NARCAN SAVED ME. NOW I HELP OTHER ADDICTS.

I manage a sober living house in San Diego, and I have three years clean from substance addiction. About 13 years ago, I had been clean, but then relapsed into a heroin addiction. During that time, lots of fentanyl was flooding the streets, and you never knew what drugs had this lethal substance within their contents. My addiction almost killed me, but Narcan, the kindness of others and sober living saved my life.

I suffered my first near-fatal overdose on the streets of Downtown San Diego in 2010 at the age of 29. I was unconscious for approximately 40 minutes, the paramedics said, and was down to seven breaths a minute, very close to cardiac arrest. If it was not for the people living on the streets near 17th Street and Interstate 5 who brought Narcan and called

Nelson is a manager at Fairmont Park Recovery and a student at San Diego City College and lives in Bankers Hill. the paramedics, I might not have survived.

The struggle of addiction is real. I ended up in the hospital emergency room approximately 15 times from 2009 to 2019 before I found a different path. With the help of community resources and drug counselors known as assessors who visit county jails and offer inpatient drug treatment, I was able to put myself through intense inpatient treatment for behavior modification and start learning why I was doing the things I was doing. Looking back, I was at an animalistic level. I was out there for so long, it was extremely hard to come back. I had to relearn how to do everything I was taught as a child, from brushing my teeth to learning how to have a conversation with a human being again.

After the four months of inpatient care, I moved into a sober living house and began five months of intensive outpatient services. Union of Pan Asian Communities, a nonprofit organization that provides health and human services to underserved diverse populations, provided financial assistance and helped me pay rent for five months right when the COVID-19 pandemic first began. After that, I got a part-time job at a temp agency and was able to cover my own rent. I went back to school and am now starting my third year at San Diego City College majoring in video production and film. I have come a long way in these last three years, but it would not have been possible without these new resources that are available now.

While I was still active in addiction, people who did needle exchanges also provided us boxes of Narcan so almost every addict running the streets had a box handy. I had to administer Narcan to people on the street several times. It is awesome that Narcan is readily available all over the place these days because when you see someone fall out with your own eyes, the odds of them dying are high without Narcan.