Ask HN: Best way to recover from an opiate overdose
The other night, while hanging out with friends, I seen an unopened bag of heroine on the ground and decided it would be smart to snort it in their bathroom. They said my body went cold, they frantically tried to revive me, called 911, I turned blue, paramedics came and gave me 3 doses of naloxone to bring me back.
I definitely have a history of drug use/abuse. I've done my fair share of prescription drugs and earlier in the 2010's regularly used prescription opiates until I got on suboxone. I did suboxone throughout my Comp Sci degree and then weened off of it.
After that I would still randomly try prescription opiates when they were available. If I could get my hands on them, I would do as much as my body craved which was a lot. Up to 180 mgs of oxycodone sometimes.
Since the pandemic, those prescription opiates haven't been as easy to get. But I would find myself searching the dark web sometimes trying to see how much Bitcoin I would need to find them. Luckily, I wouldn't go through with that.
About two years ago, I discovered Kratom and started doing that regularly. I did this pretty routinely for almost a year-and-a-half.
At the beginning of this Fall, I made a conscious decision to stop doing it to have more energy for work. It's been over four months since I last did Kratom.
To be perfectly honest, I randomly stumbled upon low-grade prescription opiates 3 times in the past couple of months. I say this just to illustrate that I wasn't regularly using any form of opiates before this ordeal.
But other then that, I felt like I was doing the best I ever have been. A big help there has been finding a good therapist, getting on a combination of SRI's which work for me and doing bikram yoga 2-4 times per week.
And then the night came the other day and I _overdosed_. From the time I stumbled upon this unopened bag of heroin on the ground to me waking up from Narcan was roughly 30 minutes.
I put my non-drug using friends through hell because of my dysfunction. It'll never be the same again. The rest of my social group knows about it now, too. It's absolutely soul-crushing that I could feel so good about where I'm going/how I'm feeling before the ordeal to a heroin/fentanyl _overdose_. If I was by myself, I would most likely be dead.
It's roughly 72 hours since the ordeal and things are really starting to sink in. Initially, I wasn't beating myself up about it and told myself it was "just" a one-time mistake. But it's starting to really set in, and I'm afraid that perspective doesn't take the issue seriously enough.
This came at the end of a long break from work and I happy to get back in to get my mind off of this and try to recover in time. I will also continue to do the hot yoga because I enjoy it and its therapeutic.
Does anybody have any experiences or perspectives on how to recover best from this? Thanks.