Rambling On Maureen's Log and My Failure

The speaker found his fiancee's old journal and discovered that she had a history of drug use and had written about her relationship with a previous partner. He then recounts a traumatic incident where he had to save her life after she overdosed on drugs. He questions whether this heroic act played a role in their relationship and ponders on the idea of saving someone's life being a romantic trope. I really fucking missed my fiancée. I found the journal of hers earlier and I thought at first it was her mom's because their handwriting wasn't really that different and I saw a lot of like poetry and like practice poetry. Her mom wrote a lot of poetry, well some poetry. I didn't know that until I assumed it was her mom's. Then I turned to a page that had a drop of blood on it and the exact same freaking quote from Dexter that I used in a song that I have up on SoundCloud and the whole speech that Dexter's sister goes into about being broken. She wrote the whole quote out and then in quotes and then beneath it she wrote something like, God it was so, it wasn't in reference to me, you know, it was an old journal. I mean, you know, it was buried on the bottom of one of those boxes in another room covered in dust. But yeah, it must have been something she wrote after, you know, a blood friend kicked her out. She was living with, you know, a blood friend in New Orleans. She was happy. I mean, she told me that that was a happy period for her, although she was constantly scared because she was secretly using heroin and he didn't know. She had never told him and somehow their entire relationship had proceeded to that point because they'd already been dating for at least a year, I think, out here because he was wrapping up his PhD. And yeah, so she met him somewhere along that process when he got his first job at Tulane. He invited her out and she came with him. So it looked like they were going to be having kids and get her married and shit. And that's clearly what she wrote in the paragraph to follow was basically like, I could see our future. I could see our children. I could see our potential. I could see our dream. And then she said, yes, I had met Prince Charming. But it was like past tense, you know. And then to the left of it, there was a drop of blood, which meant she probably wrote that while she was shooting up. That's fucking tragic as fuck. I don't know. I just find that to be really sad. I mean, later on, I found journals, more recent ones that she wrote after meeting me. And yeah, I mean, not to like, toot my own horn or anything, but it was clear that she was happy again. Not right away. At first, she was actually very much like some of the earlier entries, she was weighing like, whether or not she should stick with me, or not rather, rather, stick with an old blood friend, because she was already with an old blood friend. Whether or not she should leave an old blood friend. She appeared to be contemplating leaving when I met her, because he was living in Colorado and she wasn't sure if she wanted to go out there, but she was thinking about it, whether or not she should date me. But so I saw some like, you know, charts where she was doing pros and cons. And yeah, there were more pros on his side. The pro on my side was a superior pro, apparently. It was a more important pro to her. And yeah, it doesn't matter what the pros and cons were. I don't know, I guess you might hear this, I guess, probably not, but he's a nice guy. It wasn't about him. Anyway, you know, when you spend time, as much time as we do, on a cycle with someone, you tend to get to know them pretty well. It's not just that, there was something weird right off the bat that took place. It felt like recognition, more than like meeting someone. It was like, oh, you, it's her. Not like it's her, like she's the one. It's like, I know you, I've seen you before, I know that. But I hadn't, I had never seen her before. There's no way. Because, you know, I thought, well, it's very, very, very unlikely I've seen her as an adult. Anyway. And she told me she saw the same thing later on after she ended up choosing me. And I think saving her life, I think. I ended up saving her life. I'm not, to be honest, I'm not too well informed. And I just happened to be there while she overdosed. And I was trying my damnedest to get her to not fucking do it, because she was already pretty freaking high. But she was so confident that, you know, now that I was gonna be fine, I was gonna be fine, I was just gonna do a small shot. And it was the very first time that she did it in front of me. And she asked me to do it. And I was like, fuck, no. Nope. I'm not doing that. That'd be a violation of my health. Anyway. Yeah. Right after finally finding her in her fucking foot, her ankle, probably the dorsalis pedis