If you’ve never watched someone sharpen a used hypodermic needle on a brick to inject a substance-watch that happen. Now it’s about the entire town,” she said.īlanchard’s relationship with her daughter improved when she began supplying Kaylen with clean needles and invited her to use in her home, at her dining table: “I would rather my daughter sit at my dining room table and do what she’s got to do than hide behind a dumpster or Burger King and die. This whole thing-every fucking thing I do is about her not dying. I thought I was just being nice.”Īfter that, Blanchard became involved in harm reduction.

I was often deemed a soft, bleeding-heart pushover. For some reason, that didn’t feel right to me.

“We were taught, ‘Well, you did it to yourself.’ That was the mantra. “We’re taught drugs are bad, ‘Just Say No,’ deputy dog, D.A.R.E. In that instant, Blanchard unlearned everything she had been taught in nursing school about drug addiction. Because even standing there, bleeding, I was looking at my baby, and she was OK. “That’s when it hit me: ‘Just don’t die.’ That was literally the moment my brain shifted. “She threw her hands out to the side and said, ‘Mama, what the F do you want from me?’ And I threw my hands out and said, ‘If you would just not die, that would be great.’ ” And when we got through fighting in the Krispy Kreme parking lot, we were both bleeding,” Blanchard said. “For a few seconds, she forgot I was her mama, and I forgot I was her mama. Being from West Tennessee, I hit her back.” And when I did, she turned around and hit me. I meant to touch her shoulder, but I grabbed her shoulder. “I drove across five lanes of traffic, me in that little Jeep, and I ran up on her,” she said. She recalls driving her car around for three and a half hours each day (an hour before work, an hour at lunch, and an hour and a half after work), hoping to catch just a glimpse of her daughter. One morning, she found her, in the parking lot of a Krispy Kreme. “She was hiding from me because every time I saw her, I gave her the business,” she said. Blanchard hadn’t seen Kaylen in weeks, and she blamed herself. Not long after Kaylen started using, Blanchard found out by word of mouth that she had almost died of an overdose.

Answer to their every whim