A prescription for danger: The hidden cost of the opioid crisis

In an era where streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu bring the grim realities of America’s opioid crisis to the forefront through compelling narratives and star-studded casts, the painful truth hits home for countless families. Among them is Sandra Martinez, whose daughter Qarinna’s journey began with a seemingly benign prescription for opioids to address a health condition. However, this prescription marked the start of a harrowing descent into substance use disorder, echoing the chilling plotlines of horror films.

Qarinna’s struggle saw her life unravel, leading to homelessness, exploitation, and abuse. In this compelling episode of Grieving Out Loud, Sandra bravely recounts her daughter’s ordeal, shedding light on the overlooked warning signs and sharing essential insights to help other parents navigate similar challenges.

Discover more episodes of Grieving Out Loud, including an exclusive interview with Dan Schneider, the inspiration behind the hit Netflix docuseries “The Pharmacist,” on the Emily’s Hope website. Explore our podcast series here and delve into the backstory of “The Pharmacist” here.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Painkiller: I am an investigator with the U.S attorney's office. You lie. You hurt people. You go down. You ever prosecute a company as big as Purdue Farmer 

[00:00:09] Angela Kennecke: from Netflix to Hulu? 

[00:00:11] Dopesick: People all across this great nation are in pain. 

[00:00:15] Angela Kennecke: You'll find big-name actors and actresses starring in shows centered around the topic of America's opioid crisis.

[00:00:22] Dopesick: And we have the cure. This new miracle drug OxyContin.

[00:00:34] Angela Kennecke: I am Angela Kenecke. This is Grieving out loud. Sadly, hundreds of thousands of parents know how realistic these shows can be. Sandra Martinez's daughter was prescribed opioids for a health condition, but what seemed innocent at the time led her daughter down a dark road that could have been straight out of a horror movie.

[00:00:55] Sandra Martinez: I know that there was human trafficking involved 'cause we have some human trafficking issues in our city. I know that she was drug-muled. I know there were gangs that they abuse. These girls that are out on the street seeking drugs because of their addiction, 

[00:01:13] Angela Kennecke: join us for this emotional and candid conversation as Sandra not only bravely shares her daughter's story, but also has valuable advice for other parents.

And reflects on the warning signs she may have missed. 

[00:01:27] Sandra Martinez: When you mix pain with emotional hurt and addiction together, you have all those things, it makes for a catastrophic situation.

[00:01:45] Angela Kennecke: Sandra, welcome to Grieving Out Loud. I am so grateful to meet you, but as I always say to parents that I meet on this podcast where we've both lost children like this in this manner, I am so sorry that we're meeting under the circumstances of both of our daughters dying from fentanyl poisoning. 

[00:02:03] Sandra Martinez: Thank you for having me.

I greatly appreciate being able to speak on my daughter's behalf. 

[00:02:08] Angela Kennecke: So let's start from the beginning. You are a naturopath, a natural medicine doctor. Could you explain to people what that is? 

[00:02:18] Sandra Martinez: Yeah, so a naturopath is mind, body, spirit, so we deal with the emotional components of the body, the spiritual aspect, building up someone's faith, and also the holistic side, which is alternative medicine, herbs, whole foods, non-traditional therapies.

Things that if you go to a traditional doctor and you don't wanna take a prescription, you would typically see a naturopath. So we deal with healing the root cause of a person's illness. 

[00:02:51] Angela Kennecke: And how long have you been practicing this? 

[00:02:53] Sandra Martinez: Oh gosh, about 15 years. 

[00:02:56] Angela Kennecke: And you also are a mother? Mother to five kids? 

[00:02:59] Sandra Martinez: Yes.

I've raised five children. My oldest is thirty-five, and my youngest is twenty-two. 

[00:03:07] Angela Kennecke: We're talking now today about your daughter Qarinna, right? So can you take me back in time and tell me a little bit about Qarinna and. What she was like as a kid, you were pretty busy raising five children, 

[00:03:20] Sandra Martinez: so Qarinna was that true mother heart.

