Nick Zimmer woke up to two New York police officers kneeling over him. They told him his heart had stopped and he was no longer breathing. He remembers thinking, “I wish you would have left me here.”
First responders had gotten a call of a drug overdose. Police used naloxone, the opioid reversal drug, to block the heroin and fentanyl that were working their way through Zimmer’s body. They took him to the hospital and in less than a few days he was flying out to Las Vegas to receive treatment at Solutions Recovery, a drug and alcohol treatment center.
That was Zimmer’s second overdose in the span of three months. Both times Naloxone was used to revive him. Both times his parents were the ones to find him and call 911.
“Opioids affect decision-making processes on a cellular level,” said Dr. Mark Calarco, chief medical officer of American Addiction Centers. “Despite knowing that opioids are harmful, their brain has been so physically altered that they cannot resist even if they wanted to.”
Zimmer’s first experience going through treatment did not resonate with him enough to end his substance use. “I remember that as soon as they (the treatment center) said that I could never use again, they said ‘if you use one more time you’ll be right back at it’ that I wanted to prove them wrong,” said Zimmer. “Nope, I’m going to show you. I’ll use one more time. I’ll be the one person who is able to do it because I’m so strong-willed.”
Shortly after was when Zimmer overdosed for the first time. He had learned in from others that one of the main causes of an overdose was after treatment, when the body no longer has the drugs in its system, so it cannot handle the same amount.
“Someone who is detoxed has lost their tolerance,” said Calarco. “So if they relapse and take the same dose of drug that they used before treatment, they can easily overdose. Also, people who think they are taking heroin may actually be taking a synthetic opioid like fentanyl and carfentanil (an elephant tranquilizer 10,000 times stronger than morphine), leading to sudden death.”
Knowing this, Zimmer purposely took a quarter of the amount that he would normally use to get high. The dose was still too great and first responders had to use the opioid antagonist on him.
Zimmer then celebrated 90 days of sobriety when he was cooking Sunday dinner for his parents and daughter. As his parents left to go get his daughter, he found a stash of 13 bags of heroin that he had forgotten about inside his shoe. He decided to use one bag but the small amount still caused him to overdose. Luckily for him, his parents had come home before picking up his daughter and found him in enough time to save his life a second time.
“I used one bag and I overdosed.” Said Zimmer.
“I died that time.”
Each day in the United States 91 people die from an opioid-related overdose. Zimmer’s story is just one of thousands, but his had a happy ending where others did not. Since getting treatment for the second time in Las Vegas, Zimmer discovered the piece of his sobriety that he was missing: recovery.
Zimmer started using pain pills, which transitioned to heroin, when he sustained an injury from playing hockey. He did not categorize himself as a bad person and knew himself to be a victim of happenstance, not a “druggie” like many think of heroin users. Even when sober, though, he felt off.
“When I came (to Solutions) I could see that others were happy, and I knew at that point in my life that I was not happy,” said Zimmer. “So I tried to figure out what they were doing different.”
What Zimmer had noticed was that the recovery community he had found himself in was just that: a community.
“People were working the steps together, they were going to meetings every day, they all had sponsors, and some of them had sponsees,” remembered Zimmer. “I started doing what they were doing and that is when my life really began to change. I realized that I was wrong, these programs are not here to stop you from using. They are here to help you become a better person; not drinking and not doing drugs is just a small part of that.”
Zimmer relocated to Las Vegas and is currently celebrating over 18 months of recovery.