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The opioid epidemic is so bad that librarians are learning how to treat overdoses

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  • The opioid epidemic is so bad that librarians are learning how to treat overdoses

    Source: http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/23/health...can/index.html
    The opioid epidemic is so bad that librarians are learning how to treat overdoses

    By Darran Simon, CNN
    Photographs by Michelle Gustafson for CNN
    Updated 2:46 PM ET, Fri June 23, 2017








    Philadelphia (CNN)A crowd hovered over the man lying on the grass as his skin turned purple. Chera Kowalski crouched next to his limp body, a small syringe in her gloved hand.

    Squeeze.
    The antidote filled the man's nostril.
    The purple faded. Then it came back. Kowalski's heart raced.
    "We only gave him one, and he needs another!" she called to a security guard in McPherson Square Park, a tranquil patch of green in one of this city's roughest neighborhoods.
    "He's dying," said a bystander, piling on as tension mounted around lunchtime one recent weekday.
    "Where is the ambulance?" a woman begged.
    Squeeze.
    Kowalski dropped the second syringe and put her palm on the man's sternum.
    Knead. Knead. Knead.
    Nothing.
    She switched to knuckles.
    Knead. Knead. Knead.
    Then a sound, like a breath. The heroin and methamphetamine overdose that had gripped the man's body started to succumb to Kowalski's double hit of Narcan.
    With help, the man, named Jay, sat up. Paramedics arrived with oxygen and more meds.
    Death, held at bay, again.
    Kowalski headed back across the park, toward the century-old, cream-colored building where she works.
    "She's not a paramedic," the guard, Sterling Davis, said later. "She's just a teen-adult librarian -- and saved six people since April. That's a lot for a librarian."...
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