She was like having a second adult mother around helping raise her younger siblings, very nurturing, very outgoing. She would just kind of pick up where I had to continue working. She would do that. She wasn't afraid of getting into the depth of. Being that nurturer in the home. She also struggled a little bit with learning.

Like for instance, had some reading issues and I think that set the standard for not feeling as confident in herself. And that led to other issues growing up, 

[00:04:01] Angela Kennecke: some insecurities or some of the ways she saw herself? 

[00:04:04] Sandra Martinez: I think so. And that insecurities, you tend to draw yourself to. Or boyfriends that aren't at that stature that we would want as they grow up somebody that can still good values.

You know, they typically, it's people that if they struggle, you struggle, you kind of commingle with kind of commiserating. You know,

[00:04:31] Angela Kennecke: despite her struggles, Qarinna held onto some big dreams. She had her heart set on a career in law enforcement. But above all. Her main goal was to be a loving, caring mom. How old was she when she had her kids? 

[00:04:46] Sandra Martinez: The first one that she lost, she was twenty-one at about seven months pregnant, and then she had her oldest daughter at twenty-two, and then had her youngest daughter when she was about 20.

[00:05:02] Angela Kennecke: So two living children she had, yes. Yeah. Pretty young mom. 

[00:05:07] Sandra Martinez: Yes. She was a very young mom. She did exactly what I did. I had my children young, and she kind of followed in my footsteps and. She was a fun mom. Her girls always say, mom is the best mom ever. You know, if they wanted to ride bikes, she would ride bikes, so whatever they wanna do, even play makeup, she would be the model for them and they would just slap makeup over her face and she would just love to play house with them and just very hands-on Happy Mom.

[00:05:40] Angela Kennecke: But during Qarinna's third pregnancy, she began suffering from troubling health systems. At first, doctors thought she may have GERD, but eventually she was diagnosed with pyloric spasms and gastroforesis, a disorder that slows our stops. The movement of food from your stomach to your small intestine,

[00:06:05] Sandra Martinez: they wanted to take the baby early. Because she was vomiting all day, every day. They did take her about two weeks early. Two weeks after that, they brought her into surgery, did extensive tube tying. They knew she never could have children again. Went and did Botox and her stomach, which helped the spasms.

Did the gallbladder surgery remove that thinking that would stop their bio buildup? 

[00:06:33] Angela Kennecke: That didn't help. Oh, it sounds awful. Like it sounds like she was really suffering. 

[00:06:39] Sandra Martinez: Yes, so she would vomit all day long. Sometimes a lot of blood. She would vomit. Her iron levels were incredibly low. The pain that she had was like a level 10 plus when I would see her report and it was just a bleeding stomach.

I knew she was in horrendous pain and it was just overwhelming. 

[00:07:01] Angela Kennecke: Were you caring for her children then during all of this time too? Because I would imagine she wasn't able to care for her kids. 

[00:07:08] Sandra Martinez: So that's a catch-twenty-two because, uh, with all the vomiting and the blood loss, her iron was really low to a dangerous level, so she would be so exhausted she would come over days on end and just rest.

But she was such a great hands-on mom that no matter how much she was sick. She would go and be sick and then come lay on the couch or lay on the floor next to them and basically suffering her agony while taking care of them. And I would pinch it. I would kind of tag team when she just couldn't really do it

[00:07:49] Angela Kennecke: to deal with her pain. Sandra says doctors prescribed her daughter several different types of opioids. 

[00:07:55] Sandra Martinez: The pain was so bad. They gave her fentanyl, lidocaine patches to wear over her right shoulder. Because when you 

get that kind 

of pain in your stomach, it affects your sleep, so it sends that pain up to the right shoulder.

So those pain patches were only supposed to be used like once or twice a day. She would use two a few times during the day because the pain was so bad. 

