Losing Joe – An Introduction To My Son's Life

We unexpectedly lost our only Son, Joseph (Joe) Anthony Suarez, on May 28, 2018. Joe was 27. Our firstborn and eldest of three children. Fentanyl took his life. The coroner's report also stated Joe had a heart disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). This had been undetected for several years. I researched HCM, and it turns out Joe had experienced some symptoms but never knew the cause. For example, he occasionally had chest pain and unexplained fainting — he passed out the night before Thanksgiving 2017; he didn't tell me until the next day when I noticed his arms and legs were scraped and asked him what had happened. He told me it was probably a homeless person who hit him from behind and stole his glasses but not his wallet. All he remembered was talking on the phone to his friend and suddenly falling to the ground. When he woke up, he was on the floor next door to our house, everything went blurry afterward, and he came home and lay on the couch—not saying a word to me or Juliana, his sister. Joe refused to go to the hospital that day, convinced me he was fine, and we continued to prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday. A year prior, on May 28, 2016, Joe suddenly passed out at work. He was taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital emergency room and admitted at 7:25 p.m. The ER doctor ran multiple tests, including an EKG, but did not find anything irregular in his results. He did…