809: The Call
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A quick warning: There are curse words that are un-beeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. From WBZ Chicago, This American Life, I'm Howard Glass. Okay, so you call a hotline, and then a complete stranger tries to figure out how to help you. On the spot. That idea seems to have begun in the 1950s. The first suicide hotline in the United States was created in the early 60s by a guy in San Francisco who was a priest and also a journalist.

And it was just him answering the phone at first. Ads on matchbooks and sides of buses said, thinking of ending it all? Call Bruce. Which, by the way, was not his real name. His real name was Bernard Mays. But of course, the power of anonymity is so important to any hotline. People would call. And sometimes he could help them precisely because he had no connection to their life at all. Like, they could say anything to him. In those pre-internet days, that was completely new. To harness that kind of anonymity, the intimacy of it,

This way. Over the phone. These days, of course, there are all kinds of hotlines for people in all sorts of situations. Prayer hotlines. Psychic hotlines. Also hotlines for homework help. For new moms. There's a hotline for owners of three-legged dogs. And another one specifically for anybody who swallows one. You know those little round button batteries? That hotline also handles any kid who pushes it up their nose. Today we're going to devote our entire show to one phone call that happened on one hotline. A very unusual hotline.

And then we have everything that followed from that one call. It takes you inside this world that I think either you're already in this world or it's totally invisible to you. Like it's all around you. You don't even register that this world is there. Mary Harris tells what happened. She's the host of Slate's daily news podcast, What Next? We first broadcast today's show last year.

One quick note, some parts of this phone call might not be great for young children to hear. I suppose I'm going to give you this warning before mentioning that part about pushing batteries up your nose. But anyway, here's Mary with Act One, The Call. The call in this story took place a few years ago. Thank you for calling. It's a call to a hotline of sorts, though one I'd never heard about before and was surprised to learn existed.

This is the music you hear when you're waiting for an operator. I tried to break free. You tried to keep me bound. I tried to live right. You tried to keep me down. But now I'm going. Never use a loan, it's just each. Hi.

My name's Kimber. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm good. Let me catch your name one more time. Kimber. That's what I thought. Okay. The woman taking this call, her name's Jessie. She's a nurse. And she's taken thousands of these. All right. Let me get my book, Kimber. I've never talked to you before. I'm glad you called.

The hotline is called Never Use Alone.

And the idea is, if you're going to inject heroin or do a speedball, something like that, and there's no one around, you can dial them up. Someone will stay on the line, make sure you're okay. If it seems like you've overdosed, they'll call the paramedics. All right, let me get some information, okay, baby? All right, give me your callback number in case we get disconnected. Jessie gets the caller's phone number and address, just in case she has to call the ambulance. The caller, Kimber, is in Massachusetts.

Jessie is down in Georgia. You got your door unlocked? Let me check. Hold on. Yeah, it's unlocked now. Okay. So make sure I'm on speakerphone. Yep. All right. Are you by yourself in your home, in your apartment? Yeah. Okay. Do you have Narcan? I do. Set it out for me. Okay.

And if you've got anything else extra that you don't need to do your job, if you just picked up, if you've got some extra rigs, put away anything you don't need, okay?

Okay. Because God forbid I have to call the ambulance, they'll take your shit when they leave, and I don't want them to do that. Okay. Hold on, let me put everything away. Then in the bathroom, I'm going to take a bunch of stuff out. Yeah, just, you know, like close the door, you know, or whatever. Just don't leave it right where you're at. How long have you been abstinent? About a month. Okay. So you know your tolerance is in the dirt, right, baby?

Yeah. Okay. All right. So I'll stay on the phone with you. If you want to just, I mean, if you want to do points at a time or half a point at a time, we'll take it as slow as you want. If you would feel better video chatting me, we can do a jitsi or something. Okay? Okay. Okay.

So you can hear, like, in the beginning, I'm upbeat, I'm happy to talk to her. I spoke with Jessie, the nurse. But you hear my voice change. What is that? She was speaking with some speed, with some urgency. I just, I knew she wasn't going to be careful.

My mama spirit kicked in immediately. It's a sixth sense that you develop when you do these calls. She's not like connecting with you. She's like, she's like, just I'm here to get this done. She was there to do a job. So all I ask you to do is you let me know as soon as you push your first dose. You let me know that you're done. Well, I have to hold my breath for a second because I have to do it in my neck.

I'm not going to be speaking for a second. Okay. So her neck, you can inject in your external jugular vein, but to do that, you have to hold your breath. Is that because you do that when your other veins are like blown out? Mm-hmm. You're using terminology I don't understand, like half a point, a point. What does that mean? When they hopefully weigh their dope. Hopefully when you weigh your dope out, they're using a scale. Okay.

And they measure it out in grams. Point one is zero is a tenth of a gram. Point two, I mean, you know, that's, you know, drug user lingo for we'll nickel and dime it right on in there. Small doses are one way to try to stay safe when you're using a drug like heroin or fentanyl.

But the truth is, you really have no idea what you're getting if you're buying drugs off the street. Yeah.

Okay, I'm pushing it in. All right. Slow and easy, baby. All right. I'm pushing. I'm letting the tourniquet go. Okay, baby. Okay. I think I'm okay. I'm good. All right. Well, we're going to stay on the phone for about five minutes, okay? Okay. And then if you want to do more...

