Mary Harris
speaker
236 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard 25 May
Mary Harris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
At the end, there's a little bathroom.
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.
He has the police stand in another room while he works.
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.
Do you remember what she said to you?
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, I've been in your shoes. I've been in your shoes.
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.
A friend of the group named Kelly had died recently. She'd fallen off a balcony. Really kind of rocked Stephen's world.
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.
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 withdrawal. It was the only way he'd get back to sleep. And he was getting way too skinny.
Stephen 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.
Yeah.
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.
This isn't that uncommon, but usually someone hears the sirens and comes out, says, we're over here.
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.
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.
Showing 161–180 of 236 · page 9 of 12
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