Vicki Pruitt of Wilkes County doesn't sugarcoat her husband's 2005 death from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs -- even when she's talking to her children.
"I tell them the truth, even the little ones," she said last week. Her husband, Randy Pruitt, overdosed on the opiate-derived painkiller oxycodone.
"My six year old asked me what happened. I told him he accidentally took too much medicine."
Pruitt tells the story of her 33-year-old husband's death in a video produced by Project Lazarus, a nonprofit organization that formed in July, and is willing to tell her story to anyone who might be helped by it. Project Lazarus, which has joined with the community to help fight Wilkes County's high rate of accidental prescription-drug overdoses, educates people about the threat of overdoses and distributes anti-overdose kits that include an overdose-inhibiting drug.
Last year, 28 people died of accidental prescription-drug overdoses in the county, giving it one of the nation's highest per-capita rates, the Journal's Monte Mitchell recently reported. Authorities suspect that 25 people have died of overdoses this year.
One of the reasons for the high rate is that there are a lot of painkillers in circulation in the county for people who work in chicken processing plants, on farms and at other forms of manual labor. People like Randy Pruitt.
His widow doesn't want anyone to endure the heartache she has. So she tells her story.
Her husband was a factory worker who enjoyed hunting, fishing and NASCAR. He and Vicki Pruitt married in 2004. Randy Pruitt broke his sternum twice, first in a household accident, then in a car accident. A doctor prescribed oxycodone for the pain.
He was hooked in about a year. She doesn't blame the doctor or her husband. "He prescribed them legitimately for pain," she said. "You can't really blame Randy because he took them for pain. He couldn't remember he took them, he just took too many." Warning labels on pill bottles should be clearer, she said.
She's not sure whether he got all his pills from his doctor, or got some off the street, too. She told him they had to separate until he kicked the pills. "He came off it on his own, he just threw them down and quit," Vicki Pruitt said.
They reunited. She said Randy Pruitt had been clean for 10 months when he overdosed. She didn't know he had any pills.
On the morning of his death, Oct. 23, 2005, she said he was red-eyed, his speech was slurred, and he was staggering. She said she assumed he'd had too much beer the night before. He went back to their bedroom to take a nap. When she checked on him a few hours later, she found him pale and unresponsive and called paramedics.
Her heartache began.
"I felt like, ‘Why did he do something like that, with four children?' There's a whole lot of things he missed." He missed the birth of their child, six months to the day after his death. And he's missed the birthdays, proms and graduations of his other children.
Now, Vicki Pruitt is helping to teach others about the potential dangers of prescription drugs, including the signs to look for that she missed, and that help is available through Project Lazarus. "If it helps somebody decide they need to come off pills, it's all worth it," she said.
(For more information about the fight against overdoses, go to projectlazarus.org.)
jrailey@wsjournal.com.
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