"You can't pull in air": When you walk into your child's bedroom and they've overdosed
When Elizabeth Knight and her boyfriend came home from the emergency room at six in the morning one day in 2017, Elizabeth had a story ready for step mom Greta. Her boyfriend had slipped in the shower and hit his head, she claimed.
Greta didn’t buy it (who takes showers at 2am?). She assumed one of them had overdosed, so she set about trying to find out if it was Elizabeth or her boyfriend who had almost died that night.
She called the local authorities to ask if they’d treated anyone with Narcan, the opioid overdose antidote. They said that they had.
“Was it a boy or a girl?” Greta asked.
“I can’t tell you that,” they said. “Did the patient have a penis or not?” Greta demanded to know.
After a shocked pause, they confirmed to Greta that the patient did, in fact, have a penis. Greta and Elizabeth’s dad, John, were relieved that it had been the boyfriend, and not Elizabeth, who’d overdosed that night. But they were also worried that she was dating a heroin user. At that point, as far as they knew, their 33-year-old daughter had not done heroin for two and a half years, after more than a decade of opioid addiction.
Elizabeth started taking Vicodin as a teenager and for 15 years she’d sowed chaos in the family. The vivacious blonde refused to go to school and ran away from home. Once, the police called her dad John in the middle of the night to inform him that his beautiful teenage daughter was passed out in a car with some college guys from a nearby town. Another time, he had to rescue her from a rural West Virginia crackhouse. “And it was as bad as you’d imagine a rural West Virginia crack house to be,” he says.
Once, in her 20s, she’d slunk home looking like hell—like, “She’d literally been drug over by gravel,” John recalls. As it turns out, she had. A boyfriend had sped away in his pick-up truck and she’d tried to jump in. She’d fallen, scraping herself on the gravel in their driveway.
There were years they only saw her at Christmas, and years when they didn’t see her at all. She got married, had two kids, then divorced. Eventually her ex got full custody and she lost the right to visit them even under supervision. “There are two different phone calls you expect when you’re in our position,” John says. “One is to get a call that says, ‘Dad, I need help.’ “The other is a phone call that says, ‘Your child is dead.’”
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