8 Bottles of Narcan Was His Wake-Up Call

“I felt like I couldn't breathe. I felt as if I was suffocating. I remember waking up and taking a deep breath and realized that I was in the hospital.” Joseph Barnett will never forget the day he almost died from a fentanyl overdose. “I didn't even know how I got there. I didn't know what had happened,” he recalled. 

Joe grew up in rural Ohio to a stable, traditional family, and was raised in church, but when his grandmother died of cancer when he was 13, he became angry at God. “It took a really big toll on me. We were really close and I didn't understand why such a more or less perfect woman was taken so early. My life completely changed. My thoughts changed. My everyday life changed. I stopped wanting to go to church. I stopped wanting to do things with our family.”

The event sent him on a course that spiraled down for many years. “I tried smoking marijuana,” he said. “When I would ride to school with my friends, they would be eating pills. It was the Percocet and the Oxycontin era, when they were really big. And every day became more and more expensive, so I got introduced to heroin, which was a cheaper method, but the same effects. I just knew from that point that that's what I was going to be doing.”
 
The death of several friends to drug overdoses and two arrests were not enough to pry him away from his addictions. “Once the fentanyl came around, it started killing people. I mean, it seemed like once a week somebody was dying. I wasn't scared to die, even though I knew that if I died that I would go to hell. I knew that.”
 
Joe entered a rehab program after one incarceration and was even able to stay sober for five years until he ran into an old friend. “I just saw somebody walking down the street that I used to use with and that was all it took,” Joe said. 

In October, 2019, Joe bought what he thought was heroine--but was actually pure fentanyl. “I was with one of my friends and had he not been there, I wouldn't be sitting here today,” Joe said. 

His friend drove him to the E.R. Although it was not verified, Joe believes his heart stopped on the way to the hospital. It took hospital staff eight bottles of Narcan to get the drug out of his system. “That’s what was my ultimate wake-up call, was I had a second chance at life,” Joe recalled. “And I decided that I would stop using that day.”

Shortly after that, he met Deidra who was a former addict and now born-again Christian. Deidra recalled the meeting having said, “He had a little bit of that party boy mentality, but he was still sweet and sensitive." 

Around that time, Joe attended a service with his mother. “Every Sunday, she would call me and ask me to go to church with her,” Joe remembered. “And so I came to church with her and it was almost like somebody came and just sat down beside me and said that they would never let me go. When I heard the voice, I sat up and looked around and there was nobody even close to me. I was sitting by myself, so I knew that it was God talking to me. For the first time I had heard God's voice because the whole time that I was away from church, that was the only thing that I asked, was I would pray and ask God to just, 'show me that you're real, or let me hear your voice, or let me know that you're here.' And He did.”

After this experience, he was able to stay clean and sober—this time for good. “Since then, my life has changed a lot,” Joe stated. “I'm a lot happier. We're both working. We have everything we need. We have a church family. I had just recently went back to my old job. They were shocked from the person that I used to be to the person that I am today.”

Joe and Deidra are now married and raising their baby, Joe Jr. They serve in their local church and hope to one day spearhead a drug recovery program there. “You can come out of addiction. You don't have to be stuck there for the rest of your life, that you can beat it,” Joe encouraged.

Deidra added, “He's a good husband, a great father, and he holds his values true to who he is. And I love that about him. It's just beautiful to see today compared to who he was when we first met.”

“Jesus filled that void in my heart and my soul that nothing else can compare to it,” Joe added. “Nothing can fill it. Nothing can quench the want except for God.”