He didn't know why he didn't see the signs earlier. His roommate was always crazy, odd, and often aloof, but never agitated, violent, never swore. He never skipped vintage video game night, or Thai food night, or comic bookstore night. He was scheduled and predictable. So, when he started deviating from the norm, he assumed that it was because he was upset that his girlfriend of five years broke up with him and that he himself was moving out with his own fiancé. He never expected the cause to be this, or a symptom of change to be this. But he should have known better. That fateful day months ago when he found Sheldon hunched over his desk, bruises decorating his face, he should have known for some, that the cure for the pain could be the downfall.
….
"Sheldon! Wake up!" The physicist cried as he pulled him out of his bed. The previous dark bruises circling his face were almost healed. "Penny! Call 911! I think he overdosed." Penny gasped as she came running into the room. Sheldon's unconscious body lay across her fiancé. "Hurry! He's not breathing." Leonard started to rub, breathe, and push down on the limp form. "Come on buddy, oh God, what did you do?" As if the flash himself drove the ambulance the paramedics and EMTs arrived filling the apartment. A medication was given, and Sheldon shot to life.
"Looks like an opioid overdose, do you know the type?" A tall burly man faced Leonard, clipboard in hand.
"Um, he was beaten up pretty severely a couple of months ago, stayed in the hospital for three days…I think he was given Vicodin for the broken ribs."
A copy approaches, "I found these white tablets, looks like street oxy."
The paramedic turns to the short physicist. "Do you know if he's had a problem before?"
"Sheldon? No! He won't even touch coffee because of the caffeine…though he drinks Mountain Dew…but no, he's like a five-year-old trapped in a 33-year-old body…he would never do that stuff."
"Any changes in his life?" The paramedic adjusted his clipboard.
Well yea, Leonard thought. His girlfriend broke up with him right before he was going to propose. We're moving out, his switching to dark matter as a focus was not working out. He and his mother argued the other day, he got beat up a couple of months ago because he's a jackass…the list could go on. But was this enough to even put someone like Sheldon over the edge? Leonard thought to himself as he saw the EMTs carry his roommate's frail form out the door.