Then you can do a little bit more, okay? Sometimes a personal call-in wanting to talk. With our regulars, Jessie knows the names of their pets, keeps track of their birthdays. But her main job is just to stay on the line and check in every now and then. For this call, she was sitting at her kitchen table. Her husband walks in at some point for help with a Ziploc bag. But every minute or so, she's trying to get a read on Kimber. You good? Yeah.

About 60 seconds later, Jesse checks in again. What are you thinking in this moment? I'm hoping that she just walked away from the phone.

I try to give them 30 seconds, 30 seconds, 30 of the longest seconds of your life. I try to give them 30 seconds to, oh shit, I'm sorry I walked away from the phone or my head, my earbuds disconnected or I hit the mute by accident or, you know, that's what I try to do. 30 seconds.

South Adams Public Safety, the sign's recorded. 1251 from Northland 911, transferring a operator from the Overdose Prevention Crisis Line, requesting ambulance in North Adams, Massachusetts. I have the address of apartment 1 upstairs. What's the nature of the request? The caller became unresponsive while on the line with me. Okay. Do you have any reason to believe they may have taken any narcotics?

We're an overdose crisis line, so it's possible. Okay, ma'am. Can you give me any specifics in terms of the age of the potential patient? The female, her first name is Kimber. K-I-M-B-E-R. We're going to get help en route, ma'am. If you happen to get them back on the line or gain anything further, please call us right back, okay? Okay. Yeah, I've got the calls merged in. Yeah.

Okay, can you hear anything in the background, ma'am? No, I can't. I'm not picking anything up on my end. No, let me call her name again. Kimber, baby, answer me. Kimber? No. Okay, I'm going to get multiple agencies en route to us this, okay? Okay, her front door's unlocked. Okay, thank you for letting us know. All right, okay. Kimber, baby, I got you some help coming. Jesse stays on the line.

And then after a little while, you can faintly hear in the background over the phone, someone shouting, anybody home? The ambulance got there just three and a half minutes after Jesse disconnected from 911. Jesse hears him say, you awake? Then move that suitcase. And then she hangs up. You awake?

It's easy to read the statistics and still not be able to imagine what the overdose crisis looks like in this country. More than 100,000 people die from an overdose each year. That means that Americans are now more likely to die from an overdose than from a car accident. This hotline's purpose is simple and very single-minded. It's not to get people sober or push them into treatment. It's just to keep people alive. One injection or snort after another.

I wanted to know what it was like for everyone. The callers and the people like Jessie, who sit there while someone uses, knowing they could die, right there on the phone. Jessie talks to people week after week. And sometimes they just stop calling. Maybe it's because they're not using anymore. Maybe it's because they're gone. Actual overdoses on the hotline don't happen that often. And Jessie had no way to know what went on after she hung up that day with Kimber. She kept answering calls on the line, tried to distract herself.

She says she probably walked around her yard, poured herself a Sprite. Then she got a text from a pretty close friend of hers, a guy named Steven. He's a paramedic, so he sees a lot of overdoses. She has him in her phone as bruh. He said, what up, homie? I said, um, I said, oh, just living the dream, taking some calls, some NUA calls. What you doing? He said, oh, he said, you know, I'm at work today, right? And I'm like, oh, I forgot today's Saturday. Steven works in Massachusetts.

texting back and forth. I was like, oh yeah, I had a never used a long call. I had an overdose call in Massachusetts today. Immediately, her phone rings. It's him. Like, instead of texting, he wants to talk. She answers. He said, where? I said, I said, hold on. I don't remember. He said, bitch, where? I said, bitch, I said, hold on. I got to go get the book. Damn. I opened the book. North Adams, Massachusetts. The sob story.

that left this man's chest I'll never forget. He said, that was me. We hear from that man in a minute. Stay with us.

Thank you.

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This is American Life. Mary Harris picks up her story where we left off. Act 2. Stephen. Stephen Murray, the paramedic who responded to that overdose call Jesse took, he had a lot of jobs before working in an ambulance, each with a very different uniform. The first was a black t-shirt. He was in a metal band. Then, a suit and tie. When he was in college, he ran for a seat on the village council and won.

Being a paramedic meant wearing a button-up with S. Murray on one pocket and a badge above the other. He carried his dispatch radio pretty much everywhere, which is how he got the call that day. So it came in as an unresponsive possible overdose. That's all we really got. And when I heard the address, I was like, oh, that's really close by. It was right up the hill from the ambulance station, basically on the same street. We're only like 0.4, 0.5 miles away.

So I like jump in. How many people? It was one engine company, three police cruisers, and two ambulances. We get there and I'm looking at the building and it's, there's multiple units within this big house. He bangs on the door, doesn't hear anything.

Then he sees a little stairway, runs up, finds another door, which is unlocked. He lets himself in. I'm like, hello, anybody here? Like, EMS? With the cops that are behind me, they're yelling out, and I'm looking around, and I get down this hallway. At the end, there's a little bathroom. And I find a girl laying on the ground, or a woman laying on the ground, but she was very small. And she looked really young, and she was blue. And so I was like, crap.

