what happened?
three minute read
blur
The next few hours are a blur of doctors, nurses, beeping machines, IV's, phone calls, sitting, waiting, praying. Spending several hours in the ER on a Friday night was like watching a very serious and sad circus play out with a cast of incredibly interesting characters. From the medics running in with bodies on stretchers to nurses who handled everything with a calm coolness that meant they've seen it all before, to the doctors who were ping-ponging back and forth from room to room looking at patients and dealing with the frantic people who were there with them. The worst scenes were the ones where no one was with the patient - someone was playing out this craziness all by themselves.
It was almost midnight and I knew by now my parents would be panicking to know what John's status was but I couldn't leave him, and wasn't allowed to use my phone in the room, so I asked my husband if he would call my parents and also my ex-husband to give them an update. While we didn't have much, at least we could confirm that he was alive and that was enough for now. This relay of telephone calls to family and friends via my husband became critical for my sanity and for everyone who was praying for John. My focus had to stay on him but I knew word would spread quickly that he was in the hospital and wanted to be sure the right information was communicated to the right people.
There were definitely people we didn't want information to get to, mainly John's drug-friends who we were sure would be coming to the hospital or trying to get information very soon. We didn't know a lot about what had been happening in his life over the past few months, but knew it wasn't good and there was a likely chance John owed people money or had other issues going on that would potentially bring around the “homies” who didn't want the best for him. My ex-husband had sent me a text saying he'd been getting messages from various people asking where and how John was and if they could visit. He didn't answer them but it was clear that word was spreading - fast. Which, for John's safety, was exactly what we didn't want. The curse of social media's instantaneous ripple effect was kicking in and I knew it would be hard to keep things quiet about where John was and what had happened. The good news, I figured, was that anyone he'd been with may assume he didn't make it, which if that word spread among his "friends" I would have been perfectly happy.
Somewhere between the time we arrived at the hospital and midnight, facts about how John was found and what happened started to emerge. We cobbled the story together from ER nurses, text messages and a few cryptic phone calls from the people who were with him earlier that night. It was disturbing and unreal to me, but it helped put some context around how we had ended up where we were. Of course we weren't sure of the accuracy of the story because John obviously couldn't communicate with us, so we had to go with the bits we learned along the way. To this day he doesn't remember any of this.
John had been hanging out with friends that day and in the late afternoon was at his friend Nick's house waiting for Nick to get home from work. Nick's sister and a few other people were there as well, and wanted to get some food. They asked John if he wanted to come along and he said no. We later learned he was supposed to be going out to dinner with a girl he'd started dating and her parents - maybe this is why he said no to going along for food. Then, for some reason, John decided to go with them but wanted to wait in the car while they went into the restaurant - again, maybe because he was planning to go to dinner later with his girlfriend. We don't know. His friends all went in to eat and John stayed in the car - he must have taken the pills either just before they left Nick's house, or in the car, we're not sure. While his friends were in the restaurant they met up with a few other people and when they were done eating decided to go do something else and didn't go back to the car for another three hours. When they returned, John was laying in the back seat, had no pulse, and was foaming at the mouth. My boy was clinically dead.
Nick's sister probably saved John’s life because she knew CPR - they pulled him out of the car onto the sidewalk and she started pumping his chest and blowing in his mouth while one of the other friends called 911. Medics arrived (we don't know how long it took them to get there) and took over CPR - for 25 minutes. It's unclear if CPR was done on the street or in the ambulance, probably both, but because he wasn't able to breathe on his own the medics inserted the ventilator down John's throat on the way to the hospital. We didn't have more than this - but for a parent to envision this scene where their child is in such pain, is laying on a sidewalk, dead, was more than I could handle. I had to block the vision and also my anger at "friends" who would leave someone they knew was taking massive doses of drugs in a car, alone, for three hours. And the fact that they were texting us to see if they could visit John in the hospital made me angry and disgusted. And sad, so sad, that this is where drugs had taken my son.