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Submitted by: Sandy Gearlds

Amber was my first born, a vibrant, colorful daughter, a mother so full of life and its mysteries that she was always teaching her two young children every piece of knowledge she could find. In late December of 2016, Amber was scheduled for a hysterectomy due to uncontrollable bleeding. She ran into complications several times during the months that followed causing her severe abdominal pain. She was in and out of the hospital until early April of 2017. During this time, her family physician had been prescribing her Percocet and hydrocodone like it was candy. At first, she couldn't take the narcotics unless she took a nausea medication with it as she vomited profusely from narcotics up until - she didn’t. By early summer I had noticed she wasn't taking the Zofran any longer to help with the nausea in order to take a narcotic. She mentioned she thought it was weird too, but we let it go. By end of summer her PCP cut her off of all pain medication with no recourse for help. She started to buy pain pills from a "friend of a friend" off the street until it became too expensive. Amber then found out that heroin was much cheaper and at least it would help her to "get up off the couch" to take care of her two children ages 6 and 8, which were her entire world. I found out later from her sister, she didn't consider herself an addict because she was planning on snorting the heroin, not using a needle and it would just be until she could get control of her life. The last two weeks of her life she became very withdrawn, dodging phone calls and visits. On September 20, 2017 at 7:30am, not even a year after being prescribed Percocet she was found lifeless lying on the floor next to her son's bed. At 1:30am, someone had came to her home and given her what she thought was heroin. Her autopsy showed it was pure fentanyl, enough to kill ten men.

I received the call shortly afterwards and I literally felt my chest ajar, my heart had broken. Our family, like so many others will never recover, never celebrate holidays the same, or make new memories. And like all the other Angel moms this murderous poison has affected, our broken and shattered hearts will never heal. It's an atrocity our government has let this go on for so long. Amber was poisoned by fentanyl in 2017, imagine the lives that could have been saved if we could/would have been more proactive instead of losing all of these loved ones. It won't matter to you, until it actually affects you, of this I'm certain.