The Season 3 Sampler lets you get a bite of each episode:
1. Shawn's Story
2. Aeris' Story Part 1
3. Jason's Story
4. Superintendent Summit
5. Losing Someone to Overdose
6. CSO Shane's Story
7. Aeris's Story Part 2

Covering lots of really tough stuff, and emerging with our humanity intact, this sampler is all about connecting to each others' stories.

Off The Clock Toolbox Talk
Men forging health in the unregulated drug crisis, through real f**king talk.
Learn more about the podcast series at TradesPodcast.com.

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Aeris’s Story Part 2 picks up where Aeris is just coming back to reality after being in a coma for a month. His steadfast family helps him slowly recover from kidney, liver and brain damage. Advocating on his behalf, his family asks the doctors for a pain specialist as they believe Aeris consumed poisoned drug supply because he was attempting to self medicate his pain from multiple surgeries and ongoing complex medical diagnoses. With the prevailing assumptions about people who access unregulated drug supply, instead of a pain specialist, Aeris is given an addictions doctor. While Aeris has minimal intellectual functioning as his brain is still swollen and recovering, instead of supporting him with his pain management, the healthcare system coerces him into going on OAT (Opioid Agonist Treatment) that effectively causes him to become dependent on opioids that don’t actually address his pain. So as Aeris fights to regain his intellectual capacity and day to day functioning in his life, by virtue of what OAT is, he is now also dependent on opioids again and he is daily humiliated by a doctor who refuses to take him or his family at their word. Because Aeris is willing to do anything and everything he can to recover, to be there for his kids and family, he tolerates this inhumane treatment from the medical system for over a year.

Eventually Aeris becomes well enough that he’s able to self advocate to find another more trauma-informed doctor who supports Aeris to manage his own Suboxone tapering, and Aeris is able to fully recover, including recovery of dignity. Between ongoing Crohn’s and other health issues that have emerged due to Crohn’s, Aeris’s rebar days come to a mutually agreeable end. While Aeris is feeling lost without his rod busting crew, an opportunity to become a drug testing specialist with Mountainside Harm Reduction emerges where Aeris is able to utilize all his personal and family experiences with substances, and give other folks the supports that he rarely found. https://mtnsidesociety.ca/

“Be kind to that person on the street… you don’t know what they're dealing with… and sometimes one moment of kindness could honestly save a life… Do the best to advocate yourself, or do your best because I know it can be really hard... Get your drugs checked!” – Aeris Finch

Off The Clock Toolbox Talk
Men forging health in the unregulated drug crisis, through real f**king talk.
Learn more about the podcast series at TradesPodcast.com.

Please give us your honest feedback by completing our anonymous survey at tradespodcast.com.
You'll be given the opportunity to enter our monthly draw for a $200 grocery card.
Thanks for supporting Off The Clock Toolbox Talk.

As rod buster Aeris Finch refers to partway through his story, his struggle really began at age 11, when he lost his older brother to an MDMA accident. But some of the effects of that trauma didn’t emerge until he began experimenting with substances himself as a teenager. Another layer of complexity emerged when Aeris developed painful and debilitating Crohn’s disease while working rebar as young adult. While Aeris’s description of his day-to-day existence with Crohn’s is graphic, it highlights the desperation of ridiculous circumstances that many tradespeople with extreme stressors have to navigate while trying to meet the grueling demands of physically intensive labour.

The stakes rise yet again in Aeris’s story as he desperately clings to the company he works for, doing everything he can to provide for his new family, and in the midst of trying to find some brief relief, comes into toxic drug supply, and stops breathing for long enough that for all intents and purposes, he is brain-dead. Remarkably kept alive for weeks by machines and medical interventions, Aeris survives against medical prognosis. We leave Part 1 as Aeris emerges from his coma and begins to return to reality from intense brain swelling. But the story is only half over. Listen to Aeris’s Story Part 2 to find out what happened next as Aeris tries to recover from hypoxic brain injury from drug poisoning.

Off The Clock Toolbox Talk
Men forging health in the unregulated drug crisis, through real f**king talk.
Learn more about the podcast series at TradesPodcast.com.

Please give us your honest feedback by completing our anonymous survey at tradespodcast.com.
You'll be given the opportunity to enter our monthly draw for a $200 grocery card.
Thanks for supporting Off The Clock Toolbox Talk.