[00:08:23] Angela Kennecke: When doctors stop prescribing opioids to Qarinna. Sandra says her daughter first resorted to visiting emergency rooms to try to manage her pain. 

[00:08:35] Sandra Martinez: I knew they gave her morphine drips.

I knew they gave her the strongest drugs you can imagine they gave to her. She had on a whim, constant narcos, Percocet, all those things that were for muscle relaxers or P meds. That's what she was given. 

[00:08:56] Angela Kennecke: Unfortunately, Qarinna's story is painfully familiar following the FDA's approval of OxyContin doctors nationwide.

Begin overprescribing the opioid. In a previous episode of Grieving Out Loud, we had a conversation with Dan Schneider. The focal figure in the NetFox docu-series, the Pharmacist Schneider went to great lengths to uncover the widespread corruption, fueling the opioid crisis, and advocate for reform following the tragic loss of his own son.

[00:09:28] Dan Schneider: And I'm, I sad to say this again. I would've probably been like most pharmacists and I would've probably looked the other way when I started seeing that. That's what 19th Pharmacist did back then, and there's, there's some guilt shared there. Had I not lost my son and been through to trauma and been so committed to try to prevent these tragedies, had that not happened, I would not have gotten involved in putting doctors out of business.

[00:09:59] Angela Kennecke: You can listen to the two-part Pharmacist episodes on Grieving out Loud by checking out the show notes of this podcast. While you're there, please take a moment to rate and review this show. It helps our mission to increase awareness about the fentanyl epidemic substance use disorder, and hopefully reach more people with the help they need before it's too late.

Did she ever talk about 

how these 

medications affected her, or was she worried about it or did, what did you get from her about all of these prescription opioids she was on? 

[00:10:35] Sandra Martinez: Looking at this now after the fact, what I really see is that when you mix pain with emotional hurt and addiction together, you have all those things.

It makes for a catastrophic situation. So I believe that she was still wounded by the loss of her son. I believe when the illness came in, they couldn't handle it and they gave her these meds. I think that the meds numb the pain. Of both areas, the emotional and the physical. 

[00:11:06] Angela Kennecke: Did she ever try to stop taking the painkillers or wasn't she not able to do that?

[00:11:11] Sandra Martinez: She tried when she went to go see the doctor that suggested to drink lemon water and pineapple fruit to get in papaya. And that's what I was telling her as well, to build up the enzymes. She tried. It was so painful. Uh, she just cried. She just cried and she just. She just kept telling me, mom, I can't live with this pain until I'm 30.

It's just, it's so horrendous. 

[00:11:40] Angela Kennecke: And do you know what made her turn to the streets? For her drugs? For her painkillers? 

[00:11:46] Sandra Martinez: Yes. So when she had three bouts of going to the local hospitals that give you 10 pain pills. 10 pain pills would get her maybe two days, maybe three days max. So then you have to go to the next urgent care, the next hospital, and you don't get enough to sustain you for the month.

The teen management clinic was about forty-five to 50 miles away, and she would have to go every day, so there was no way that she could make it there, being as thick as she was with a girl and getting to that place of care. So I think meeting someone on the street when she went to one of the clinics or had gone somewhere, they suggested, well, one of the pills you're taking is a sister to morphine, so why don't you just try a little bit of heroin because the heroin is $10.

It'll get you four days worth of pain meds, and you can smoke it, you can inject it. You know, they gave her all these different ways to ingest. And it's only $10 for four days and it'll cover all your pain. And that's how she was introduced. 

[00:13:04] Angela Kennecke: What year would that have been in? Roughly 2018 sometime. And did you know that this was happening?

Did you know that? 

[00:13:11] Sandra Martinez: No, I just thought it was the pain pills that she was still using. I never knew that heroin was ever introduced. When did you find out? Actually, I found out after we had to call and do a well check on her. And she was living with me, but she went missing for about two weeks, her and my girls, and I was very concerned.

