This is a summary of the Melissa’s speech which was given at the Naloxone Conference in Sheffield (United Kingdom) in November 2025.
A few years ago, my life looked very different. I’ve always struggled with mental health, and my life had deteriorated to such a point that I ended up street homeless, with a past I only felt ashamed of, and a future I couldn’t imagine. I don’t think I’d ever even heard of naloxone back then.
My first experience of it was waking up on the floor, with my tshirt ripped open. Looking down on me was my friend, scared, and a room full of paramedics, concerned. I had no idea what was going on. I found out later that two people had been giving me chest compressions and breaths for thirty minutes before the paramedics arrived with the naloxone.
For thirty minutes, my friend was fighting an invisible clock because this life-saving tool wasn’t there. That delay, that struggle, is the proof of why we need naloxone everywhere. Naloxone isn’t something that should ever be 30 minutes away when it’s needed. My friend’s arms must have been exhausted. They were not a medic; they were just someone who chose to fight. Every time they pushed, they kept my heart going, their strength literally giving me life .
When the naloxone hit, it wasn’t a gentle wake-up call. It was a jarring, terrifying shock: the sudden rush of light, noise, and confusion. My friend had performed an act of relentless, urgent, desperate love.
You might think that experience scared me so much that that’s when I turned my life around. But to be honest, I was on a complete self-destruct mission. I’d go to bed praying not to wake up, so the thought of an overdose really didn’t scare me. When you are on self-destruct, you are convinced you deserve the pain, or worse, that the world would be better off without you. My life, to me, felt disposable. In fact, after one of my later experiences with naloxone, listening to the nurses talking about how they’d never seen anyone need so much, I actually thought: “I wish they hadn’t bothered.”
Using for pain
I didn’t use because I was a bad person; I used because I was in profound pain. But here is the truth that eventually broke through that self-destruction: somebody else thought my life was worth saving, even when I didn’t.
I was saved three times. This brings me to one of the cruellest myths we must destroy: the idea that providing naloxone enables addiction. Let me tell you what naloxone truly enables: it enables me to live today. It enables a family to have a tomorrow. Naloxone doesn’t encourage use; it delays death, giving sobriety and recovery a chance to land.
I decided that I was going to try and turn things around. I went back to college two days after a naloxone incident. I started volunteering. Slowly but surely, I got my life together.
I won’t say “back together” because this life is nothing like the one I had before. I’m now in paid employment, studying for a degree, and repairing relationships that I thought were broken beyond repair. At the back of my mind, I kept thinking: “someone else believed I was worth saving,” even when I couldn’t see it myself.
And because I stayed alive long enough to find my footing, I’ve had a year full of things I never thought I’d get to experience: I travelled to Costa Rica on my own, I’ve spoken at a conference, I’m planning my future, planning Christmas… all things that felt impossible when I didn’t care if I woke up the next day.
That’s the power of being given another chance.
This story could have turned out very differently. I am incredibly fortunate to be alive today because those 30 minutes without naloxone could have easily led to irreversible brain damage or death.
Let me be very clear. My life wasn’t worth saving just because of all that I’ve achieved. My life was always worth saving. Every life is worth saving. The value of life does not depend on change.
Every dose of naloxone buys someone time. It buys their brain time to adjust. It buys their family time to support. And most importantly, it buys the person time to find the belief that they are worthy of life.
Even if it just gives that person the chance to see another sunrise, if it saves their loved ones the worst phone call imaginable, that is enough. I’m a mum, a friend, a sister. Countless lives would have been shattered if it weren’t for naloxone. Every dose is a chance to prevent a family’s worst day. They deserved the chance to love me still, hug me, and worry about me.
I’m so grateful for those chest compressions and breaths; it’s a reminder that naloxone shouldn’t just be in the hands of emergency services. It should be everywhere: every workplace, school, church, and medicine cabinet. Because the person who saves a life is often not a trained professional. It’s a colleague, friend, or family member.
Naloxone is not a magic cure for addiction; it’s a chemical answer to a chemical problem. And to anyone who says it “enables addiction”, I say what it really enables is a future. It’s not encouraging use; it’s a lifeline. It prevents funerals.
A person’s right to live does not require a sobriety test. My life, and the life of anyone struggling, is not conditional on their immediate ability to recover. My worth is innate. The measure of my worth is not my productivity; it is my humanity.
If you carry naloxone, you are carrying a tool that defends human dignity. You are saying, ‘I see your struggle, but right now, I only care about your breath.’ Please carry the breath. Please carry the hope.
Melissa now enjoys life as a housing support worker and a student of sociology at the University of Sheffield. This was only only possible because naloxone was used on three separate occasions to save her life. Here, she writes about how naloxone expresses the unconditional worth of every human life.
