The End of My Addiction

He was finishing a rehab stint, by no means his first, for a cocaine problem. His parents were coming to bring him home to New York City, and when they arrived they kindly offered to take me along in their black Mercedes.
    We left without any dinner around seven p.m. I was full of rage and thought, “I’ll show these rehab idiots. I’m going to get home and have a nice big drink.” My fellow patient’s parents were going to drop me in front of my place. There was a liquor store around the block, and realizing I had just enough cash, I said, “Oh, leave me at the far corner, please.”
    I went into the liquor store and bought a bottle of Stoli. That began a binge that lasted, like all binges, until I could no longer drink because I felt so horrible. After I detoxed myself with Valium, I called my insurance company and learned that my coverage included $15,000 for addiction treatment and that this was a total rather than a yearly figure. Three weeks at Clear Spring in September and one week in November had consumed all $15,000.
    I was already paying for my alcoholism-related visits to doctors and other therapists to the tune of $2,300 a month out of pocket, and from now on I would also have to pay for any ER visits, detoxes, and rehab stays myself. Because I was not practicing medicine while I was ill, only a few more stints of rehab, at least at Clear Spring prices, would exhaust all my resources.
    For that reason, and because I was outraged by the abrupt, callous shift from “You must stay in rehab here a long time if you want to live” to “If you can’t or won’t pay, get out,” I contemplated suing Clear Spring and was referred to a successful malpractice lawyer who was described admiringly as “a real shark.” He grilled me like he was cross-examining me in court and then said I had an excellent case. But he wisely asked if I was willing to burn all my bridges as a cardiologist at New York Hospital by waging a lawsuit while I was still ill with alcoholism. Hearing that, and recalling John Schaefer’s advice to keep a low profile until I had at least five years of sobriety, I decided not to sue.
     
    As part of keeping a low profile, I also decided that when I had to go to an ER to detox, I would no longer go to New York Hospital. Fortunately in a big city like New York there were many other options. Joan agreed that if she ever felt she had to intervene and call EMS again, she would make sure that I was taken to another hospital besides my own.
    Another step I took at this time was to put all my expenses on automatic bill payment. I wanted to streamline things as much as possible, so that I could concentrate on getting well and not worry about having my phone or the electricity turned off because I was bingeing and forgot to pay the bill. People in AA told horror stories about things like that.
    Hoping that it would help me break free of the binge-drinking cycle, my mother urged me to come to Paris for a visit. Liz Khuri agreed that this might be helpful, and she gave me the name of a Paris psychiatrist, Dr. T. I went to see him shortly after arriving in Paris, and I found a very congenial and sympathetic man with a thick beard who looked like the great nineteenth-century founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl.
    Dr. T. made no secret of the fact that he had himself been a narcotics addict, and I felt it was a great help that he understood craving from the point of view of the addicted patient. He was also a child of Holocaust survivors, and on that basis he refused to charge me. He was completely nonjudgmental. He agreed to let me conduct an experiment, although he predicted it would be useless: I would drink before and during a session to see if that enabled me to talk more freely about emotional issues that triggered drinking.
    My sister-in-law, Fabienne, drove me to the appointment; there was a bottle of Scotch on my lap. The experiment was a total failure. I certainly talked to Dr. T. freely, but we hit on no great insights or undiscovered issues.
    Talk therapy in individual and/or group sessions is a standard part of addiction treatment. There were regular talk therapy sessions at Clear Spring, every AA meeting was a form of group therapy, and I had been seeing shrinks for anxiety long before I started drinking. But it is hard to analyze yourself and take appropriate action, if indeed there is any appropriate action to take, when you are in the grip of anxiety and panic or when your brain is