I'm a die-hard circuit guy and oddly enough I'm a registered nurse. I've done the drugs, the sex and all. As fabulous as I used to think it was, I am now tired of it. I have been going through a phase where my using is less and less.
I work the ER and ICU in a level-one trauma center on the west coast. I get many homeless and adult suicide attempts and every once in a great while I get a guy who has overdosed on meth. A few weeks ago I received a patient who was brought in by helicopter. A friend who had not heard from him in days had found him in his apartment. When I got the report via phone it was nothing new, I had taken care of patients like this many times before, little did I know I was not prepared emotionally for what was in store for me.
When the patient arrived he was unconscious, even in his state he was one of the most adorable men I have ever seen. When he did come around the look in his eyes brought tears to mine. There was so much hurt in him, we never even exchanged words because he was so severely dehydrated he could not speak. His friends showed up moments later in panic and I had to make them wait in the waiting room. After doing a drug screen on him he tested positive for meth, heroine and cocaine. He was my only patient and my goal for the night was to get his electrolytes back to normal and get him re-hydrated.
After several hours into the shift he was stable and I went to speak to his friends, they told me he had just tested positive and that he went off the deep end with the drugs to mask the pain. After I finally got his lytes back to normal, I let one friend in at a time to see him. I was appalled by my fellow staff members’ comments in the break room and at the nursing station behind closed doors. Comments like "Fucking fags, faster he dies the better, he makes me sick.” As furious as this and other comments made me I decided to deal with them the next day with my manager. My point is that even people who are in the medical field who see HIV patients all the time can be cruel and naive to gay men. We see HIV+ homeless people everyday and not a word is mentioned. But when a good-looking gay male comes in, a portion of the staff had a slanderous field day.
As the night went on my patient began to awaken; he was alone and scared. I sat next to the bed and held his hand. It was almost surreal because I knew what it was like coming out of a drug overdose. I had overdosed on GHB when I was in college. I just sat there and continued holding his hand knowing that he probably didn't want to say much. Much of the time I was looking down fighting the urge to cry. Staff members kept walking by the room and glaring at me but I didn't care. When I looked up at the patient to make eye contact he was crying and that is when I lost it as well. Mind you, I controlled myself, I didn't fly across the bed and hug him but I had some pretty big tears. Again no words were spoken. About an hour later his heart began to beat at about 160 - 180 BPM's. This is a lethal arrhythmia and it needs an immediate intervention. We pushed cardiac drugs in attempt to slow his heart rate and also put up a continuous IV drip, nothing would work. His arrhythmia worsened. What had happened is that he had basically ruined all the cells in his heart, so much that they could not polarize and depolarize any longer. Cardiac cells are the only cells in your body that cannot fix themselves after sever damage. I pulled a blood draw on him to test the troponin which is an enzyme that indicates heart damage; it was higher than any of us in the unit had ever seen.
And then my greatest fear, he had a cardiac arrest. After calling a code we intubated him and we went through the standard ACLS procedure with defibrillation and the whole nine yards. The doctor pronounced him dead at 05:45 Dec 19th 2003.
After my shift was over I went to my car and cried for what seemed like hours. I cried so hard my stomach muscles ached for days.
As a nurse I have seen many things that I have been able to shut myself off from. This was too close to home.
Crystal meth is ruining our society. Unity has been replaced by drug use as a norm. We need to make some changes before we all are severely affected.