I didn't know where she was. She was with some friends. I found out where she was and I wanted to make sure she was okay. So I called the police and did a well check. They went to check on her. They brought a social worker with her. They did a drug test and found these things in her test. 

[00:13:54] Angela Kennecke: What did you think when you found this out?

[00:13:57] Sandra Martinez: I was so shocked because we all sang, not our child never. I mean, heroin was always the worst drug I could ever imagine anybody using, and I could not believe that my child that was raised in a godly home that had all the morals, that was a loving mother, a great mother. That she had a wits about her and she knew she never wanted to be an addiction, that she would ever try that.

[00:14:27] Angela Kennecke: So what happened next after this, after you find this out and you know, she was missing for a couple of weeks. I mean, things must have started to go very wrong. 

[00:14:36] Sandra Martinez: Yeah, it went very wrong. I made the executive decision to hire a guardianship team. To help me get guardianship of my grandbabies, my husband and I.

we went ahead and pursued the paperwork When she was forced to come home, she then was under the guidance of the social worker to do her test, to keep doing the positive test to prove that she was an adequate mother. She did. She did the tests. Some she passed, one, she didn't. It only takes one bad test.

For them to determine you're not a sit parent. And they had came to my house, a female social worker, and said, you have a decision to make. You either choose your daughter or you choose your grandchildren, but I either take the children today or she has to leave. So. I had to make that decision and it was a horrific decision.

How do you send your young daughter out into the street with no means and yet she needs the help and yet you don't give your children up? Because really, honestly, it's really trust CPS. You know, there's just so many things that were wrong with that, but I had to make the decision to choose my grandchildren because they were innocent in all of it.

I just figured that at the moment I would choose them and the lady would leave, and then I would somehow miraculously get my daughter in to the treatment that she wanted. But my daughter was so hurt by that, that when she walked away, she said, I don't know what's gonna happen to me now. That sounds 

[00:16:22] Angela Kennecke: awful.

That just sounds like the worst situation you could be put in. Yes. And so you took the grandchildren and what happened to your daughter after that? 

[00:16:32] Sandra Martinez: So my daughter was. In and out of the home where she came, we would do a bag check to make sure that she didn't have anything on her. We got her into two, two detox facilities.

In between that she would stay with friends, she would meet people and stay with them, or people would just offer a place for her to stay. But in between the detox facilities, one didn't do anything. The other one was extensive treatment that could help the stomach. And her addiction, which it was a wonderful treatment in the beginning, but she felt great on the six day.

She thought she could overcome this, and so she left the facility on the sixth day, and then from that, they wanted to send her to long distance treatment, so that long distance treatment would've been about three hours away. She was now then Choleric. She could understand she wanted to be by a girl. She knew that there were detox facilities in our city and she did not wanna be far from her girls, but they were not willing to put her somewhere close by her girls.

And typically that's what happened. You need moral support. And to see her girls would've been a wonderful thing to keep her going. But they said no, they wouldn't do that. So she ended up. Going back into the old ways, and of course old ways, stronger drugs, more addiction, a lot of horrific things happened to her.

I know that there was human trafficking involved because we have some human trafficking issues in our city. I know that she was drug mule. I know there were gangs that abused these girls that are out on the street seeking drugs because of their addiction. So many scary things that happened, and I mean, I would get phone calls or messages daily of things that were being seen 

[00:18:34] Angela Kennecke: from her.

She was telling you 

[00:18:35] Sandra Martinez: not from her, from other people, because I was always looking for her. I was always trying to get her help and we were trying to rescue her essentially all the time, and so she made a comment to one of her friends. I don't know is always one step behind me, but she always knows where I am.

I think I just had fever on social media and I would put her picture out there and someone would message me and say, I just saw her at this place or that place, and I would go looking, or my husband would go looking.

[00:19:10] Angela Kennecke: It sounds like a terrible way for her to live and for you to live as well. Yes. It just sounds like an awful, awful time.