Why? Hold it. Why? Well, because nobody's there and she's blue. When someone's blue, I know they're not breathing. You thought you were too late. Yeah. That's where my mind went immediately was that here's somebody who's alone. She's blue on the ground. And I find her pulse and it's quite slow. So it's like in the forties. So I turned to the cop and said, she's got a pulse. The bathroom is quite

If they'd gotten there a few minutes later, it might have been too late. But now, they had a chance.

Stephen's got a particular way he likes to handle overdoses that he feels is easier on the people being revived. Because he's thought about this a lot. If they do come to, it's going to be a very strange experience. Some random guy leaning over you, face upside down. And if you just give someone a big dose of Narcan, it'll throw them into withdrawal. People sometimes wake up angry. They'll have a massive headache because they might not have been getting oxygen to their brain.

That lack of oxygen, that's what'll kill you in an overdose. So Stephen starts by fixing that. So I grabbed the bag valve mask out, hooked it up to oxygen and started to breathe for her. And in the meantime, I directed one of my staff members to draw me up to pull out an arcane and put a needle on it because I like to give it intramuscularly because I can control the dose better. He has the police stand in another room while he works. Well, because the thing is, I've seen people come out and...

vomit and feeling well. And when I first started EMS, I remember like the police would be standing over them like, what did you use? Like yelling at them. I started to think about like, what is that environment like when they wake up? If there are too many people in the room, I will like tell people to go wait outside. So Stephen's kneeling over Kimber's head, squeezing oxygen into her lungs, one breath at a time. Then he gives her the smallest dose of naloxone just to see how she'll react.

Her color improves, her oxygen saturation comes up, and she then wakes up. Do you remember what she said to you? She looked upset. Upset, despite all his effort, but alive. There's a conversation Stephen sometimes has with people he's revived. He doesn't remember where it happened with Kimber. But often it's in the back of the ambulance, where the driver can't hear. The patient will say something like, you're so much nicer than the other EMTs. And then Stephen will explain...

So Stephen, the person who revived Kimber from her overdose, he'd also survived an overdose. Let me tell you what happened. Stephen started using drugs sometime after he stopped touring with that metal band. He'd been straight edge then. So no alcohol, no drugs.

But then he went to college, University of Miami. And academics had never been his thing. The people that I, like, fell in with, my group of friends, we all met, like, at this... the tables that were outside the dorms. And we, like, would smoke cigarettes outside. It was, like, this thing. And the guy that used to sell us our weed, he was great. He was just, like, this really cool... Like, I can't even describe him. He was, like...

He would show up with a fishing tackle box full of drugs. It was like a menu, right? And like, he knew that I was like, I had been struggling a bit. A friend of the group named Kelly had died recently. She'd fallen off a balcony. Really kind of rocked Stephen's world. And so he was like, oh, like, if I remember right, he was like, oh, you should try it. These will make you feel better. And that was like oxycodone. So drugs became part of Stephen's very busy life. He's going to school, working a campus job.

He'd also won that seat on the local village council. At the time, they were saying I was the youngest elected official that had ever happened in South Florida. I don't know if that's verifiable, but that's what people were saying about me. And here I am, using drugs the whole time. He used in his car before talking to TV news. Before bed, he would lay out lines of oxy for when he woke up at night and withdraw. It was the only way he'd get back to sleep.

And he was getting way too skinny. I used to wear like baggier clothes when I talked to my parents. This is like the era when Skype was a thing.

And I used to put under eye concealer on my eyes to, because the, I have like sort of naturally dark circles under my eyes. But because I had lost so much weight and was so sunken in, they were very like pronounced. And so I would put like under eye concealer on before I would go on camera with my parents. Wow. And actually like the camera would be faced backward where I had all my like accolades on the wall, like,

certificate of election from like the board of elections and like i got a letter from a congressman congratulating me on being elected and like just like those things like behind me but on the other side of the camera my life was chaos so yeah steven thinks he probably od'd twice somewhere in there but luckily he came to on his own none of that stopped him

His family at some point had an intervention, which he said you could see a mile away. Like he walked into the room and everyone was sitting there and no one was saying anything. And he was like, oh, I know what this is. But he felt relieved to be found out. He only had to go to rehab once, but recovery was a long process. ♪

Stephen tried various jobs, ran out of money, went back to living with his folks. They were retired in western Massachusetts, where he noticed they were looking for volunteer firefighters. So he signed up. And for some reason, it stuck. In my head and in my mind, I'm like, I'm Stephen the addict. Yeah. And like, now I'm Stephen the firefighter. And it was like, I'm a firefighter. That's pretty cool. Eventually, he became a paramedic.

Stephen's experience with addiction is not what made saving Kimber so emotional for him, though. It was something else. Back when Stephen was using, his drugs were coming from pain clinics known as pill mills. But by the time he became a paramedic, many of those had been shut down. More and more people were getting drugs off the street. That's when fentanyl entered the scene. Fentanyl can be 50 times stronger than heroin. It was causing these cluster overdoses.

Stephen would see them from his ambulance. He'd have days where he'd go to five ODs one after another. He was seeing more people die, too. One case stuck with him. Everything went wrong. They were at the station when he got the call. And the street address that was given, we'll say, for example, that was 313, like 313. And we get there and there is no 313.

