On March 19th, 2016, I woke up at 8:30 AM, and to this day, I have no idea what woke me up; I got up from bed and found my fiancé, Darryl Jeffrey Spahn, lifeless in my bathroom in my house, where I currently still live. I didn’t even get to say goodbye. The paramedics said that his body was still warm, and they tried to bring him back, but his heart exploded. You see, Darryl was a major heroin addict and had other addictions, but that was his pick of poison. Darryl’s dealer murdered him by knowingly giving him heroin cut with fentanyl. When the sheriffs figured that out, I went on Darryl’s phone and found that dealer’s number and gave it to the cops. By the way, as a side note, I am an ex-addict, but I never touched heroin. Before Darryl died, I actually had no idea he relapsed. I knew something was wrong starting in October 2015. He was acting different and being very secretive with his life and phone. I didn’t have the strength to figure out he relapsed sooner because in December 2015, I had two major surgeries done at the same time. My gall bladder was removed due to it failing, and they had to completely redo and repair my esophagus surgery where they create a flap because I was born without one. Then, in late February, I had an aching feeling and a tiny little voice in the back of my mind telling me to look through his phone because something is not right. I respect privacy, and it’s just not my thing to go through someone’s phone out of insecurities. He was asleep, and I grabbed his phone and found a message from this girl: “Hey! I just got back into town, and I stole my grandma’s norcos……..” I didn’t have to remember or read the rest to smack him awake, and I shoved the phone in his face, asking/yelling at him “WHAT THE FCK IS THIS?!?!” His eyes got so big he looked like a deer caught in a car’s headlights. He got up, and he turned to me and asked, “if I tell you, can we please start over?” I said “what the fck did you do?” He said “I cheated and relapsed on heroin.” My next move was that I made him move in with me so I could cut him off from his connection he had because at the time he lived with his mother in Calabasas. Then, while recovering from the surgeries still, I spent two weeks sitting with him through the withdrawals. I would even make him get up to take a shower while I changed the bed sheets because they were full of sweat so he could be comfortable and clean. Then I also had my mother take him to the ER for fluids because he was severely dehydrated from the withdrawals. Then I thought he was going to N.A. meetings… nope he secretly relapsed. He came home late from a “meeting” the night before he died. I was knocked out, and he got in bed with me. I asked him if he threw his heroin kit out. He said yeah, why? I told him he was different; he wasn’t the same person I cared about on heroin. He still lied. He got up the next morning before me and slammed heroin, not knowing it was cut with fentanyl. He went into the bathroom and literally dropped dead onto the floor. And not long after that is when I somehow woke up and found him. I remember knocking on the bathroom door, yelling his name. I got up to go check on him because I thought he was smoking a cigarette on the patio. I started going by the bathroom door when I heard his phone alarm going off, and he wasn’t shutting it off. That’s when I started banging on that door yelling his name, then because he wasn’t a small person he was 6 foot 5. His body was against the door, and I not only had to kick the door down, but I also had to force his body to move. I saw him, and I knew something was wrong. I checked his arms, and I didn’t see track marks. Turns out addicts can get so desperate to hide things they will just inject the drugs into between their toes. I got up from his body and ran to my mom’s room and banged on her door crying and yelling for her to open. And when she opened the door, she was like “what’s wrong?!” And I remember crying saying “there’s something wrong with Darryl!” My mom is retired LAPD and was a Navy reserve officer. She checked his pulse, and she told me to call 911. They got here fast, and like I’ve mentioned, they tried to bring him back, but his heart exploded. It was impossible to bring him back. I was only 20 years old when that happened. Darryl was only 24 years old and became one of the early statistics/victims for the fentanyl crisis. I got to watch that person that I loved so dearly die and be loaded up into the coroner’s van. It was the most heartbreaking experience of my life. For two and a half months, I couldn’t sleep by myself, and I was heavily drinking 24/7. I had these amazing guy friends at the time and made friends with one of their girlfriends; all five of them slept with me in my room because I was so terrified of sleeping alone, and the first three days I would just cry and cry and cry even when I was asleep, I was crying. But because of all this stress and developed MAJOR PTSD. I had to go back to therapy and see a different psychiatrist to determine my “updated” mental health diagnoses. The psychiatrist I saw for that diagnosed me with PTSD that is at the level of a Vietnam war veteran. Those were the doctor’s EXACT words. So I not only have anxiety and depression, but I also have CPTSD (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Then my health issues on top of that continued to get worse. That day with Darryl dying seriously triggered something in my body that I literally, I myself started dying. At one point, I had to have an emergency blood transfusion, and I wasn’t bleeding out; my body’s hemoglobin levels were just dangerously low, and I was resuscitated twice in the hospital. Another incident that happened, I had to have emergency surgery because I had a very large blood clot like the size of a dime about to enter my heart. The doctor told me if I didn’t show up in the next 24 hours, I would’ve gone into cardiac arrest from the blood clot entering my heart, and I would’ve died. I started crying when he said that because the day before that, I was sent home by this awful ER doctor named Robert Hook. Yes, I will name him in this post because he almost killed me TWICE, including that incident! I got the blood clot from a PICC line in my arm (a semi-permanent IV connected to my main heart vein). Guess where they moved it to after that incident? I got to get a Hickman port which is the same thing as a PICC line but in my chest directly to my heart. I had to have this because I had to have IV infusion therapy at home along with a nurse that came once a week to check on me and all that. It sucked spending 24/7 hooked up to an IV, doing nothing but watching Netflix in bed for three and a half years every day, while also being admitted into the hospital at least once a month, and I always magically got dozens of sepsis (blood infections). Yeah, I was not living a great life. My heart rate at its resting point was in the 190s. I wasn’t allowed to walk by myself at the hospital at all. Not even to go to the bathroom. I had to be hooked up to a portable heart machine/tracker as well. I would just be talking to someone, and the nurses would come running into my room asking me if I’m okay and be in a panic. They’re like “did you get up?” Nope, just sitting here talking. “Crap… don’t get up without us!”

Then, for some reason, when my grandmother passed away and a little after, I was in psychosis, a switch just flipped for me. My body magically stopped shutting down, and I’m now exceeding my doctors’ expectations who originally told my mother I was going to be permanently mentally disabled for the rest of my life. I went from getting brucellosis, valley fever, and pneumonia AT THE SAME TIME and E. Coli to not having to be admitted to the hospital in years and only getting sick with the flu or Covid! Which is a miracle for me!

I fell into psychosis due to having a mental break, and I decided to quit cold turkey on the pain medication I was highly addicted to. The withdrawals were so severe it just stressed my brain enough to shut down a part of my brain that brought me into psychosis for three and a half months. I know quitting cold turkey was dangerous, but the doctor who was prescribing the pain medications wouldn’t help me get off the medications safely at all and told me I had to stay on them.

March 19th was not only a day that I lost Darryl, my fiancé, it was also the day that something in me died and then somehow was brought back to normalcy and not dying after my grandmother passing away.

Rest in Peace

Darryl Jeffrey Spahn

October 11th 1991 – March 19th 2016