[00:19:18] Sandra Martinez: Yes, it was an extreme nightmare. So how long 

[00:19:21] Angela Kennecke: did this go on with her being homeless? Basically? 

[00:19:25] Sandra Martinez: Yeah, about a year and a half. 

[00:19:27] Angela Kennecke: And then what happened? So things got worse. She got involved with a group of people that were very dangerous and. At one point she was given a dirty needle injection in her forearm.

It was left in abandoned house. She was found, we got her to the emergency room. She had a severe infection, a blood infection. It created like a golf ball sized mass on her right hand. It swelled her whole arm all the way up to her shoulder. They said that she almost died of Staphs. I believe that was her wake-up call to really get help.

So she sought to get help with one of the first addiction places she went into. She submitted a letter. It had to be a whole 12 months before she could submit the letter because she was able to go into the facility because I begged and begged, and I. I had to talk to everybody from people in Sacramento.

I had to pull a lot of strings to get her in this last time because they did not wanna take her in. She got in, she was there for three days, pretty much slept the whole three days because she was on the fourth day of detox and she was losing her bodily fluids. So she slept for about three days. On the third day, she got up, I guess, to take a shower and took all the clothing that she had on that she entered the facility in.

She had a needle, which they call a rib, a hypodermic needle hidden in the back of her undergarment, which she went to take the shower. She just took her belongings off, got in the shower, and then got back in bed. A nurse heard the running water, came into her room. Saw her undergarments with the needle shoved in undergarment, and they proceeded to wake her up at three-forty in the morning.

I call that waking the sleeping giant heavy duty withdrawal. They were giving her heavy duty meds in there. Well, they wanted to do a strip search. They wanted to strip the room down. They wanted to check everything. Well, she didn't wanna be there. She said, give me my things. I'm leaving. They proceeded to tell her she had to go.

So she said, I wanna go. Not thinking in her right mind. So she goes down to the lobby, realizes that was a bad decision that she should have, just let them look through the room. She had nothing to hide, she didn't have anything with her. They take everything from you. But she was angry and once she got down to the lobby, she called back up and they said she couldn't come back up.

She had to see her therapist, and the therapist didn't come in until eight 30 in the morning. By that time, they believed she had been out too long and never took her back in. So that was in her mind, her last ditch effort. She lost all hope, all hope nobody else had ever helped her. This was the only place, and that her treatment was horrific.

So from there. It was three weeks of a severe downward spiral.

Three weeks after she left treatment, Qarinna stopped by her mom's house while Sandra was relieved to see her daughter. She was shocked and startled by her appearance.

[00:23:10] Sandra Martinez: She was very thin. It was the summer, so she had been sober. From being out in that element. Her feet were really swollen from walking. Just looked like someone who hadn't eaten in a while. I caught her on my ringed camera, walking up to eat kumquat in the middle of the night 'cause she was hungry. Before that, I would just sleep bags of food out there and blanket as a, just in case.

[00:23:37] Angela Kennecke: Were her stomach issues still a problem for her? I mean, could she eat? Was that still an issue? 

[00:23:43] Sandra Martinez: During the addiction journey, she was still vomiting, still having problems, but I don't think the pain level was what it was because she was so numb of the drugs. But what happened from injecting heroin, her veins were destroyed.

So she had to start, they call it muscle stabbing, where you stick the needles and you jab your shoulder muscle to get it into the muscle, or it gets into the bloodstream. So both her shoulders. Had scars from muscle stabbing on her shoulders. So what had happened then is three weeks after that last detox, she had.

Met up with a woman I know, a street ministering woman, and she was able to talk with her. My daughter said she needed prayer. She was asking for some sort of help. She gave her some supplies and she saw that she was with a gentleman from the area that is not a good guy. And moving forward to the June twenty-sixth, when she came to my house, she was with one of the gentlemen and.

She asked for $20. My daughter never asked for money, so we thought something was wrong. She never asked for money. She just would come for food or a shower. I told her we weren't gonna give her the money, and I told her never to bring somebody to our home. It wasn't safe. We don't know where these people are, and the next morning she text me at 10 15 while I was working, wanted to get her insurance card.