thing. Within moments, she started getting kind of like confused. It looked like she was passing out. So I started increasingly talking to her louder and louder and then eventually shouting at her. She was trying her damnedest just to stay awake, which resulted in that stuttery kind of jerky kind of thing that happens when you're falling asleep. It happened like a whole bunch in sequence. It almost looked like a fucking seizure. I thought maybe she was having one, but I don't think she had a seizure. She was just kind of like coming in and out of consciousness for a little while. And then she kind of went out. And then she not kind of went up, she went out. And then no matter, but yeah, long before that, I got into the front seat of the car because we were having a little picnic thing and it was kind of late at night and we were out of cell phone range. It would have taken about 30 to 40 minutes for me to get her to a hospital. And I didn't like those odds, but I had to try because, you know, I knew that her breathing wasn't going to immediately stop. It was going to take a little bit of time. So I floored it up where it would drive and to get to the top, you know, like skyline. But before I even got to skyline, I turned around and I saw her and she was turning blue. And I realized, oh fuck, she's already, this is not ever going to, I'm not ever going to get there. So I stopped, I got in the back seat and I just started, like I grabbed both her legs and I just started pumping in and out, like pushing like her, like, you know, knees towards her chest and then pulling all the way out and just kind of rapidly doing that to, because if you do that, you can sort of expand and contract someone's diaphragm, which will draw a little bit of air into their lungs. It's not really enough to keep them alive, but my thinking was that it would pull in saliva into her lungs and it might, that would hurt, right? Like pain signals, you know, and that's a pretty strong pain signal. And she was teetering on consciousness, you know, like she was, she had just barely overdosed. And that's the only reason why this worked. This is not a method that would work on someone who had like massively overdosed. But because it was just barely an overdose, yeah, it worked. It was enough to, you know, the process of like screaming at her, slapping her, and then, you know, the diaphragm thing, it kind of woke her up enough to feel the pain of having just inhaled a bunch of saliva. And then she just immediately went into a state of coughing. And I knew from that point on that she was going to be, well, most likely she was going to be okay because, yeah, she was just coughing like crazy for 15 minutes, non-stop almost, which means she could barely breathe. But if you're coughing, you're breathing. It's okay. If you ever see someone and you think they're choking, but they're coughing, if they're able to say anything, then they're not really fully choking. You have to get concerned when they're not able to even cough or say anything, or their face starts turning blue or something. That's when you, yeah, Heimlich Maneuver time. Anyway, well, you might want to do the Heimlich either way. The Heimlich has some risk, so you don't want to just go around doing it on people, just willy-nilly. But yeah, there's not, you know, the only risk involved in what I did was that she might get an aspiration pneumonia. I mean, a small risk of aspiration pneumonia versus death, I'll take that. I'll take the risk of aspiration pneumonia. If she didn't, she was fine. She didn't get any pneumonia. I think she only inhaled a little bit of saliva, but it was enough to hurt like fucking hell. And yeah, by the time she was done coughing, it hadn't worn off enough for her to maintain consciousness on her own. I guess she was still like really loaded though. So she was like kind of drowsy and fading in and out, but not, she was no longer, like her breathing was no longer stopping. Even when she was, I would see her fall asleep, and then I would just check to see, to make sure she was breathing, and she was. But for a while, I kept waking her up anyways, because it was making me fucking nervous. And I hung out with her for about an hour, like outside of a gas station on the way down to Highland. You know, like we're just, yeah, like eventually I got to a point where she was finally able to like formulate a question. And you know, I started to realize, she doesn't really need to go to the hospital anymore. And yeah, I just pulled over at that point, so I could talk to her, because she was scared. She didn't know what happened. And I had to kind of explain it to her. And she was like, oh, okay. Sorry. I mean, she thought she had just had a stroke. And that was the question she asked. She was like, did I just have a stroke? And I was like, no, no, honey, no, no, you're