My lovely husband died suddenly on August 10th 2007 at 33 years old, from pulmonary oedema (fluid filling the lungs), brought about by left-ventricular heart failure (it just stopped) because of opiate poisoning.
He had been home from rehab for less than three weeks when he had a lapse and used heroin once - a fifth of the dosage he took pre-rehab. The postmortem examination couldn't show that he'd even injected the heroin either. Neither of us knew that you could die 24 hours after using the drug and that the combination of heroin and coproxamol & loperamide (diarrhoea medication) was a lethal cocktail. The tragedy of this is that we were totally unprepared by healthcare professionals. Although recovering addicts are mostly aware that they cannot return to injecting their usual dose after a period of abstinence for risk of overdose, smoking it and using opiates or benzodiazepines in prescription medication is extremely dangerous too but not spoken about particularly.
His death was not an overdose (as is often lazily reported), it was poisoning. Please let anyone in a similar situation know before they slip up, that even if you survive the immediate effects of a lapse/relapse and think you have escaped an overdose situation, poisoning damage may have already happened and the symptoms aren't much different than you'd expect the day after using so you're not on your guard anymore, thinking the danger hours are over. My husband died silently after walking into another room to fetch something for me, a sudden horrid surprise when I went to see what he was doing... Prevention is better than another bittersweet blog, check out Patient UK's info on opiate poisoning, it could saved a loved-one's life.