LUCKY TO BE ALIVE

Overdose spared teen's life, left him in a wheelchair

[PHOTO CAPTION] Matthew Dougherty tries to get up from his wheelchair. A
heroin overdose left the former Morris Plains resident, then 19 years old,
with brain damage. He now lives in a group home in Hawthorne. `I thought I
was invincible,' he said. Photo by Chris Pedota

`Once you tried it, it set you free. That's what we thought.'

Matthew Dougherty

Matthew Dougherty was dying when paramedics sped his limp body through the
sliding glass doors of the emergency room entrance of Morristown Memorial
Hospital.

His fingernails and feet were blue. A paramedic squeezed oxygen from a
breathing bag into a mask covering his mouth and nose. Glucose dripped
through a tube in his arm.

Under the fluorescent lights of the treatment room, two doctors, two nurses
and a respiratory therapist tried to revive him as Dougherty, then 19, lay
on a gurney surrounded by heart monitors, blood testing supplies,
infectious waste disposal boxes and a Guide to Drug Compatibility chart.

A "coma cocktail" of glucose and Narcan, a narcotic antidote given to
unresponsive patients, had been injected a half hour earlier -- with no
effect.

The cause of Dougherty's coma was a mystery. Eight hours would pass before
an anonymous caller told hospital staff that Dougherty had snorted heroin
the night before he was found unconscious on a sofa at his Morris Plains home.

The contents of Dougherty's stomach were pumped out through a tube the size
of a garden hose inserted in his mouth. He was fed charcoal to prevent
further absorption of any poisons that might be present.

But drug tests were negative. The heroin had left his system.

Dr. George Kiss replaced Dougherty's mask with a breathing tube inserted
through his mouth into his lungs and hooked him up to a ventilator.

Still Dougherty could not be roused.

"Matt was neurologically devastated," said Dr. Eugene Finch, who treated
Dougherty in the pediatric intensive care unit. The anoxic brain damage
kept him unconscious, not the heroin.

"We have no magic cocktail to correct damage. We can just prevent further
damage and support the body to maximize its healing capabilities," Finch
said. Doctors supported Dougherty's body with the oxygen, fluids and
medication. "Without intervention from us, he would have died," Finch said.

Dougherty's heart, liver, kidneys and lungs, starved for oxygen, were also
damaged, but unlike dead brain cells, these organs heal themselves.

On this hot, gray and humid July morning in 1994, the emergency room was
packed. Among the other trauma patients was a dying boy who had been flown
in by helicopter from Sussex County after a car crash, said Charlotte
"Dolly" Dougherty, Matthew's mother.

"It was horrible. They (hospital workers) were nice, but they said
everybody that wasn't a trauma should go home or go to another emergency
room," said Dolly Dougherty.

Dolly Dougherty, her husband, Tom, and her older son, Chris, waited outside
the treatment room. "The paramedics would go in and out and keep us posted.
They were wonderful," she said. "It was like a movie, like it's not really
happening, like you're going to wake up in a moment and it will all be over.

"We were sitting in the waiting room, holding on to people, praying, pacing
back and forth. Just sort of watching every move every time the door
opened," she said.

After an hour and a half, Dougherty was wheeled down the rose-colored
hallway, through another set of double doors to the elevators, which took
him to the pediatric intensive care unit, where he stayed for a month.

Now 24, Dougherty is in a wheelchair. He can converse normally and has
begun to walk with a walker -- more than four years after the coma that
finally ended his drug use.

"You can't tell an addict to stop. They have to find out for themselves,"
he said. "I thought I was invincible."

Dougherty found he wasn't on July 23, 1994.

He and two friends from Morris Plains drove into New York City that night
to buy heroin. They snorted it in the car.

For the past several weeks, he and his friends had been going into New York
almost daily to buy heroin in Spanish Harlem or the Lower East Side.

Dougherty had been using drugs and alcohol since the eighth grade. He had
already tried cocaine, marijuana and hallucinogens when he began using
heroin at 18.

"Once you tried it, it set you free. That's what we thought," said
Dougherty, sitting in the living room of his independent group home in
Hawthorne, run by Rehabilitation Specialists, which works with
brain-injured people. "It made me feel like I didn't care, almost like a
bubble of protection around me. ... It made me feel, `Now I have found
peace,' but in a very fake way."

Dougherty dropped out of school at 17 and was in and out of rehabilitation
programs. He describes himself then as angry and rebellious. Nothing
frightened him enough to keep him from returning to New York City street
corners.

The packet of heroin that sent Dougherty to the hospital was emblazoned
with what could have been a warning: the word Satan, a brand name used by
dealers.