She wanted to try detox again. She knew I was serious, but she knew that I had drawn the line in the sand and I said, no more. You can't come back here anymore because see, this is what I was told. I was told by people that are psychologists or therapists, give them tough love. You cannot let them into your home.

They have to hit rock bottom. So I listened to everybody and what they said because I didn't know any better. Well, I 

[00:25:43] Angela Kennecke: think you're not alone. So many parents, and I did this myself with Emily when she was a teenager, was that tough love, trying to be tough and don't let 'em take advantage of you and set those boundaries.

And quite frankly, it didn't work. 

[00:25:57] Sandra Martinez: No, it didn't work. And I didn't hear from her for three months, and that's where the journey went, where I was following every lead. I was going to all these homeless encampments I was going to anywhere that I thought she would had been, and I just couldn't find her.

And it just all seemed so surreal. I was having nightmares.

[00:26:22] Angela Kennecke: Unfortunately this story just gets worse. Three months later, Sandra received a heart-wrenching call from authorities saying they had found a body that matched her daughter's description

[00:26:37] Sandra Martinez: and that they had had her body for three months. And I didn't believe it because I was on that goose chase listening to everyone when they said they seen her. She had been dead the whole time. She had been gone for three months. Yes. When did 

she 

die? When did they think that she died? There 

was an accident.

They, they were on the scene when she died. She was given a lethal dose of fentanyl. We know that. I didn't know all the other mixtures that were in it. And then she was struck by a train because she was just not in her right mind. There was a witness that had seen her. On the twenty-eighth at three P.M.

sitting on the metal, railroad rack, whatever you call it, and her head was slumped over between her knees. And typically they say that's when people who are given fentanyl, they die because their oxygen cuts out. But the female came up to my daughter and she continuously tried to get her to move and get up and get off the truck.

However, she said my daughter was so out of it. She just like looked through her. She was in such a haze. When the train conductor turned the corner a mile away from her, he saw her on the track, started honking. She was walking in right in the middle of the track. He said that she was walking very calmly.

A bag was open and she had a flat iron in her other hand and a jacket. When he got really close and he slammed on the brakes, she looked over her right shoulder, saw it was coming, and stumbled to get off the track and got off of it, but she didn't make it far enough, so they called it being clipped. 

[00:28:26] Angela Kennecke: You found out about this three months after 

[00:28:28] Sandra Martinez: her death?

Three months after, 

[00:28:31] Angela Kennecke: yes. You have been looking for her this whole time? Yes. Everything about her story is just so sad. Sandra, everything you've told me about, you know, her medical issues, how her addiction started, how she lived for those final years, everything about it just makes me wanna 

[00:28:53] Sandra Martinez: cry. Yeah, it really got me too for a long time, and I am, I'm a strong believer and I didn't understand.

How this happened, you know, constantly praying and you know, believing that God will rescue her and heal her just like he's done with other people. And I didn't understand the policing behind it. I had six missing persons reports. How did they not identify her? Number one, I found out fingerprints don't count because you have to have a record.

And she never got in trouble. So she didn't have a record to identify her. She had no tattoos. I gave them all the identifiers, but they never could pinpoint who she was. So when they let her sit there for three months, my heart just broke because I thought, here's my child. Going back to when she was young, not thinking she was good enough, 'cause she wasn't smart enough in a mother's mind, all I think is my baby girl thinks I abandoned her and left her in a morgue.

I didn't come rescue her. That's 

[00:30:01] Angela Kennecke: how my mind went. Have you lost a loved one to overdose or fentanyl poisoning? I'd like to invite you to share their story on our new Emily's Hope memorial website called More Than Just a Number. They were our children, siblings, cousins, husbands, wives, aunts, uncles. And friends so much more than just a number.

You can submit a memorial today on Morethanjustanumber.org.