This isn't that uncommon, but usually someone hears the sirens and comes out, says, we're over here. And so in this particular case, like, that didn't happen. And so we just start to go knock on doors and look. And so, like, that went on. We knocked on a bunch of doors and, like, nobody ever came out. And so the other thing that dispatch will try to do is they'll try to call the person back repeatedly. You know, nobody answered on the call back. And so, you know, eventually...

We have, like, finite resources, so the next calls are coming in, and, like, we have to move on. A little while later, a different call comes in. A call about a dead body. A woman. Stephen hears the location and realizes this was the overdose victim from that original call. In fact, Stephen had knocked on her very door. Whoever called 911 the first time, they'd mixed up the numbers. So it wasn't 313, it was 133. Something like that.

So when Stephen and the cops fanned out, went house to house, Stephen had craned his neck to look in the window of the right building. But he just couldn't see the woman who needed his help. She was just out of view. She was right around the corner from the door that I had looked in. And I just thought to myself, like, I was like six feet from her. And like when I got there, she was probably, you know, we could still have saved her.

And that was actually somebody that I had reversed an overdose on in the past. I hadn't stayed in real touch, but she worked in the community, so I would see her sometimes. Stephen played this over and over again in his mind, looking for ways it could have gone differently. He understood that whoever called 911, they were doing what they could to keep this woman alive. But they were also scared. Scared that when someone like Stephen showed up, there'd be trouble. So they left.

And in the end, it was leaving this woman alone that killed her. It meant Stephen couldn't find her. That overdose call solidified something for Stephen. With the drug supply getting more dangerous, keeping people who use drugs safe meant making sure they weren't left by themselves. It was sometime around then that he heard about the Never Use Alone hotline. And it immediately made sense. So he got involved. Zoom meetings, stuff like that. That's how he met Jesse.

To get the word out where he was, he made these little cards. I made this simple design on Vistaprint. And I'm not a web designer or a graphic designer, so it looks terrible. But basically it was like, this is the Massachusetts line, here's the number, this is what we do. And so I used my credit card and bought like 5,000 of those. He convinced programs that give out clean syringes to include these never-use-alone cards in their kits.

Stephen had no idea if any of this was really working. A lot of times he'd talk to drug users who said, what, I'm going to call up some stranger? Tell him I'm about to inject dope? Are you kidding? But a few hours before he revived Kimber, she had gotten one of these cards bundled up with the stuff she'd picked up at a needle exchange. That was why she called. That was the thing that saved her life. Stephen didn't know that, though. When he dragged her out of the bathroom that day and started giving her rescue breaths,

There was a cell phone right next to her. He just didn't put two and two together. After Kimber opened her eyes, Stephen told her she had to go to the hospital for observation. That meant she had to do this walk of shame down her front steps and climb into the back of the ambulance. It was nearly summer, but she put on her big winter coat, pulled up the hood. Stephen started packing up. Before he left the scene, he went to check in with his crew. So they had the back doors of the ambulance open, and I stepped up into the back to talk to them.

And I, it dawned on me again, like, oh, she was alone. So I said something along the lines of like, you know, whoever was here with you called and left. You need to tell them never to do that again. They need to stay with you until we get here. And then she said, I wasn't with anybody. I was alone. And then I said, well, then who called 911? And then she said, I called the W's alone hotline. Oh my God, he thought.

When he got back to the station, that's when he started texting Jesse. And that's when it all kind of came out of him. When she told me that she was the operator, like, I started crying. Like, I couldn't believe it. Like, we sobbed on the phone together. I was in my office. Like, there was this, like, conference room thing that I was in. I had the door closed when I was talking to her. And we're just in there, like, crying with her. And, you know, it was just, it was like, wow. ♪

Stephen says, over his time as a paramedic, he pronounced maybe 30 people dead from an overdose. All of them were alone. Kimber was alone too, but she had the line. The line had worked. It's so rare to find something that actually protects people once they're dealing with an addiction. But even when you save someone from an overdose, it doesn't mean they'll stop using. In fact, usually they don't. The morning after Stephen revived Kimber, Jesse sent her a text.

Hi, she wrote. I am so thankful you called. She sent this with a little smiley face and a green heart emoji. Within a couple of hours, Kimber wrote back. She thanked Jessie, asked how many times she got Narcanned. Then, Kimber says, I want to use again this morning, but I'm terrified. If you use again today, Jessie replied, the likelihood of you ODing again is almost guaranteed. Mary Harris. Coming up, what's Jessie's deal?

Also a fight in a Krispy Kreme parking lot. That's in a minute. We'll just call it a public radio when our program continues. This message comes from Capital One. Say hello to stress-free subscription management. Easily track, block, or cancel recurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app. Simple as that. Learn more at CapitalOne.com slash subscriptions. Terms and conditions apply.

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It's American Life, Myra Glass. Today's show, The Call, the story of one phone call to one telephone hotline and its aftermath. So Kimmy did keep using and kept calling the line. And a lot of times she was connected with Jesse, which brings us to Act 3 of our program, Jesse. Again, here's Mary Harris. Jesse is kind of the backstop for the entire hotline, the whole operation. If none of the other operators are available, the calls automatically go to her. And she pretty much always picks up.