"I'd done maybe a bag or two of dope," Dougherty said. "I actually drove
home. I don't remember anything."

At home he lay down on the basement sofa.

His mother woke up around midnight to make sure her son had returned
safely. Seeing the car from the window, she went back to bed.

The next morning, she called downstairs before leaving for her job at Chase
Bank in Mount Freedom. "Don't forget to let the air conditioner man in!"
she said.

Dougherty didn't answer, but she was running late for work. Once there, she
tried calling home several times. No one answered. Finally, she called
Chris Dougherty, who no longer lived at home, and asked him to go to the
house to wake his brother.

He arrived there around 9:30 a.m. Unable to rouse his brother with cold
water, he called his mother. Dougherty's fingernails were turning blue.

"Call 411," she said, too upset to get the right numbers out.

"Like a lightning bolt from God, my brother came home and he found me on
the couch and dialed 911. I was breathing very shallowly and my feet were
purple," Dougherty said.

His mother arrived 10 minutes later to find two ambulances and two police
cars in front of her home. The Morris Minute Men First Aid Squad and
paramedics from Morristown Memorial were already working on her son.

Someone called Tom Dougherty, then an insurance company manager, who came
straight from his Saturday round of golf. The house was crowded with
paramedics, police officers, family members and Chris Dougherty's fiancee
- -- now wife -- Kelly.

Paramedics tried to insert a breathing tube, but Dougherty's jaw was
clenched, so they used the mask.

"They couldn't get Matt's jaw undone. It was locked. They chipped a tooth.
They just couldn't unclamp him," his mother said. "They tried to get him to
breathe. They gave him oxygen. No one knew what was the problem."

Dolly Dougherty said she "had a clue" that her son's problem might have
been drugs, but she had no idea it was heroin. "I was afraid it was alcohol
with asthma medication, because he has asthma," she said.

Doctors don't know how long Dougherty went without enough oxygen.

In the intensive care unit, Dougherty was kept on a ventilator. Doctors
gave him intravenous antibiotics for pneumonia he developed soon after
admission and fed him through a tube.

He also received methadone to help with withdrawal symptoms.

His family visited him frequently, talking to him and playing his favorite
music. Allowed into the intensive care unit 24 hours a day, the family took
turns visiting.

In intensive care, Dolly Dougherty watched her son go through "posturing,"
abnormal movements made by people with brain injuries. His legs and arms
stiffened, he turned red and sweated heavily. "As a parent, to watch him go
through it, it was pretty scary," she said.

The full coma lasted between two and three weeks before Dougherty began to
wake. The length of the coma worried Finch, but a neurologist said that his
examination revealed Dougherty had a reasonable chance of recovery.

"First he started to smile and laugh, but his eyes were closed. It was
weird," his mother said. "Someone would say something, and if it was funny,
he would laugh."

When he first began to speak, he whispered.

"I don't remember coming out of the coma. That whole scene is a blur,"
Dougherty said.

He remembers thinking that he had gone to an Eagles concert. "When I was in
the coma, my brother kept telling me `Matt, if you wake up, I'll give you
my tickets to the Eagles concert.' `Hotel California' was playing in my
head when I woke up."

He also remembers being unable to stop laughing -- until he realized what
had happened to him. His left side was paralyzed. He couldn't sit up. A
social worker told him he would never walk again.

"I wanted to belt her," Dougherty said. "And I cried. I threatened to kill
myself.... I didn't want to be a cripple in a wheelchair."

After about a month, Dougherty was transferred to John F. Kennedy Medical
Center in Edison. At that point, he could barely speak and moved his arms
and legs only a little.

After another month or two, Dougherty was transferred to Hartwick
Rehabilitation Center, which is affiliated with the Edison hospital.

It took him a year to learn how to sit up.

"When I got this big, powerful wheelchair, it was horrible. I cried my eyes
out. I said `I'm not going to stay in this wheelchair. If anything, I'm
going to wheel my own chair,'" Dougherty said. "I had to seriously try like
I'd never tried before in my life."

Dougherty's brain damage also interfered with his thoughts. "I was so
confused that when they took me to Hartwick, I thought I was moving to
Connecticut," Dougherty said.

His vision -- 20/20 before the overdose -- is still bad enough so that even
with glasses, reading is difficult.

His friend Joseph Loia's death from a heroin overdose has helped put
Dougherty's own tragedy in perspective. "I used to think, man, life sucks.
I'm in a wheelchair, this is horrible. Then I went to Joe's wake and I
thought: This could be worse."

And without alcohol and drugs, Dougherty is beginning to feel in control of
his life.

"I'm probably the most free I have ever been, in this wheelchair."

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski