Janet’s son Simon died a year ago from a heroin overdose.
He was 30 when he died, which occurred four months after his girlfriend also died of an overdose.
"He couldn’t cope at all, between the addiction and the grieving," she says.
Just weeks previously, the family brought Simon to Cork University Hospital’s psychiatric wing as he was "ráméising, holding pictures of his girlfriend, the baby, talking about suicide", said Janet.
Simon also had a prescription drug habit and Janet said she was shocked at how high he seemed when at CUH.
He stayed at CUH as an inpatient but, just as he was about to be discharged, he had a seizure. & Staff at the emergency department were horrified at his mental state and, after much arguing with the mental health unit, they ensured that he was readmitted to the psychiatric ward.
"We have no idea why they were discharging him in the state he was in," says Janet. "Was it because of cutbacks? Do they not want to deal with addiction?
"Very often with heroin addicts, they have an addiction and a mental illness."
"He was off his face when we collected him from the hospital. I had said to the nurse ‘how is he like this?’, she couldn’t answer me and then they gave me a prescription the length of my arm. He had no medical card of course, as he’d lose it and then not re-apply for it, he’d lost his driving licence, his passport, every ID. His life, his flat, it was all chaos."
Janet says Simon liked sport and had been doing a sports course but she had always worried about his drinking and knew he smoked hash. Her worry reached a new level when she learned his girlfriend was smoking heroin.
"I remember thinking then, unless there is divine intervention, we know how this will end," she said.
Janet says for the three years Simon was smoking and injecting heroin, she "lived in fear of the phone".
Source: Claire O’Sullivan, Irish Examiner, 18/11/13
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