The End of My Addiction

license.”
    “It doesn’t matter. CPH is in the picture, so you have to go into rehab at Marworth in Pennsylvania. CPH decided.”
    CPH was the New York Medical Society’s Committee for Physician Health. Struggling to take in the news that someone had reported me to CPH, I said, “I’ve gone to rehab at High Watch Farm, and I’d be happy to go back there.”
    “CPH wants a more active treatment center.”
    “How much does it cost? I’m paying out of pocket.”
    “We don’t know exactly. Maybe ten thousand dollars a month.”
    “I can’t pay that. I am going broke as it is. And since I haven’t seen patients for over a year, I don’t see why this is even necessary.”
    “But don’t you want to protect your license?”
    “It’s not worth ten thousand dollars a month.”
    “But your training must have cost you more than a hundred thousand dollars.”
    “No, in France medical school is free. I didn’t pay a dime for that, and I’m not going to pay a dime to protect a license that is useless to me. My New York State license is worthless in France. I’ll just go back to France. Besides, like I said, I’m not practicing. I closed my practice over a year ago. What did I do wrong?”
    The residents had no answer for that, and they plainly did not like my saying that my New York State medical license was worthless to me. They repeated that I had to make a decision about Marworth.
    “Can I think it over a little?” I asked.
    “Yes, but please do it quickly,” they said. They wanted to free up the bed I was occupying in the ward.
    The residents left me feeling bewildered, disheartened. I could now use the telephone. I called my cousin Steve. I loved and trusted him so much that I sometimes felt closer to him than to my immediate family.
    “I’m locked up in this place and it is absurd,” I said. “They are not doing anything for me. They’re detaining me against my will. New York law is very clear: once your blood alcohol level has dropped below a certain point, they have to release you. Get me a lawyer.”
    He said, “I don’t know what is medically right for you, Olivier.”
    I said, “There is nothing right in locking someone up in a psych ward without a legitimate diagnosis of incapacitating mental illness. Get me out of here, you son of a bitch!”
    Naturally the conversation went downhill from there.
    I called Joan. I demanded to know what the idea was railroading me into the psych ward. She said that it was not a planned intervention, but that Tom cowed her into going along with things for my own good. To make sure I was not released after detox in the normal way, Tom had lied and said that I had been fired, that I owed money, and that I left rehab against medical advice. He had also told the hospital staff, “If you release this guy and something happens to him, I will call the New York Post and blame you.”
    I called my mother in Paris, and she said, “Let them take care of you.”
    I said, “Perhaps you would have liked me to say at Auschwitz, ‘Let them take care of you.’ It’s illegal detention. Being locked in a room for the night with a violent schizophrenic is not doing anything for me medically.”
     
    Alcoholics inevitably say hurtful things to their friends and family. In the midst of the frightening, confusing experience of being locked up against my will, I felt betrayed by everyone. I was like a wounded animal in a cage, lashing out at anyone who came too near the bars. I was being given 80 milligrams of Valium a day, and I was still panicky.
    In the immediate term, it did not even matter if I voluntarily relinquished my license to practice medicine in New York State. A bureaucratic machine had been set in motion, and it was going to grind me through it one way or another.
    Desperate to find a way out of the trap that had been set for me, I called André Gadaud at the French embassy in Bern, Switzerland. “It’s a neutral country,” I thought. “No one can touch me there.” In a recent telephone call I had finally told André about my alcoholism, as I had meant to do in person the year before, and he had reacted with great empathy.
    I described my predicament and asked André, “If I can make it out of here and onto a plane, will you give me sanctuary at the embassy? I won’t tell anyone where I am going, not even my mother.”
    “No problem,” he said. “Come whenever you want and stay as long as you want.”
    To carry out my escape I needed my credit