Conversation with Sarah Blyth

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Sarah Blyth is a two term vancouver parks board commissioner, volunteer with the overdose prevention society, manager of the DTES markets and an all-round amazing person. When I reached out to her twitter asking to know more information about the conditions on the ground regarding opioid overdoses, she got back to me immediately and we had a great chat about the problem at hand.

Sarah confirmed the working hypothesis for the overdose deaths I had formulated after Andrea Woo’s (the Globe and mail) gracious response to my unsolicited tweets. The overwhelming majority of deaths occur indoors in users homes and apartments due to respiratory depression. The user cannot detect signs of distress/self inject Narcan in time, nor are any capable bystanders present. 

This scenario is captured very well in this heart-rending overdose incident that led to Mary Purdy’s death.

Marie (Mary’s sister) said Purdy died Jan. 17 of a fentanyl overdose at home. Her two boys sat beside her lifeless body for hours until they were discovered by an ex-boyfriend, who had come to check on her.

“(The six-year-old) said that she fell over, and she wasn’t breathing, but he couldn’t find the phone to call 911, so he sat with her for hours,” said Marie, who choked back tears as she talked about her younger sibling.

Unprompted, Sarah suggested that a solution that detected a flatlined pulse and called 911 to inform them of the location could help. (however, such a device would be quite expensive and would involve recurring costs due the requirement of connectivity to a mobile network). I tried to learn more about the conditions where such an overdose might occur though I didn’t get very far. Only learnt that the indoor conditions might be very similar to condos or closely spaced houses typical to Vancouver. Then, I tried to steer the discussion towards how such a device would get into the users hands. Sarah replied that the overdose prevention society’s pop-up supervised injection site where she volunteers would be a way to reach out to the community. She suggested that the device could even be tested under human supervised conditions at the pop-up tent, which has an enviable record of saving every single user who has ODed on site.

I then introduced my idea of alerting bystanders versus 911 because of the cheaper price. This solution has decreased utility as compared to a transponder with a pulseoximeter, but also can be made at a much cheaper price. While a full fledged system needs a GPS+GPRS module and a pulse oximeter on the wrist, the latter simply has the pulseoximeter, a speaker and lights.

Now, I need to make a few “testable” devices. This shall be interesting.