Lately, I was hit with the resurgence of the 'what if's' when I read a news report about a young girl who died from Codeine toxicity when two guys laced her soft drink with codeine cough medicine. Her sister said all she wanted to do was sleep and when her brother went into her room the next morning she felt cold. The brother was so distraught that he couldn't make a simple 9-1-1 call and had to have his neighbor make it for him. This, my friends, sent my head spinning to the late night hours of June 9th, 2007 when I became so distraught that I remembered running out doors in front of the house and as I waited for the emergency crew to arrive started calling out to God to "please save our little girl".
Our daughter, as it turns out, died from Codeine toxicity when the codeine which had been prescribed by her pain doctor following her surgery became unable to metabolize this narcotic drug and went into a severe respiratory depression leading to death. Respiratory depression is what killed the little girl in the news story above and it was what took our little girls life.
Both the Chief medical examiner from Anoka County and the head pain doctor at Minneapolis Children's (Maria's surgery was not done there) have concluded that Codeine is a extremely dangerous drug and needs to be taken off the market completely. It may be an effective pain reliever, but the risks of death far out weigh the benefits. As you can see in the ABC news video above one pill of legally prescribed narcotic pain medicine can kill a young person.
The pain of the what if's came flooding back with the recent news of another Codeine caused death.
Last night i was able to able to put on the shelve the pain of the what if's by dancing to swing at a outdoor event in front of Land mark center to a live jazz band. It was what my wife and I needed and it was what I needed to do to momentarily put away the pain of the what if's.
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