdog
In the Looney tunes cartoon, Ralf E. Wolf and Sam the Sheepdog go to work each morning, exchanging greetings while punching the clock. “Morning, Ralph,” the dog says. “Morning, Sam,” the wolf replies. Then it is down to business. The wolf spends his hours trying to steal the sheep and the sheepdog spends his hours…
The Price is Right
I have been writing much lately about heroin with the backdrop of Hartford’s Park Street which is one of many epicenters of the current heroin epidemic. Today, I am going to briefly change the backgrounds. Instead of Park Street with its back drop of bakeries, bodegas, Spanish restaurants, and young tattooed men, with crooked baseball…
Drug Addicts
The heroin epidemic is getting a lot of play in Connecticut. In 2015, according to the latest numbers there were 415 heroin deaths in the state, triple the number three years ago. There is a bill in the legislature to require all first responding agencies in the state to carry naloxone. Here’s a news article…
Pain Myth
In my standard talk urging paramedics to be generous with pain management, I have a section called pain myths. One of the myths is entitled Fear of Creating Addicts On the powerpoint I have two pictures, one of an all-American housewife, the other of a skanky drug-addled prostitute. Here is the text from the slide:…
That Narcan Shit
What follows first is fiction: “482. Lawrence Street. 2nd Floor, unknown on a one. PD on the way. Advise when you get there.” We were around the corner having just cleared Hartford Hospital. “Shouldn’t we wait for the cops?” I said, as Troy grabbed his house bag and monitor from the side door. “No, it’s shift…
Suffering in the World
We are sent to a detox center for a diabetic. We find a sixty-year old Puerto Rican with a blood sugar over 600, although he has no complaint. He has come to the center to kick his heroin habit. But first now he will have to go to the ER to get his sugar under…
Sore Throat
We get sent for a choking downtown. We find the fire department standing around a guy on a low cement wall that is part of the landscaping. A tree looms over him. Even in the dusk I can see the man is purple. He looks dead. I am about to say, check for a pulse…