Love Not Love

May has a post up over at at About a Nurse which describes a situation strangely familiar to me.

"she was unarousable, holding a 10 ml syringe with about 2 ml of powdery, whitish fluid remaining, about 4 inches away from her IV access."



I walked in on the same sort of thing a few years back. Actually, the astute nursing assistant working that day called me in to see the patient, who was sitting in a heap on the bathroom floor of her room.

We woke her up and helped her to a standing position. She denied that she had passed out. "I'm fine!" she chirped, then she looked up, spun around, and passed out again. We dragged her to bed and another nurse fetched the Narcan.

They always bitch and moan after the Narcan. They're in so much pain. No doubt. No doubt at all.

Needle and the Damage Done. I remember seeing that on TV when I was little. The descending bass line against strummed chords. Afterwards I went to my room and learned to play it myself.

You have to cook heroin because it's not water-soluble at room temperature, like cocaine. After a while it doesn't really matter anymore, I suppose. The question of properly dissolving tylenol and oxycodone probably doesn't get lengthy deliberation when you're shooting up in a hospital bathroom.

When you're spitting out cheeked pills, mushing them up in a little plastic medicine cup, drawing this potion up into a discarded syringe, and injecting it into your intravenous fluid line, what exactly are you thinking about?

She had long wide scars on the internal aspect of each forearm. Necrotizing fasciitis. She was lucky to still have them.

Dark wavy hair, a beautiful-but-brainy countenance, a stunning figure; she had it all. In her early thirties still, and with a Harvard MBA, the world was her oyster.

Was.

One of her boyfriends had a friend who had a friend. That was not long ago; just a handful of years. She said that when she first tried it she fell in love.