fine. And I pulled over, and I just told her that she just overdosed. And she, you know, anyway, I don't know if that played a role, but you know, the whole like rom-com thing, like, she saved a woman's life. Like, is that a question? Is that true? Like, you know, women out there, do you feel like more inclined to want to be with someone who saves your life? Or is that just some fucking trope? I don't really see why it should be the case, because I mean, why wouldn't I save her life? I do. That's the only time I've been able to use my envy to a positive effect that I'm aware of. Like, you know, without having a license, because it doesn't require a license to do. It's just like the Good Samaritan thing, you know? You're allowed to save someone's life if you know how, right? It's like doing CPR, except it wasn't really CPR. It wasn't at all CPR. I mean, her heart had not stopped. If it had, there would have been no point of doing anything. I mean, Pulp Fiction was wrong. I'm sorry, but that movie was ridiculous. That scene in that movie was ridiculously wrong. It was a good movie. I liked the movie, but they really didn't do any research about medical shit, because her heart had stopped, right? If I'm not mistaken. If it hadn't, why would they need to inject it into her heart, right? If her heart was beating, they could have injected epinephrine anywhere, right? Because that's the whole reason why. But first of all, epinephrine, that's not the drug you use to wake people up from the heroin overdose. It might temporarily wake them up, but yeah, you need naloxone. But anyway, that's not the thing that's... Because you can make an argument that maybe epinephrine would wake them up enough, but I don't know. But that would only work if their heart was still beating, because the reason why their heart stops beating from the heroin overdose is because first, they stop breathing. That's what happens. Their breathing gets suppressed so heavily, their autonomic breathing, so that they fall asleep. It also hits the reticular activating system and just knocks you out. So while unconscious, your autonomic breathing takes over, but if that's being suppressed as well, then you're just not going to breathe. So literally, you die because you just forget to breathe. That's it. It's not because it's like toxic or anything. You just forget to breathe. And anyway, so if it gets to the point where your heart stops, that means it suffered so much ischemic damage that it can no longer beat. The no amount of shots of epinephrine to your heart is going to reverse ischemic damage to the heart. It won't do a fucking thing. If it does, it would only get it pumping just briefly, and then it would stop again, because it would have the same problem of no oxygen in the blood, or not enough to feed the coronaries, to feed the muscle of the heart. So it's not a way to, you cannot bring someone back after their heart stops because of a heroin overdose, is my point. If someone's heart stops because of an arrhythmia, then yeah, you can use a defibrillator to bring them back. That's the only thing that a defibrillator can fix. Someone who has passed out, not died, they have not suffered brain death yet, but their heart has stopped because of an unstable arrhythmia, which those are pretty common at the end of the day. I mean, they're not the most common cause of heart-related death, but if you see someone suddenly collapse while jogging or whatever, or just walking around, there's a reasonable chance that they collapsed because of an unstable heart rhythm. And so, yeah, a defibrillator in that case is a pretty good thing to do. That's why they put them in airports and in public places and shit. Because yeah, if you ever see someone just fall over all of a sudden, unless they're like, you know, holding their throat and indicating, you know, like, you know, then they're choking. But if they just collapse and fall, you know, they're not conscious anymore. That's probably because their heart just went into an unstable rhythm and it wasn't beating enough or pumping enough blood to their brain. So they passed out. So therefore, a defibrillator might bring them back. But you know, in the movies, there's so many fucking movies. Clear! It's like there's always a scene where they're trying to bring someone back from something that that's just not an appropriate treatment for. You know, it's like a gunshot or something. What? The guy just bled out. A defibrillator is not going to help. You got to give him a freaking transfusion. Hello? Yeah, but it's just, you know, doesn't look as dramatic as you got to have that scene with the clear, you know, and then, you know, eventually the flatline. And then it's like, oh, he's gone. Darn. Well, we did our best. Yeah, I guess. But you didn't actually need to do that last part. That