Sometimes she'll even give someone her cell and say, just call me directly. She did that with Kimber. It's like she can't help herself. Oh, I got a call. Okay. I went down to visit Jessie at her home in Georgia to watch her work. You have an incoming call. Never use a loan. It's Jessie. From the second I walked in, she was taking calls. Still in her house dress and mismatched socks. The vibe was organized chaos.

She takes in strays, seven cats, one is missing an eye, a chihuahua, and more chickens than she can count. Look at our eggs. Hold on, those are from your chickens? Yes, those are the eaten eggs. We've got eaten eggs. They lay their eggs in the garage. I wanted to know how Jessie, a nurse, had ended up spending so much of her time on this line. And at some point, in a pause in the conversation, she said this.

My child has called this line before. She was talking about Kaylin. Kaylin's 23, her only kid. She's the most magnificent creature I've ever met in my life. She's also the raggediest bitch I've ever met in my life. She's magnificent. She's magnificent. Kaylin has overdosed a dozen times and counting. Have you picked up the phone and it's your daughter? No, she'll let me know. She would let me know that she was calling. Hey, Mom, I'm going to call the line.

Watching her daughter nearly die again and again is kind of how Jessie came around to a whole new way of thinking. And the hotline, too. She tried for years to force her daughter to change. She wanted her to finish school. She wanted her to go to rehab. But she couldn't.

She wanted her to come home. But wanting all that never made anything go differently. It just made Kaylin push her away. Now, for her daughter, she really only has one goal. It's the same goal she has for her callers. Don't die. Jessie's serious about this goal. And this one goal only. She literally has a tattoo on her forearm. That's a bird taking flight. It's carrying a banner on its beak with a single word on it. Fucks.

As in, I don't give a fuck. My fucks are flying away. Jessie told me this one story about a time Kaylin pulled up in front of the house with a bag of dope and a couple of friends. It was late at night, just Jessie and her husband at home. Kaylin called her from the driveway. I said, what are y'all doing? She said, well, Mama, we just picked up from a new guy and we're not real sure if it's safe or not. I said, so y'all gonna sit in my front yard and use dope in a car? I said, how the hell? I said, how am I...

What am I, what am I do for y'all in a car, Kaylin? And I heard her. She said, I told y'all we could go inside. I said, yes. I said, you're either going to come inside or you're going to get out my yard. I said, I can't. Her friends didn't believe her. They came in and she watched as her daughter injected herself at her kitchen table. I had so many questions about this approach.

I'm a parent. I know how hard it is to stop wanting things for your kids, stop protecting them, stop pushing them towards some imagined better future. The implications of abandoning that wanting were so radical to me. I asked, what if Kaylin never stops using drugs? If what she wants to do is continue to use, she should be alive and healthy to do so. If what she wants to do is

is one day kick and go on and do something else she should be healthy and alive to be able to do so do you even see her like no longer using permanently as a goal i don't know i honestly don't think about what kaylin wheeler won't do and i honestly don't i don't mean this to sound like it's gonna sound i really don't care what kaylin does as long as she don't die that'll be that's it we can work with anything but death it must have taken you so long to get there

Took a fight in a Krispy Kreme parking lot one morning. Right there where y'all stay. You go down to the end of Dawson. I bet y'all go to the end of Dawson and take a left to come to my house. It's a Krispy Kreme donut shop right there. It took a fist fight in a Krispy Kreme parking lot for me and her to come to this place. What happened? What was it over? I hadn't seen her in weeks. I hadn't heard from her. She was hiding from me. Because every time I talked to her, I was giving her the business. You know, you're going to come home. You're going to do this. You're going to do that. I was yelling at her, making her feel like crap.

People who are using substances who are in the place that she is, they feel bad enough about themselves. They don't need us to help them. Okay? So she would change her phone number. She would hide from me. I wouldn't see her. I'd ride an hour every morning before work. I'd ride an hour at lunch. And I'd ride an hour and a half every afternoon when I got off. I would ride three and a half hours every single day, Monday through Friday, to try to catch a glimpse of my baby. You would just literally ride around town looking for her? Literally ride around town in the places that I knew she was trying to catch a glimpse of my baby.

One morning on the way to work, I saw her. She doesn't remember this. She was that altered. But I saw her walking across the Creeks for Cream parking lot, and I drove across five lanes of traffic, me in that Lejeune. And I ran up on her, and I was excited, and I guess I ran up real fast, and she had her earbuds in, and I touched her. I grabbed her shoulder. I meant to touch her shoulder, but I grabbed her shoulder, and when I did, she turned around and hit me. And being from West Tennessee, I hit her back. So for a few seconds, she forgot I was her mama, and I forgot I was her mama.

And when we got through fighting in the Krispy Kreme parking lot, we were both bleeding. She threw her hands out to the side. She said, Mama, what the fuck do you want from me? And I threw my hands out and screamed back, what I've said a thousand times to you today, if you could just not die, that would be great. And that's when it hit me. Just don't die. That was literally the moment, the moment my brain shifted. Because even standing there bleeding, I was looking at my baby and she was okay. And that moment, that was all that mattered.

Remember, Jessie was on her way to work when all this happened. I was in my nursing uniform going to teach. I teach collegiately. I was going to lecture. I was going to stand at my podium looking my very best, my very best professional nurse that I could possibly look going to teach all these baby nurses. Did you go to work? I did. Wow. I did. What did you say? The truth. She told them exactly what had just happened.

