Reality star Sabrina Burkholder opened up about the overdose on Facebook.
Sabrina Burkholder, a star of TLC’s reality television series Breaking Amish, revealed to her fans on Facebook that she recently suffered from an overdose that nearly took her life. She wrote that the incident happened while she and her boyfriend Jethro were out and about in June.
“A few days before my 32nd birthday, almost 2 months ago, Jethro and I were with our friend Sean in York County, PA,” she wrote on the Facebook post. “I was almost a year clean from heroin. For whatever reason that day, I was in a mood. We all were.”
Her friend Sean then produced drugs for the trio to take.
“We did the molly and then Sean did some heroin and handed me a capful of it. I asked him if it was all for me because it looked like a lot. He was like ‘Yeah happy birthday.’ So I mixed it up and shot it,” she recalled on the post.
The next thing she knew, she woke up to paramedics and her distressed boyfriend around her.
“I remember feeling very weird and that was my last conscious thought. Half an hour later I woke up surrounded by paramedics,” she continued the post. “I remember seeing Jethro staring at me with tears running down his face. And I was suddenly hit with memories of what happened when I was dead. Yes, dead.”
It turns out that while she was unconscious, both Sean and Jethro were fighting for her life.
“Sean did CPR on me and kept on going even after my heart had stopped beating. Jethro was kneeling on the ground crying out to God to save me,” she wrote in the post. “Sean and Jethro both told me later that Sean tried to stop after he realized I was gone, but Jethro kept screaming at him to keep on going and wouldn’t let him stop giving me CPR.”
Fortunately, paramedics were able to revive her with Narcan, which reversed the effects of the overdose to keep her alive.
“They had to narcan me twice to bring me back. They only had 2 narcans on them; had I needed another, I wouldn’t be here,” she recalled. “That experience shook me to my core and forced me to look at the shitty person I’ve allowed myself to become.”
Burkholder is now focused on recovery, according to a more recent post.
“Trying not to lose my mind on this road trip… I am so excited to get to rehab,” she wrote on August 4. “3 more hours of this bs and then I’m off the map. Adios.”
The incident represents only the latest of her struggles. On the show Breaking Amish, Burkholder was one of a handful of Amish or Mennonite people who traveled to New York to experience the outside world. Fans of the show have been following her struggle with sobriety since season one in 2012.
In 2017, Burkholder was charged with manufacture of a controlled substance, possession of a controlled substance and criminal conspiracy.
