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SAVANNAH, Ga ()- Some families will have an empty seat at their Thanksgiving table this year after losing a loved one to a drug overdose.
Drug overdoses, especially those related to fentanyl, continue to rise in Georgia and around the country.
A local woman who experienced her tragedy because of a drug overdose is now doing what she can to help others who are struggling with addiction.
Lesli Messinger provides a special kind of public service: giving lifesaving supplies to those struggling with drug dependency, including naloxone spray, fentanyl testing strips, and biohazard disposal bins for needles.
“Everybody’s path to recovery is different. I don’t like it when I hear people say, ‘Well, they should just be able to stop it.’ there’s medicine to help, and it should be used. I mean, there’s no reason why not,” Messinger, Executive Director of No More O.D.s Savannah, said.
She says she does it for her son, Austin Barthen, who died from an oxycodone overdose years ago.
She says losing him was agonizing.
“Your knees don’t work. That’s the first thing is like – you drop and you scream. – a primal, guttural, animal scream that you never thought was even ever in you. And then every day for a couple of years when you wake up, you wake up like a normal person, and then you remember, he died,” Messinger said.
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Messinger tells me she works with a lot of parents, providing them with info she wishes she would’ve had when her son was still alive.
“I definitely can help other parents because when it was happening to me, what was out there was ‘let them hit bottom, and then they’ll get better’ but the bottom is death,” she said.
Her work has had a significant impact on the community. She shared a startling statistic about how many people have been saved by the supplies she distributes.
“I had one person in Savannah, just one person, save 42 people this year. 42 moms did not plan funerals,” she said.
Doctors in our area say they are seeing an ever-increasing number of overdoses, and it’s always hardest to break the news to family members.
“It’s been more difficult explaining it to the kids, watching the parents die. We’ve had situations where both the mother and the father have died of opioid addiction with young kids who were in the room sometimes,” Dr. Timothy Connelly, an internal medicine at Memorial Health University Medical Center said.
“We really try to intervene early in those situations because we can treat opioid addiction. We couldn’t treat opioid addiction just a few years ago like we can now,” he said.
If you or someone you know is struggling with drug addiction, doctors say don’t hesitate to reach out for help because it could be the difference between life and death.
