The agony and the ecstasy
THE TRAGIC DEATH OF BRANDON BODKIN reveals a ruthless street drug that could cook your organs in your own skin
CALGARY – Even after nurses told Camille Mcdonald that her friend was dead, she was still too high on drugs for the grim news to penetrate her fog.
Pumped full of Valium to slow her racing heart, and still feeling the effects of the drugs she’d taken hours earlier, the 21-year-old couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“I was high. The whole situation was just so unreal.” McDonald said. “I was waiting for Brandon to come in the door. I didn’t think once that he was not going to make it.”
A month later, Mcdonald is still struggling with the death of her friend, Brandon Bodkin, who died en route to a Calgary hospital after a night of partying where they swallowed capsules of what they believed was ecstasy.
While toxicology results are still pending, Bodkin’s death is believed to be the latest in a spate of overdoses attributed to a tainted supply of the street drug. Authorities suspect batches of ecstasy, or MDMA, have been laced with another drug called PMMA, with deadly results.
Bodkin, along with Mcdonald and another friend, Dallan Moser, were rushed to hospital Jan. 22 after taking the drug. Mcdonald still doesn’t understand how she survived and her friend didn’t.
“I kept thinking it wasn’t real. I was thinking, ‘What is this? Why are me and Dallan fine?’ ”
Nearly 12 hours earlier, Bodkin had been fine, too.
The three friends from nanton, Alta., were partying at a Calgary bar and purchased what they thought was powdered mdma. mc donald said they each took a capsule, but she believes Brandon may have taken more.
Leaving the bar after last call, the group headed back to Mcdonald’s Calgary apartment to unwind, listen to music and trade stories. It was nearing 3 a.m., but the drug’s stimulant effect kept them energized and laughing.
They were having a good time, but that suddenly ended.
Bodkin felt warm and took off his shirt because he’d begun sweating, said McDonald. “He started laying down and shaking so fast. It sounded like he was shivering but he was sweating so much.”
Mcdonald watched her friend curl up into a ball on the floor, clutching his stomach. “He kept saying, ‘It’s okay, don’t worry, I feel fine.’ ”
With Bodkin refusing help, the group returned home to Nanton, 85 kilometres south of Calgary, together. But by Sunday afternoon, they begged him to go to hospital.
“You could just tell something in his body was shutting down,” Mcdonald said.
Moser grabbed the phone and called for an ambulance.
The next few minutes seemed to speed by for Mcdonald as paramedics descended, plucking Bodkin from the house without stopping to put him on a stretcher.
“They carried him, his feet hanging behind, and threw him in the ambulance,” she said.
Within minutes, both McDonald and Moser were also rushed to Rockyview Hospital in Calgary.
It would be another five hours until they learned their friend had died even before a STARS air ambulance could take him to Calgary.
For Mcdonald, who was still in a Valium-induced funk, the experience was surreal. Her IVS removed, she joined her friend Moser in a waiting room expecting to hear of Bodkin’s recovery.
“I didn’t think it was real,” she said. “I was waiting for Brandon to come around the corner.”
Just hours earlier, Bodkin was still alive. But inside his body an excess of ecstasy’s feel-good brain chemical was cooking his organs in his own skin.
Emergency physician and poison expert Dr. Mark Yarema said ecstasy, including both MDMA and PMMA, is designed to stimulate the release of serotonin.
“People (want) the pleasurable, euphoric effects – the feeling that everything is right in the world,” Yarema said.
But the Calgary doctor notes excess serotonin can also cause muscle rigidity and the body to rapidly heat to dangerous levels.
“One of the real killers of these patients is their body temperature,” Yarema said. “In many of the fatalities, their temperature was in the 41- to 43-degree range, which we know the body cannot tolerate for long.”
Normal core body temperature is 37.5C.
Yarema said many more survivors of the drug could be left with lasting problems, including muscle damage and kidney dysfunction and failure.
According to the latest statistics, there have been 151 ecstasy-related urgent care visits in Calgary since last April – a number Yarema suggests is up slightly from last year. More concerning, he says, is the severity of the cases coming through the doors.
The number of ecstasyrelated deaths in Calgary rocketed from a single death in 2010 to eight deaths in 2011, according to the latest statistics from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
With four more confirmed in the province so far this year, including two in Calgary, 2012 is on track to be another deadly year for the street drug.
Alberta’s chief toxicologist said he can’t remember another cluster of drug deaths quite like this one.
Within days of the first body coming into the morgue, Dr. Graham Jones knew that something was wrong.
Despite a single, isolated death earlier in the year, PMMA found in the blood of a Calgary teen in November would be the first to alert authorities to the possibility of a tainted supply of ecstasy being sold on the street.
“When you have a case like that, you obviously notice it. It’s unusual and your own radar kind of kicks in to look for similar findings in other cases,” Jones said. “With the cluster of deaths in the Calgary area, it became evident that there were people selling (something) on the streets in Calgary.”
The lab began fast-tracking the testing of ecstasy cases. Jones made the decision to alert police that there could be a problem.
At the same time, police were in touch with provincial health officials such as Yarema, who said they were seeing more extreme overdose cases in emergency rooms.
“I don’t think I’ve seen a situation with this many deaths due to a designer drug,” Jones said. “We’re always on alert for clusters of deaths like this, (but) this is probably one of the only situations where we’ve had this number of deaths due to something relatively unusual.”
But even with all the public health warnings that followed from the province and police, Mcdonald and her friends somehow missed the message.
“I didn’t know all these people have been dying from ecstasy,” she said, noting she hasn’t used drugs since Bodkin’s death. “It wasn’t in my head.if I had known that, then I would have thought twice.”
She said she wishes it had gone differently, but knows nothing can change what happened.
“I look out the window just waiting for him to come down the street. Now we just have to get used to the fact that’s he’s not coming back and he’s actually gone.”