was kind of strange. You were just shocking a dead body and potentially hurting people in the room. Because if anyone was touching that body, that's why they yell clear. You know, yeah, they'd get shocked. So yeah, don't do that. Don't fuck around with defibrillators if they're not going to do anything. And people in fucking ambulances know that. So they would never do that. I fucking hope they don't. I don't know. It's arguable whether or not she was savable. Like, her friends all tell me that I extended her life. But, you know, by saving her life that day, there was one other time where I might have, and it's a little less clear to me, because she wasn't turning below that time. And I wasn't positive that her breathing had stopped. Yeah. Well, I didn't even actually do the diaphragm thing that time. I just got some naltrexone and I crushed it up and put it under her, just a teeny little bit, put it under her tongue. And yeah, because I still have some around here, naltrexone. Because, you know, once upon a time, I had problems with alcohol. And it's also prescribed to help with alcohol curfews. But it's also, I mean, it's an opioid, or I should say it's an endorphin receptor antagonist. And so it can be used to bring someone out of it. But it's not like, yeah, because it comes with pills, you know. But yeah, you know, as long as there's enough moisture on it, on a mucous membrane, you can crush it up and put it on a mucous membrane, and it will absorb in a bit. And she came out of it. And then she was kind of in like a little bit of a withdrawal for a bit. Because naltrexone, unlike naloxone, lasts quite a while. So she wasn't feeling very good for like a number of hours after that. And I left that part out. I didn't explain to her why that was. Because she would have been mad. I think she would have been mad. Because no one likes to get dope sick, you know. But I told her that I did the naltrexone thing. But it was arguable that it was necessary. I don't know if it was or not. I might have been jumping the gun. But she looked like she was heading that way. And yeah, it would be a short window or naltrexone would be a way to bring her back. So I just, just to be safe. And I tried to use as small amount as possible. But it was enough that, you know, she felt sick. She was reluctant to redose after just having overdosed. I was reluctant to let her. But I couldn't stop at the end of the day. I couldn't. She was her own person. I could have tried to enforce some rules and whatever. And I did actually. I mean, I gave her an ultimatum about needles. But that was bluffing. That was bluffing. This unconditional love for her. I was never going to leave her here alone. That would have killed her. But I didn't want to. I wasn't sticking around out of some fear of her. I felt like obligated to take care of this, you know, wounded bird or something. I joined her here on purpose. I moved in. I joined her in her own little personal hell to get through to her. You know, because dating her from where I was, which was in Las Vegas at the time, you know, she was constantly teetering on suicide. And she went back in the hospital. And she was really depressed. And there was more than one time where she would not respond to me for a couple of days in a row. And I was just panicking. And I ended up having to text Craig, which was her housemate, her mom's former lover, I guess, who was now her subtenant. And he was a real asshole. And she hated him. But she basically felt trapped in her room all the time. Because he was such a fucking dick. And he would just stomp around and just be a dick. She felt afraid of him. I don't know that he was actually like dangerous, but she was easily triggerable. Because she had been abused in more than one way, in every conceivable way that a child can be abused. And so yeah, can you blame her for being a little bit? And you know, she was very easy to put her on edge. You know, any guy just stomping around would scare the crap out of her. So I was always like, well, maybe not always. I did lose my temper a couple times. But it was like deeper into the relationship when it was established that she felt safe around me. And I don't know. And I didn't stomp around. But anyway, yeah, I had to contact Craig and ask him to check on her. And you know, one of the times it was she, yeah, she had been, you know, overdosed, I guess. But not dead. Overdosing just means you took more than you intended to. Doesn't always mean that, you know, you'll die. But yeah, she clearly took more than she had intended to. And she was, yeah, she had thrown up in her sleep. And there's like, he had to help her like, wash her. He wasn't always a dick, apparently, because he helped her like clean her sheets up and shit. But yeah, she, it was not good. You know, she, I was already in love with her. I