The End of My Addiction

to Paris, where I was from. But I loved my life in New York. In 1991 I had acquired U.S. citizenship, and it pleased me to be a citizen of a country with so many shared ideals with my country of origin. If not profitable, my practice was at least busy and my work enormously rewarding. My patient roster included wealthy and celebrated people along with Harlem church ladies on Medicare or Medicaid and the indigent, and I liked that mix. And my social life was wonderfully stimulating—more so than I could imagine having anywhere else. No, I wasn’t eager to leave.
    But my practice could not continue indefinitely at this rate, and the constant anxiety created by financial worries was growing into a source of full-blown panic. I struggled with a deep sense of failure, and I lived in fear that the world would see that my accomplishments were nothing but a sham, a house of cards that could collapse at any second.
    This was not a new feeling to me. Throughout my life I had been plagued by anxious feelings of inadequacy, of being an impostor on the brink of being unmasked. I had been seeing therapists for a long time before I started drinking. To be honest, they never were much help with my anxiety. Nor was the Xanax they prescribed me.
     
    The one Scotch at Jeff’s made me aware of how thirsty I was. I went to a Chinese restaurant, intending to have a meal as well, but wound up eating nothing and drinking one double vodka after another. And then…I found myself bleeding in the taxicab.
    It wasn’t my first blackout drinking. But the blackouts were getting more common, whole stretches of evenings expunged from my memory. And this was the first time I’d come out of a blackout with a physical injury. Until then blackouts had only been sources of intense mortification as I wondered what embarrassing things I might have said or done.
    The next morning I thought briefly about amusing tales I could concoct to explain the bandages on my forehead. Deciding that I was too hungover to go to work, I had my office assistant reschedule the day’s patients. As my drinking had increased, I had scrupulously honored my first duty as a doctor—to do no harm. I stopped driving. And I never set foot in my office or the hospital when I was not completely sober.
    Still, I resisted seeing myself as a problem drinker. All I really needed, I thought, was to learn to drink better. This delusion was encouraged by a well-meaning friend and an equally well-meaning but I think even more misguided therapist, both of whom undertook to show me how to be a moderate wine drinker rather than a binger on Scotch or vodka. I even began AA with the thought that it might give me tips on managing my drinking better rather than stopping completely.
    Not everyone thought I was a candidate for moderation. The two friends who escorted me to my first meeting didn’t think so. One was a longtime AA member, a poet and a writer and a very beautiful woman who looked a bit like Katharine Hepburn. She used to say, “I want you to see me before I lose my looks.” She still has those looks today. When we met, she had been sober for many years, yet she told me, “I am an alcoholic.” That struck me as very strange, and I was embarrassed to hear her say it. People with diabetes or hypertension didn’t identify themselves by their illnesses. Why should people with alcoholism?
    Of course, I thought that because I did not want to admit—to myself or anyone else—that I might be alcohol-dependent. And so I was terrified to go to a meeting. But my friends each took me by an arm, and escorted me from my apartment on East 63rd Street to the major AA meeting place in the neighborhood—the 79th Street Workshop, in the basement of St. Monica’s Catholic Church, on 79th Street between York and First Avenues. It was my first step, taken reluctantly, toward facing my illness. But it was a vital one.
    It is hard for everyone who attends AA to get past the potential embarrassment of being seen as an alcoholic. Shortly before I went to AA for the first time, my shrink began encouraging me to go. I said, “What about anonymity? My office and my apartment are right in the same neighborhood. What if a patient or somebody else I know sees me?”
    He said, “Don’t worry. Anyone inside will be an alcoholic and won’t say anything.”
    “But what if a colleague sees me entering or leaving the place?”
    “It won’t happen.”
    It did happen. But after I started going to AA, I