After that fight in the parking lot, Jessie started getting needles for Kalen. Then she ordered Narcan. She got a big box to distribute around town. And inside was a Never Use Alone card. Jessie saw it and thought, huh, good idea. I heard about Never Use Alone when I ordered my own Narcan from the New York City Department of Health.

you have to go to a training before they'll send it to you. The training tells you how and when to reverse an overdose, and one of their PowerPoint slides mentioned the hotline. At the time, I imagine Never Use Alone was some official thing, like 911, but it's nothing like that. It was started, as Jesse puts it, by a bunch of drug users who were tired of watching their friends die. When she first volunteered to answer calls, the screening process to be an operator consisted of talking to one guy to see if he were a fit.

The very same day, she picked up her cell and got connected to someone who was about to get high. I said, hello. He said, I'm trying to reach Never Use Alone. I'm like, oh, shit, I guess you did. I mean, I knew I needed to get his address. Uh-huh. I mean, that was kind of the no-brainer, right? But outside of that, I was like, he's like, well, are you going to get my information? I'm like, what information do I need? He's like, oh, God. He said, you're going to let me die. And I'm like, well, I mean, it seems that way right now, so help me out.

In the years since, Jesse's set up a whole system, a script that operators can use, a training regimen. But this organization is still basically run on a Google Doc and a prayer. I hung out while Jesse took one call after another over two days. Never use alone. It's Jesse.

The calls were intimate, sometimes joyful. One guy talked to Jesse for like half an hour about his life, where he was going over the weekend, his girlfriend, his health. You do good. You're drinking an ounce of water for every kilogram body weight. Didn't we figure that out the last time I talked to you? Another guy felt guilty for taking up Jesse's time.

He tried to have everything ready to go when he called, and he apologized afterward. Listen, if it wasn't for people like you calling, people like me wouldn't have nothing to do. I'd be bored as hell. I am so glad you called me. He told her he tapes Narcan to his arm and sits on his porch after getting high in case he passes out. He hopes his neighbors will find him.

There was no recovery talk. Sprinkled throughout these conversations were little reminders of how scary things are for the people who need this line. Jesse gently admonished one caller who told her he'd used on his own a few hours before without letting her know. You didn't call me? You know my heart would be broke if something happened to you. I know that, he says. I know. Okay. Just call us. It's not a bother. Even if it's a tiny amount, okay? Even if it's a tiny amount, it's okay. Okay.

You're worth it. You're worth it every time, okay? It's notable that everyone in this story has some kind of connection to addiction. The people who started the hotline, Stephen the paramedic, Jessie with her daughter, and actually, Jessie herself. 20 years ago, she had a real problem with opioids. I did, back in 2002. I'd had a surgery, and my doctor put me on Oxy30s. I'm a nurse. Anytime I called for a refill, I got one.

For Jessie, there was no rock-bottom moment. But after a couple of years, she started running out of pills, and she didn't want to risk her nursing license to get more. She quit cold turkey, spent three days sick on her bathroom floor. Then it was over. Jessie says her daughter Kaylin started using years later, when a boyfriend introduced her to heroin. Jessie wonders about why a lot. Everyone has a why, Jessie says.

Kaylin's why, she thinks, sort of has to do with her. Their particular mother-daughter relationship. Jesse can be a hard ass. Kaylin, too. When Kaylin got pregnant at 15, Jesse thought Kaylin's boyfriend was bad news. So she blocked him and his family from calling Kaylin's cell. Kaylin was pissed. She threatened to move out. One morning, Jesse told her to go ahead and do it. So she did. They'd see each other every once in a while, but it wasn't the same. You know, I...

I found out I was a grandmother through a text message when I had been at the hospital for two days, you know, with her while she was in labor, you know, but she sent me home and said, you know, I'll be fine. I'll let you know when something starts happening. And I found out the baby was here through a text message. Oh, it's so hard. It's so hard because it's like you go back and you're like, I don't know, like, what should we have done? I don't go back and have any regrets. I did the best I could with what I had at the time.

That's all I got. Yeah. When it became overtly obvious that I was really not doing my best, that I was making things worse between me and her because we were always so incredibly close. And when I realized, all right, you're fucking this up. You got to find a different way. You got to do something else because this right here is not working. Over the years, Jessie's watched Kaylin go back and forth. She'll have months of sobriety, then return to youths.

Kaylin's been picked up by the cops, had her photo posted on the local police department's Facebook page. While I was visiting, Jessie called Kaylin up. Kaylin said she'd come by to talk, but she never showed. I think Kaylin's part of why Jessie takes so many of these never-use-alone calls. It's people like her daughter on the other end. She told me as much. I didn't want her to die. This whole thing is about this whole, every, every, every, every fucking thing I do is about her not dying.

About her not dying. Then about her and her homie not dying. And then about her and her homie and their homies dying. And now it's about the entire town not dying. When Jessie took that call from Kimber, listened to her OD on the line, she knew better than to expect that moment to change Kimber's life. And the next day, when Kimber thanked Jessie for saving her, and then quickly followed that up with, I want to use again, it didn't surprise Jessie. In fact, for Jessie, this was good news. It meant she could encourage Kimber to keep using the line.