Sandra says if it weren't for her faith, she never would've survived. How did you keep your faith? Because like you said, you were waiting for her to be rescued. You were waiting for a miracle to happen. I think all of us parents who've been through. Something, maybe not, not as bad as what you've been through, what your daughter went through, but we all think gonna get this miracle, especially if we pray hard enough and if we try to always do the right thing.

And, and so how have you been able to maintain your faith? 

[00:31:05] Sandra Martinez: Well, to some people it might sound crazy, but the word of God talks about the gifts that people have. And some people have discernment, some people have sight, they have visions. They have those supernatural gifts. Right. And you know from the moment I got the word from the coroner, I came to my office and screamed at God and I just said, I can't believe this is the God I served.

I can't believe that this happened to my daughter. Where were you? And I said, I need to know what happened that day. And you know, my visions of what anything I saw in the past didn't compare to what I was about to see. I saw the train tracks the Lord. Let me see what happened that moment. And I saw the train tracks.

I saw him walking towards her. And his long white robe would just go up and over each track. He didn't look at on a train that was coming. He didn't focus. His vision was solely on her. And when he got up to her, I saw him pick her up like a brine, and I heard him say I rescued her before there was ever an impact.

She felt nothing. So that started my journey of asking him more. I started tracking back to. Three days after she was killed, I had a white ladybug land on my leg, and I thought it was a chick because I had never seen a work ladybug, and when I looked at it, it had two black hearts on it. Then I had a white dove land in my backyard, a giant white dove land in my backyard days before her service, and it had two hearts on its chest.

So I kept seeing hearts and it was like the Lord was constantly telling me, I know your heart is broken. Trust me, I rescued her

[00:33:02] Angela Kennecke: in the midst of grappling with her own grief. Sandra is one of the millions of grandparents stepping up to raise grandchildren because of the Fentanyl crisis. How is that going for you? How are her children? 

[00:33:17] Sandra Martinez: So they've been in child-rearing. They don't get any financial support from the state because my daughter didn't work long enough.

So we are solely supporting them. They don't get any death benefits. They don't get anything. So we provide for them a hundred percent because we're faith-based family. I think they're handling it the best they can. It's hard because I'm fighting the war on Fentanyl, finding out that she was given 14.8 hundred milligrams of fentanyl.

Car-Affentional nor-Affentional men, knowing that this was out there and this is the world that her girls live in, I feel like I need to be an advocate while protecting them. I'm very cautious now with them on where they go. They don't trick or treat. They don't touch things. I have Narcan in my purse.

They don't know the gravity of their mother's accident. They just know there was accident. They hear a lot about fentanyl. Because we have pictures with her. When I go to events, they know it's bad. I'm teaching them about not taking candy or anything from anyone. Not trusting people. They very much are on a journey of being aware at such a young age of being told that fentanyl is being taken on America.

[00:34:33] Angela Kennecke: Does that bring you some comfort, having your granddaughters with you? 

[00:34:37] Sandra Martinez: Yes it does. It's kind of a bittersweet though, because there's so much like her, so it's nice that we have a piece of her, but it also feels very sad because I wanna hug her and I see their antics or things about them that are exactly like her kind of is a chance to do a do-over, but it's just in a sad way.

Yeah. Well. 

[00:35:01] Angela Kennecke: You're certainly not alone with taking on that job. Nobody thinks they're gonna be raising young children after their own children are all grown up and out of the house. But I so appreciate you sharing Qarinna's story with us, and thank you for all the work you're doing to help raise awareness and for caring for her children.

[00:35:19] Sandra Martinez: Thank you. I appreciate the time.

[00:35:28] Angela Kennecke: Thank you so much for spending your time with us to learn more about one of our nation's top killers, fentanyl. If you or a loved one are struggling with substance use disorder, we have resources for help on our website. Emilyshope.charity. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, wishing you faith, hope, and courage.

This podcast is produced by Casey Wundemberg King, and Anna Fye.