Resuscitating Sobriety
“The only thing you have to change is everything you know”
Story by Liam Walsh
Published Sept. 24, 2026
Jen D. was sitting on the floor of her Mt. Vernon apartment. Leaned against a couch, her breathing started to slow, her eyes became blurry and her head rocked back and forth.
On the table in front of her was a charred sheet of tinfoil. In the middle, a tar-like substance still bubbled from her last hit. She picked up a small plastic bag lying on the table and tapped white powder onto the foil.
Across from her on the couch was her then boyfriend, Joel Glowaski.
She slowly rolled her thumb down the striker of her lighter and held the flame to the foil. The powder began to melt, and a clear white smoke emerged.
“This is the hit that kills me,” she said.
With the straw tucked between her teeth, she inhaled the smoke deep into her lungs.
Immediately, her head rolled back onto the couch and her lips turned blue. She had overdosed on Fentanyl.
Joel sprung off the couch in a panic. He had saved people from an overdose before, but never someone he loved.
He tried to lay Jen on her back. The table in front of her didn’t allow it.
He scanned the room for Narcan and spotted one dose on the edge of the couch. He grabbed it and ripped off the packaging. With two fingers on each side of the plastic, he shoved it up her nose and pushed the nozzle.
Nothing happened.
He scanned the room for another dose and couldn't see one. The panic started to set in. This felt more real than anything ever had.
Without thinking, he scooped her off the floor and carried her to the bathroom. He laid her down in the shower, and while she was still unconscious, he slid the faucet to cold and turned it on.
He slapped her face as hard as he could.
Nothing happened.
He slapped her again. Her eyelids slowly began to open.
“Before, when I Narcanned people, I was like, they're human, I'm human. I Narcan them, and I would leave,” Joel said. “I didn't care, right? But, with her, I was emotionally distraught, to say at least. I mean, shit, I'm not a crier, I don't cry, and I cried after she woke up.”
The next thing Jen remembers was waking up on the living room floor soaking wet still in her clothes. Joel was slapping her across the face trying to wake her up. She was freezing cold, shaking uncontrollably and in acute withdrawal.
“I was laying in the living room just shivering and begging for more, " Jen said. “My body hurt so bad. My bones hurt. It was awful, and I remember being so angry that I was awake.”
After coming to her senses, Jen asked Joel if she could smoke some of his pills.
“It wouldn't even work if you wanted it to,” Joel said. “I don't know where the other Narcan is.”
A few weeks earlier, the police had raided the couple’s apartment, destroyed their paraphernalia,taken the drugs they had and Jen gave up custody of her daughter to her sister.
“I just didn't have anything to live for,” Jen said. “I didn't think I had anything to live for.”
Naloxone, brand name Narcan, is a drug that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. The drug attaches to opioid receptors in the brain, and reverses and blocks the effects of opioids.
According to the Washington State Department of Health, 381,696 naloxone kits were provided statewide in 2025, and over 40,000 overdose reversals were reported.
Amy Wheat is an Opioid Outreach Specialist with Snohomish County Human services. She is a caseworker for Jen and Joel, and provided them with services throughout their addiction and recovery.
Wheat explained what it feels like to receive naloxone.
“The best description that I've been given is the worst flu you've ever experienced,” Wheat said. “You're going to be vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, chills, feverish symptoms, muscle cramps, just feeling like you have a fever, shaking, wanting to crawl out of your skin, essentially.”
She also reiterated that it often can take multiple doses of naloxone to resuscitate someone who is overdosing.
Jen’s overdose was one moment within a long and tumultuous relationship with Joel. Throughout their relationship, the two were in and out of rehab, robbed at gunpoint and raided by the police.
Joel said of their relationship, “at first it was really soft, gentle, and cool, but as you know, drugs twist people, and people aren't that great, dude, her or I. We mashed fucked up trauma stuff together and repeated the cycle.”
The pair would continue to use drugs after Jen’s overdose, and they would not get fully sober for years.
“When she was ready to get clean, I wasn't,” Joel said. “When I was ready to get clean, she wasn't. We tried multiple times together, and it didn't work.”
Despite the harrowing experience for Jen, rock bottom didn't come for a few more years.
Her and Joel were living in their car at the time and still in the throes of addiction. The two of them had been going to meetings but were still actively using. Their mission that night was to get money for more fentanyl, and they came up with a plan to rob a store.
Jen waited in the car while Joel went in. As she waited all she could think about was the guilt of continuing to use. The 12 steps were ringing in her head. She knew recovery was there for her; she just didn't have the strength to go through with it.
Joel emerged from the store screaming, with blood running down his leg. He had been shot.
Jen was so high she couldn't figure out how to get directions to the hospital on her phone, call 911 or drive. Eventually she drove to the hospital while applying pressure to his wound.
“I just remember thinking, God, if you get me through this, if you get him through this. I'm going to get clean,” she said.
When they arrived at the hospital Jen got out of the car and started screaming at the staff on site to help Joel. Police showed up shortly after and arrested Jen. She had a warrant out for her arrest.
The police took Jen to Skagit County Jail.
“I didn't know if he was dead or alive,” she said. “I got a hold of my attorney, and my attorney found out that he was alive. I decided right then and there I was done. I'm never going back to jail. I'm never doing any of this stuff anymore. This is not me.”
After being arrested on September 1, 2023 while taking Joel to the hospital, Jen has been sober ever since.
Jen began working a 12-step program, and has found a new purpose in her life outside of drugs.
“You start realizing that there's more to life, you know, like there's so much more,” she said. “You get to learn to be yourself again. You get to learn who you are, and what you like.”
Jen now sees her children regularly, and is in school to become a surgical technician. Her advice for people going through addiction is to surround yourself with people you want to be like.
“When we're in addiction, we hang out with people that are less than us to make ourselves feel better,” she said. “In recovery, hang out with people that are better than you, for lack of better word, somebody that has their shit together, somebody that you look up to.”
Nine months later, May 7, 2024, was the last day Joel used drugs. He, too, began working a 12-step program, and he is incredibly proud of his recovery.
“I worked on myself, so I was okay,” Joel said. “Not just the material shit external to me, not just the car, the house, the kid, the chick. I have done work internally. I have worked a program of recovery that has changed me on a base level, dude. Today I have empathy, feelings, where I did not for a very long time. I was fucking cold, callous and calculating, and that is no longer me.”
Joel has now been reaccepted into his family's life. He picks up his 14-year-old niece when his sister is busy, and babysits his 18-month-old niece. A few years ago, he didn't even know where his family lived.
“I have met my bottom,” Joel said. “I have slept under stairs. I have slept in dumpsters. I've been released from jail at 3 in the morning in gym shorts in January, and covered myself in fucking garbage to not freeze to death. Today I have a home. My son is back in my life. I'm a business owner. I have everything I could ever need or want, because I found recovery and I worked on myself.”
Joel’s message is recovery is possible if you're willing to put in the work.
Joel and Jen officially split up in January, 2026.
They both work service positions in their 12 step program, and they go to meetings in the same area. They run into each other every so often, and their relationship can still be tenuous, but they both reiterate the same message; change is possible through recovery, and it saved their lives.
“The only thing you have to change is everything you know,” Jen said. “It doesn't seem easy when you're in it, but it was literally one of the easiest things I did in my life.”