And it was an invitation to stay in touch. So she did. She friended Kimber on Facebook, texted her for no reason. A few months after her OD, Kimber started calling Jesse mama. But Kimber would also drift away. When she did that, Stephen and Jesse would try to keep track of Kimber online, what she was liking and commenting on. Messenger shows her active six minutes ago. Jesse texted Stephen at one point. She hasn't even read my message. I text her phone. Nothing.

Yeah, he replied. She's been leaving me on read. Like she'd seen his message, but hadn't replied. A month later, Jesse tried Kimber again. Hey, haven't heard from you in a while. I hope that means you're good, she texted. Two days later. Hello? Are you good? A day after that. Hi, this is Jesse B. in case you lost my contact. It's not like you not to respond. I'm growing concerned. She added a heart emoji, pressed send, and hoped for the best. Act 4. Kimber.

While Jesse was checking in with Kimber by text and Facebook, Stephen, the paramedic, he was trying to help out IRL. After all, he and Kimber lived in the same town. Stephen got Kimber back into rehab. Then he offered to get her into job training. A few weeks after her overdose, he posted a picture of the two of them on Twitter. Kimber had shown up at Stephen's July 4th barbecue. A few months after that, though, is when Kimber went silent. For Stephen and Jesse.

Weeks went by, then months. And then Jessie got a text from a number she didn't recognize. It read, hey, Jessie, it's Kimber. I just wanted to give you my new number. Jessie replies, oh, hey, hi! Four exclamation marks. Kimber was alive. Is this going to bug you? No, you're good. This, of course, finally, is Kimber.

Kimber lives in Vermont now. She's been sober for one year. The place she calls home is a tidy duplex where she lives with her little gray dog, Luna, and not a lot else.

She didn't bring anything with her when she left Massachusetts, where she OD'd two years back. There aren't any family pictures on the wall, not many mementos. Kimber's growing plants, though. Nature's always been her thing. As a kid, she was the one who was always bringing creatures home. Do you remember Elmira from Looney Tunes? Yeah. So my family called me Elmira because her thing on the show was she would kiss and hug and squeeze animals until they died. Yeah.

And so that's what they called me because I always had some kind of critter or like stuff like that. In her new apartment, there's a little sunroom off the kitchen. Kimber wanted to make it into a greenhouse, but the radiator started leaking there and the floor got soft. Still, this is a fresh start. Do you keep Narcan around still? I do. I do. I carry it with me. You just never know when you're going to need Narcan. Yeah. Yeah.

I just had to revive somebody the other day here at an AA meeting. It was different being on that side of things. Like you don't even think about the fact that you almost died. That's the crazy part. Like I forgot about a couple of my overdoses because like, cause you kind of just fall asleep and don't even know that you fall asleep. Like I'd always get mad. You get mad at the person. You're like, what are you stressing out about? Like I'm here. I'm fine. Like what is the problem? And,

And then I watched people overdose and it is, it happened, it's like three minutes between when you arcane them and they'll come back. It feels like an eternity and all those things run through your head. This person's dead. I don't know if this person's coming back. And then you realize, oh, you're like, oh, okay, this was pretty scary. On that first day, she called the line. The day Jesse answered and Stephen revived her.

Kimber remembers waking up to a cold shiver rolling down her spine. She was looking down the hallway to the bathroom where she last remembered being, a bathroom now filled with cops. There was the suitcase she'd just lugged home from rehab. And then she got really, really sick. After Stephen forced her to go to the hospital, she checked herself out within an hour and walked home, puking along the side of the road. She picked up more drugs pretty much right away.

The whole idea of Never Use a Loan's approach is that, as Jessie puts it, you give the callers time. One more day to fight their demons. And Kimber had a lot of demons. She says her parents both used drugs. When she was 17, her brother was killed by a drug dealer. The whole family kind of crumbled after that, Kimber included.

Kimber went to rehab on and off for years. She'd use a ton of drugs, realize things were getting a little out of control, and check in for a couple of weeks to spin dry, as she put it. She'd get clean enough to go back to work and pay her rent, and then the cycle would start back up again. So the call with Jesse was not the moment things changed. That moment came over a year later. Things had gotten bad. She says the sheriff had kicked her out of her apartment, the one where Stephen had revived her. Her car had been stolen and totaled,

She was carrying around a backpack with her passport and birth certificate in it. But then it disappeared. Her cell phone was gone, too. She had a friend who would let her crash, but the friend had a condition. Kimber had to call detox every day and try to get a bed, which eventually she did. The hotline is called Never Use Alone. But walking into rehab, Kimber was utterly and completely alone. Maybe for this part, you have to be. When she arrived, the nurse asked if she wanted medication.

Methadone? To make getting straight a little easier? For the first time, she said no. So I went up to the detox and detoxed with no medication. What did that feel like? It was awful. Like I couldn't, I just remember going in and I didn't, I couldn't lay in the bed. It was so cold. They had the AC blasting. It was summertime. Of course, AC's on, but you're going through withdrawal, so you're so cold. And I was like, I'm going to do this cold turkey.

