I Saved a Woman’s Life Today with Narcan

I am too shook up to edit this story

CJ Sterling
2 min readSep 3, 2023
Carry it with you. Photo by NEXT Distro on Unsplash

I saved a woman’s life today with Narcan (naloxone). A story I never thought I would be posting. It just happened a half hour or so ago and I’m a little shook up. The reason I am not editing and fixing this story is that maybe today you might save a life.

She was unresponsive and passed out. For reasons I won’t detail now, I suspected an opioid overdose. My neighbor called me about her. I hung up and grabbed my backpack for the Narcan I have been carrying in my backpack for a good six months. I shook her hard and yelled Hey Hey, but her head just lolled over. I couldn’t lay her flat, she was dead weight and I saw no signs of breathing.

So I stood there and counted to 60 waiting for her chest to rise. I was scared because I didn’t know if it would harm her if it wasn’t an opioid overdose. But I was panicked about lack of brain oxygen.

Without knowing exactly, I put it in her nose and pressed the plunger. I had read the instructions long ago and remembered that sometimes it takes two doses so I opened the second one. I waited for what seemed like forever but was less than 30 seconds. She woke up just as I was going to insert a second dose.

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CJ Sterling
CJ Sterling

Written by CJ Sterling

Writer, journalist. Commentary: Washington Post, Economist, Daily Beast, New York Times, Seattle Times, Crosscut, The Stranger. 22.5 million views, Quora.

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