The End of My Addiction

physician I can tell you that the day I am released from here, I’ll go and drink. That is the nature of the disease. You can keep me here six months if you want, but who gains from that?”
    “So you’re locked up in the psych ward here simply because you are an alcoholic?”
    “Yes.”
    “This is Kafkaesque,” she said.
    “I think so, too.”
    “I’m going to order that you be released,” she said. “Tomorrow morning you will be free to go.”
    “What if they forget or don’t release me?”
    “Either you will leave the hospital tomorrow morning, or the chief of the department will.”
    Nightmares of being permanently locked up persisted throughout the rest of my alcoholism.
     
    The last night before my release, as I waited nervously, I met a beautiful young woman patient of twenty-three. She had blond hair and blue eyes, and a constellation of diagnoses including depression and binge-eating. At the end of an hours-long conversation, we kissed each other good night.
    The next morning, when my mother, Jean-Claude, and Eva arrived to pick me up and drive me home, the beautiful young woman saw me to the door and we kissed again. My mother asked who she was and why she was in the psych ward.
    “She’s very attractive,” my mother said. “But couldn’t you find someone without clinical depression?”
    “I find the people you lock me up with,” I said. “She comes from a good family. Her father is a physician and her mother is a nurse.”
     
    My fury at my family—especially my brother and sister—caused a rift between us that would last a painfully long time. In recent talks with Jean-Claude and Eva, I’ve learned that the hospitalization had not been planned. It had been spontaneously organized by my mother in desperation over my walking out of the psychiatrist’s office. And in fact my brother had opposed it, only going along with it because my mother begged him to do so.
    I also learned that all during my illness, the family struggled with whether or how to intervene in my drinking. They’d been bewildered by the conflicting advice from addiction treatment specialists. Most said, “Don’t intervene. The alcoholic or addict has to hit bottom and change on his or her own initiative. There is nothing you can do.” Whereas others said, “By all means, intervene if the opportunity presents itself. You never know what may help.”
    In truth there was nothing that my mother, Jean-Claude, and Eva could have done to cure my severe alcoholism. What I needed from them, and what the families of all addicts find it hard to give in a way that the addict can appreciate, was love and compassion.
     
    From my reaction to being locked up in the psych ward and my continued drinking, it may have seemed to my family that I had stopped trying to fight my alcoholism. That was not at all the case. I went to AA meetings regularly, usually at least once a day if not more often. I got a Paris AA sponsor, a very kind, patient man who spoke to me for hours at a time. And I looked for help everywhere.
    I went to see the world-renowned cardiologist Philippe Coumel, who had supervised my M.D. thesis. I told him, “I am so ashamed of my drinking. I shouldn’t bother you by calling or visiting.”
    He replied, “As a physician, how can you be embarrassed about having a disease?”
    In the midst of a binge, I could repay such kind, wise counsel with the same abuse I sometimes hurled at my family. I once called Coumel up at four in the morning, waking him and his wife, and railed at him for letting me down and dropping me as a friend because of my drinking. I blacked out and had no memory of what I had done. But the next day he wrote me a letter in which he said, “I never let you down, and I will never drop you as a friend. More important, I cannot believe that a man of your intelligence cannot find the solution.”
    Coumel’s generous words kindled a spark of hope in me. But I thought, “This disease has killed some of the strongest-willed and most intelligent people on the planet and it is defying the smartest researchers and practitioners in the field. How am I going to find the answer?”
     
    My mother’s health began to decline. Decades of heavy smoking had taken their toll, and she suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and chronic bronchitis. At the end of the year, she began using a small oxygen tank at night—she took off the mask to smoke in bed—and intermittently during the