couldn't, I couldn't fall out of love with her. I wasn't going to just, so I had to get through to her. I don't think she wasn't believing me that I loved her unconditionally. You know, she'd had too many experiences with men that were bad, or she'd had a couple good boyfriends before me. But one of whom had thrown her out when he discovered that she was using heroin. And, you know, that's not unreasonable. It's not what I would have done. But that's not unreasonable. He regretted it later. And he told her that. And he's a good guy. And if he ever ends up listening to this, um, yeah, I think, I think maybe he just, he's got a kind of a quick temper, and a little bit of reactionary in his eyes. We all have that capacity. When I called him to tell her that she died, I think he actually, well, he hung up on me. I, well, because I explained that she had been, we had been doing a harm reduction approach, where she was using the actual substance as a maintenance, instead of methadone or suboxone. We tried both of those, but both of those are not always easy to get, especially methadone. It's really freaking hard to do the methadone program here. You have to show up every day, at like three in the morning or four in the morning, and stand out cold on Sacramento Street, which is a very bad area. And I'd have to drive her down there. And I would stand out there with her until she got in. And that was a pain in the ass for both of us. I was willing to do it, so long as she was. But she wasn't willing to do it for more than like, I don't know, a month. And yeah, the suboxone thing meant trips down to Highland Hospital, I think twice a week, or yeah, it was either twice a week or once a week. And that was also not easy for us. That was easier for me. But she didn't really like to do that either. And she just didn't really like suboxone. Even though while she was on it, that was about, I don't know, maybe six months, seven months, eight months, I can't remember. At that period, she was at probably about the most functional I'd seen her until the last six months. So it wasn't pretty good. You know, it was kind of a highlight of our relationship, really, from my perspective. But then towards the end, she had been off needles for approaching two years. And she was really beginning to use it less and less. And it looked like, yeah, because I could tell, I mean, she was more and more with it. She wasn't like, she didn't have that spacey look on her face anymore. Like hardly ever. And so I think she was just using the minimal amount that she needed to not get sick. And that's what you're supposed to do for me. And I think it took moving in here and joining her here to get through to her. Yeah, I'm in it for the long haul. I wasn't thinking about it at the time, but it was sort of like what dreams may come. Like I could see that she was in her own personal hell. And she was alone and scared. And I, you know, I just kicked down the gaze of hell and joined her here. And I was prepared to stay here forever. I had to convince her, you know, come out. That her hell was just in her head. And she was just starting to get it. I could see it, you know, and her friends saw it too. All my friends, they all told me the same thing. That they were seeing like noticeable improvement in her like overall mood. And like, yeah, whatever. And I was too. She was starting to look like somebody who was genuinely not happy, because what the fuck does that mean? I don't know what that means. No one's happy all the time. But she was starting to look like she was content with her life. Like she was feeling loved. Like she felt loved. And she wrote that down too. So that's not conjecture either. She felt loved, which was not an inaccurate way for her to feel because she was loved. Not just by me, but by a lot of people, including her, you know, her former boyfriends. And yeah, it was hard for them to hear. It was hard for me to call them and tell them. The other one took it very well. And eventually, they both did. The initial reaction was a little bit, you know, but I think he understands now. I think he probably put it together. I hope. I was doing my damnedest. I mean, I didn't have to come here. This is his hell. I can see why it was her hell. You know, all her mom's stuff's in the next room. And this is where she was abused. And goddamn, it's atrocious. It's a terrible scene. And I just joined her here. And now it's become my hell. Now I'm stuck here. And I don't know. We were on our way out. I was holding her hand and leading her out. And we were climbing up, you know, to get out. She was strong enough to start to, you know, be able to climb on her own. And so we were climbing side by side. And I, you know, maybe I was a little bit ahead and just trying to find stable ground for us for our next step. It was just what I was doing