Someone Saved My Life Tonight

Yesterday at lunchtime I was walking out of Quizno’s and was just about to get into my car to head back to work, when something caught my eye that made me grab my cell and call 911. There was a young woman standing by the passenger side of a car, and initially I thought she was yelling at and hitting a child in the back seat. I thought this because horrible as it is, it’s not that unusual, since people seem to catch that stuff on video all the time. Anyway, I didn’t even shut my car door, I just dialed and kind of jogged over to the girl, trying to see exactly what was going on. When I got closer, I realized that she wasn’t abusing a child, she was trying to wake up her friend. She was shaking her and yelling at her, and slapping her face. I told the 911 operator that there was a girl who was not conscious and that we needed an ambulance ASAP. I gave the location, and as I was talking a couple of young guys in suits came up to see if they could help.

One of the guys checked her breathing, and her pulse. He said both were there, but not very strong. I relayed this to the operator, and she told me to make sure she was face up and her airway wasn’t blocked. Then she asked me to find out from her friend what she took. Because this wasn’t something that had “just happened” – the girl had obviously OD’ed. This wasn’t the first time in my life I had seen something like this, but it WAS the first time I had seen it as a sober person. And it chilled me to the bone. Another one of those moments that hits you like a ton of bricks – ten years ago, I could’ve been that girl. It was all very surreal, but it was making me sick to my stomach too. One of the guys had reached in the unconscious girl’s jeans pocket (which I could’ve told him he SHOULDN’T do) and an empty half pill capsule came flying out. When her friend saw this, she started grabbing stuff from around the console of the car and shoving it in her purse. I was still on the phone with the operator, and started asking the girl, “What did she take? We NEED to know what she took!”

The girl looked at me like a wild animal and started shaking her head. “We don’t DO drugs!! I don’t know what you mean!! I left her for TWO minutes and when I came back, she was LIKE this!” My heart sank. Even though I wasn’t surprised at her denial, I did know enough to read the telltale signs of addiction. And I still had the operator on the phone, who now wanted me to get the girl on the phone. When I tried to tell the girl the operator needed to talk to her, she panicked. “NO! I’m not talking to ANYONE! I can just get her to the hospital and call my mom, we’ll be fine!” I told the operator that she wouldn’t talk, that her friend had OD’ed and she was high, and obviously was too scared to get involved with the authorities. At this point, the girl’s breathing had become more irregular, and I could see from her chest movement and the hollow of her neck that she was also having a hard time, almost gasping. The guys kept checking on the unconscious girl, and I also motioned to them to watch her friend. She was starting to get in the driver’s side of the car, apparently thinking she could just go to the hospital herself. One of them walked over to her and tried calming her down, but she was way too strung out. The operator asked me to get the license plate number of the car, just in case, which I did. Thankfully, she did finally move away from the car, and it was then that I saw the cavalry arriving.

I told the operator that help was here, and she let me hang up as an ambulance, fire truck and three cook county sheriff’s cars pulled into the lot. One of the paramedics approached the girl, and yelled out, “Get a gurney and a bag FAST! She’s not breathing!” It was amazing how those people move, and within seconds they had put her on a respirator and loaded her into the ambulance. In the meantime, the police were approaching her friend, along with another paramedic. She kept repeating her mantra over and over: “We don’t DO drugs! I don’t KNOW what happened!” One of the sheriffs came to talk to myself and the two guys, and we told him exactly what we saw. Everything from the girl grabbing things from the console to the capsule that fell out of the other girl’s jeans. We described the friend’s behavior, and blatantly told him it was obviously drugs. (Which, of course, he already knew.) He took both purses out of the car, and when he went through them, he found two syringes, several empty clear capsules, the bottom of an aluminum can (used for prepping a fix), and a small cup of water in the front cupholder. He approached the girl with his findings, and asked her again, “What did she take? What did YOU take?” Now this is the part that really got to me. This girl, this STRUNG OUT, HEROIN ADDICTED idiot, looked me straight in the eye and cried, “WHY DID YOU CALL 911?? WE WERE FINE!! WE DIDN’T NEED YOU!!”

What I WANTED to do was go up to this girl and smack her in the head and tell her what a fuckup she was. That if I HADN’T called, she would have had to live with her friend’s death on her conscience forever. That life is WAY too precious to piss away while getting high. That I KNEW how she felt, because I had been there, done that, and it SUCKED. What I DID do, though, was shake my head incredulously and say, “Because your friend was going to die. That’s why.”

I had to give all my personal information and a statement to the officers on the scene, as did the two guys. We asked how the unconscious girl was, and apparently she was starting to come to a little bit, and it looked like she was going to be ok. But they had almost lost her, and said it was a good thing I had called 911 when I did. All it would’ve taken was a few more seconds for her to have become a statistic. I watched the other girl seemingly through a haze, watched her trying to explain that maybe her friend USED to do drugs, but as far as SHE knew, she didn’t anymore. That she had just gone to get food across the way, and when she came back, she was unconscious. That they both had good lives, families, boyfriends, jobs. That she didn’t DO drugs. And didn’t KNOW where the paraphernalia came from, or how it got in her purse. I watched her in her beauty school smock pulling a mannequin head out of the back seat of the car, playing with the hair on the plastic head while she retreated into a drug-induced fog. Mumbling that everyone was being so MEAN to her, and she didn’t even DO anything.

No, honey, you didn’t. And that was only PART of the problem.

It really bothered me. The whole situation. It made me want to scream and cry and shake my fist at the world. It made me want to go home and hug my Roxy and pray that she never feels she has to turn to drugs to deal with life. Or thinks that it’s ok to “party” as long as you keep your life as normal as possible otherwise. Because it’s NOT ok. It is SO not ok. And as hard as I try to forget what I did in the past, something like this makes me realize it is important to REMEMBER. To never forget where I was or what I did. And how far I have come. And to be grateful for every day of the past ten years, and for all the days to come. It made me realize that although my experiences are over, there are new people and new drugs and new issues that will always be there. It made me want to DO something, to make a difference.

Yesterday I DID make a difference. I am sure that of those two girls, one is still lying in a hospital bed and one is probably either in a holding cell or back with mom and dad after getting bailed OUT of a holding cell, and I am equally sure that both of them are remembering what happened and are terrified about the consequences they are about to face. Are they terrified enough to get help and get their lives back? Who knows? But I think I may start looking into volunteer possibilities again to try to make a bigger difference. Maybe, in a way, these girls saved MY life, too.

“Why did you call 911” indeed.