B.C. man who saved overdose victim’s life urges people to know how to use kit
VANCOUVER — Kevin Yake remembers the overwhelming relief of saving the life of a young man who’d overdosed on fentanyl-laced heroin, and he’s grateful he knew what to do.
“I think about that a lot,” he said Thursday, recalling the day in early 2015 when he saw the man in his early 20s slumped over a table at an overdose prevention site located at the office of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users.
“He was going quite grey and blue rather quickly so I yelled out, ‘OD, OD, OD!’ ” said Yake, who injected two doses of the overdose-reversing medication naloxone into the muscular part of the man’s right arm.
Yake, who was a board member of the group he now leads, said he’d received training to use naloxone about seven months before that nerve-wracking incident when fentanyl was becoming a culprit in a growing number of overdose deaths.