with this whole game thing. I was trying to carve out the nook for us to rest in. And I was doing that. And I looked away for a moment to do that. And when I looked back, she had slipped. And she had fallen to her death. And it was too late. It was too late. I missed it. I missed it like the cowards. It had been a really hard time forgiving myself for that. It was like my one job. It was a whole reason why I came here. It was to get her out of here alive. And I thought I was succeeding. And I just let my guard down. I looked away. And I didn't know she had needles. She had bought needles prior to coming into possession of what was obviously fentanyl. We both knew it was fentanyl. And she did. She used openly. It was okay. I wanted her to. Because that way I could keep an eye on it. Rather than trying to force her to do it in the shadows. So she brought in this bag of white stuff. And the guy told her, look, this is really strong. So be very careful. And she was like, okay. And when she told me that, I was like, oh, that means probably that's fucking fentanyl. And so, yeah, I thought I explained it. But I didn't explain it. Because the fact that she would try it with a needle just didn't occur to me. I didn't know she had them, first of all. And secondly, yeah, she had been doing so great without them. She was grateful, actually, for being free from that bad nightmare. She actually thanked me. And that's when I knew that she was actually done with needles, at least I thought. Because I was still worried. And I was hovering until when she told me that. I could tell when she was blowing smoke up my ass. And yeah, she clearly meant it. That was not easy for her to say. She had to eat some crow there. Because her initial reaction was kind of, she kind of had a temper tantrum about it. But you know, she didn't want me to leave. But I told her later, I was bluffing. I didn't want her to feel like if she did slip, I would immediately leave. I wanted to know if she slipped. But still, I guess she was still afraid of the potential that I would leave her. Because she didn't tell me she had needles. It's a very different story. I warned her about it. Like I watched her do her first dose. I wanted to test it before I set it up for her. So I knew, you know, I didn't want to give her a dose that I didn't know. I was using myself as a guinea pig. And yeah, I was in a lot of pain then. So I just, I set up the tiniest little amount myself. I just ran under the assumption that it was something close to pure. Because I know what the doses are and what that should look like. And we're talking like, barely visible specks. I mean, just like dust. And it would knock me on my fucking ass. It has a very short half-life. So I can't, I mean, I didn't, I never, I don't think I fell asleep. But actually, I think I did go unconscious briefly. But I wasn't in danger of dying. And yeah, I mean, she obviously had a massively higher tolerance than me. So I basically gave her a little bit more than the amount that I had taken. And she ended up doing twice as much as that. And she was fine. She didn't even pass out. She was walking around. She was fine. Because that's how high her tolerance was. But she did say like, whoa, this feels just like I, you know, done an IV. Anyway, so I, that was like, a couple of days. I mean, a couple of days later is when, yeah, so I saw her using it a number of times intranasally. And I thought she had a doubt. And I wasn't really that worried about it anymore. I was a little concerned. I mean, I didn't like that she had it, but I would vastly prefer her to use the other's guitar. But that's what she, and you know, it was economical. I'll tell you that much. That bag was gonna last her for fucking ever. She actually, she went and got a second one. Because, yeah. But the redose, I mean, she had to redose a lot more, but because of the short headway. But even then, the value of it was, you know, I mean, the economics of it made some sense for her. So she got two bags. But I thought that she knew what she was doing. But if I had known that there was any chance in hell that she would attempt to do that, I mean, I would have explained to her that, you know, an intranasal dose that's not lethal will almost certainly be lethal at IV when it comes to Fenton. Because it's 100% bioavailability compared to like 10, 20, 30%. Plus, it hits you so much faster. It's like peak levels within a few minutes, as opposed to like 10 minutes or so. 15, I don't know. And so, yeah, it's much more likely to knock you out and knock out your breathing for a while than else to kill you when you do it. And I didn't explain that part to her because I didn't think I had to. Well, first, I kind of thought she knew that intranasal doses don't equivalent to IV doses. But maybe she didn't know that. I don't know. I don't know.