And I couldn't lay in the bed because they give you like these thin blankets So I like went in the bathroom where there's like a heater thing in there And laid on the floor and they like dragged me out. They wouldn't let me stay in the bathroom They're like you can't lay in here And so then I waited for them to leave and I went into the bathroom The only thing that felt good was I stripped down naked

It was a really small bathroom with like tile floors. So I had to throw my clothes out of the door back into my room and just lay on the tile. And I had the blanket over the heating vent and I just like had the heat on there, but like the coolness on my back and then the heat, oh my God. It was the only thing that like kept me being able to like sit through it. And I mean, I was throwing up the whole time and I don't know how long I was there. Like it was a while. It just felt like days and days went on.

And I didn't think it was ever going to stop. And I just kept telling myself that I could do it, that I really had the strength to do it. Kimber remembers all the details because she's really proud of what she did. Four days after she checked in, she sent Jesse that text from a new phone. I feel like I'm in a stable enough place right now to reach out and let you know I'm back, Kimber wrote tentatively. Jesse said...

Everything that you've been through has prepared you for today. You haven't been wasting time. You've been getting ready. I'll support you however you need me to, every step of the way. For Kimber, it's been a year of big changes. She's in a new town, but she still doesn't really trust herself around her old crowd. It's interesting how this one call brought these three people together.

Stephen told me when he first met Jessie, they didn't really like each other. Too similar, maybe. But the call bonded them somehow. And Kimber, right after that call, she avoided Stephen. Even though he kept reaching out. She was embarrassed. He lived in her town, knew all the police. She said she got to this point where she knew other people were sick of her bullshit because she was sick of her bullshit. That passed eventually.

Kimber took a trip with Stephen's family to the beach this summer. There are these photos of them hanging out in the sand. Jessie, to this day, hasn't met Kimber in person. But they text all the time. On Mother's Day, Kimber sent Jessie a card. There was a picture inside of it. An ultrasound. Kimber's pregnant. I always said, like, my body was too poisonous for anything to live inside. Like, I, you know, I had done so much to myself and just, like, berated my body and...

You know, there was no way anything was going to be able to live in this toxic environment. Kimber's got a partner, Mikey. She met him in AA. They moved in together. This pregnancy was a surprise, but a happy one. And I think there was definitely a part of me that didn't thought I didn't know how to be a mother. So when I found out I was pregnant, like even if I had to do it by myself, like I was going to do it like I'm 31 years old.

I was sober. I moved to a brand new place, started with nothing. And, like, I knew I could do this. If I could do everything I was doing, I could do this too. So I never for a second thought that I was going to not keep the baby. Kimber still dreams about using drugs. These are absurd dreams, vivid dreams, dreams about smoking dope that turns into vanilla frosting. And most of the people she went to rehab with, they've gone back to using.

These days, Jessie's still taking calls, sometimes 10 calls a day. She doesn't hear from her daughter Kaylin very much, but I did reach Kaylin. She told me she's trying to use less. Mostly, she said, she's sticking with weed. As for Stephen, he says reviving Kimber changed his life. He'd been having nightmares about all the people he failed to save. But he's still taking calls.

After Kimber survived, he realized he didn't have to be the one pumping oxygen into someone's lungs to keep them alive. He could work more on the hotline instead. So he's doing that. He's even started taking calls. Stephen and Jessie wanted Kimber to come work on the hotline too. So she went through the training and just took her very first call. Now she's one of the voices on the other side of the phone saying, put me on speakerphone. Lay out your Narcan. Unlock your door.

Mary Harris. She's the host and managing editor of Slate's daily news podcast, What Next? They were our collaborators in making this story. If you liked what you just heard, Mary is such an amazing interviewer and her daily show gets into the news in ways other people don't. You might check it out. It's been a year since the story first aired.

These days, Stephen, Jesse, and Kimber are all working for an overdose hotline called Safe Spot. Stephen's the director. Jesse consults and takes a couple calls a day. She also quit her nursing job so she could spend more time helping people on the street. Kimber is the hotline's operation coordinator. She celebrated her two-year anniversary of sobriety and her baby's first birthday a couple months ago. You don't have to be a hero to save me.

It doesn't make you a narcissist to love yourself It feels like nothing is easy, it'll never be That's alright, let it out, talk to me

Mary Harris's story was produced and edited by David Kastenbaum. Our show is produced today by Elise Spiegel. The people who put together today's program include our managing editor, Sara Abdurrahman. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry. Help on today's rerun from Henry Larson. Special thanks to our sponsors,

Special thanks today to Alicia Montgomery, Paige Osborne, Susan Matthews, Elena Schwartz, Eamon Ismail, Jeffrey Bloomer, Dan Coyce, and the entire Slate and What Next team, whose work you can find at slate.com. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.

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You know you've been thinking about doing it. That link is also in the show notes. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Troy Malatia. You know, he got fired from his job as an ambulance dispatcher because he was just way too chatty. If it wasn't for people like you calling, people like me wouldn't have nothing to do. I'd be bored as hell. I am so glad you called me. I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life. It's all coming soon.

and talk to me. Next week on the podcast of This American Life. In the middle of a war zone, what would you think about? Moms going off? How to find food? Being in their own blood is boring. It's boring. Really boring. An eight-year-old's experience of the war in Gaza, where one-fourth of the population is under 10 years old. That's next week on the podcast or on your local public radio station. ♪

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