My name is Dylan Nalyd, a 19 year old male, and I am adicted to heroin. I am sharing a story of my heroin addiction and what happedned that almost killed me. It all started at the age of 13. I grew up in Denver, Colorado in a small neighbor hood. I was attending Denver middle school when I first encountered drugs. Kids were trying new drugs and it was the cool thing to do. One day I was walking home from school and one of my best friends Calvin caught up to be and brought me to our hangout area in the woods. He pulled our a bag of green stuff which was weed. He started smoking it and eventually I gave in. I really enjoyed it. At least 3 times a week we would stop and smoke through out 8th grade. The summer before sophmore year and I was 16, Calvin invited me over and introduced to me a new drug, heroin. It was a white powder that we snorted trhough the nose. This was intense. I remember the day after we had done it i started feeling things. My body was so tired and I was very restless and my body ached. By the end of the day I had such a bad craving for Heroin, I caught up to Calvin and asked him for more. The feeling was good. It gave me a warm fuzzy sensation and I felt good. I didn't realize the bad symptoms because I was so relaxed. My body felt really heavy and it took for ever for me to get home that night. That day I lost my car keys because I was so out of it and disconnscted from my surroundings. Over the next months I did it often because my cravings were so hard. I spent all my money from working at a hardware store buying heroin with Calvin. I was spending easily more than a $100 a week and eventually I started taking money from my parents. All I did was work and snort. I grades dropped badly and my parents became concerned. They didn't know I did drugs but they knew something went on. Eventually I started new ways to use heroin like injecting it in my arm and smoking it. I started using the drug almost every day in the woods with Calvin and we had a great time. Over time I started realizing more things happening to my body. My breathing became heavy on a regular basis and I had many abscesses on the spots where I injected the needles. Sometimes I would have a really bad coughing fit and frequent pain in my chest. I avoided the signs and continued to use heroin. I stopped hanging out with friends, even Calvin, to use heroin. I became very irresponsible and hardly took care of myself. When I turned 18 I dropped out of high school continued working more often, which led to using heroin more often. The fact that I was addicted to heroin never hit me. I thought I was fine and was living the life until that one day. I was walking home from work and stopped to inject heroin. I did it, threw the needle and continued home. I was going to cross the road when I just collapsed. From what I was told, a car nearly hit me but swerved out of the way. This person was my mother she jumped out and shook me and yelled at me. No response. She was freaking out crying, so scared. The ambulance came and brought me to the hospital. I was in a coma and the cause was overdose of heroin. I could have easily died but I was lucky not to. I had pneumonia and an infection in my heart. My kidney was failing and what caused the coma was a collapsed vein in my arm. I didn't wake up for a little over a month and I was still in critical condition. My heart almost failed a few times after and my left lung collapsed from pneumonia. I had surgery to remove one of my kidneys. I also learned my mother had a stroke from my incident and paralyzed her whole left side. She was confined to a wheel chair for the rest of her life and I had to pay huge fines and jail time from the use of heroin. I have to take certain mediation for the rest of my life for my problems and I had to go back to high school to finish and get my high school diploma. I was fired from my job that I had worked so hard at and began a new job at my dads solar business. The one thing I learned from this was don not do drugs what so ever.