The End of My Addiction

long since become clear to me that alcoholics and addicts could not count on the usual amount of compassion and concern when they needed medical care.
    From the moment I fell, I feared that I would never be able to play the piano properly again. My mother shared my distress. It was one thing my drinking had not affected. I thought, “The piano is all I have left. Now God is taking that from me, too.”
    Hoping to recover as much of the flexibility and strength in my wrist as possible, I consulted France’s preeminent hand surgeon, Professor J.-P. Lemerle, who warned me that after fractures like mine patients did not recover full range of motion. Nonetheless, I committed myself to a strenuous regimen with a physical therapist on Professor Lemerle’s team. I worked like crazy on it, blocking out the pain as I did. Again to avoid being treated differently from a normal patient, I did not tell Professor Lemerle or the physical therapist that I was an alcoholic. That required absurd pretexts when I had to cancel appointments because I was drunk. But I only missed a few appointments, and at the end of two months of diligent effort the therapist declared that I had recovered completely.
    My mother’s and my happiness about this was short-lived. A couple of days later, I woke up in the morning hungover, stumbled into the bathroom, and fell heavily on my left shoulder. I got up and felt all right at first, thanks to the anesthetic effect of the alcohol in my bloodstream. A few hours later, I looked at my shoulder in the mirror and saw an ugly bruise spreading, but I thought that was the extent of the damage.
    As the morning passed and my shoulder became more and more painful, I began to suspect that I had a fracture. But I did not want to go to the emergency room with alcohol on my breath. So I waited more hours, and then clumsily cleaned myself up and dressed. I wore the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor on my jacket lapel, hoping it would keep doctors and nurses from dismissing me as a low-life drunk.
    At Hôpital Cochin, where I had trained as a medical student, the ER staff told me I had a bad fracture and likely would not regain full mobility in my shoulder. Playing the piano engages muscle groups throughout the body, and I had rehabilitated my wrist only to incur an equally problematic injury. I determined to once again try my best to recover.
    I went to see Professor Michel Revel, the chief of functional rheumatology at Hôpital Cochin. Professor Revel was very doubtful that I could regain full range of motion, but he proposed an unusual program of pool therapy. The buoyancy of my body in the water would take strain off my shoulder and allow it to be manipulated and exercised much more vigorously than in normal physical therapy. It was my best shot and I took it.
    Once more, I managed to keep most of my physical therapy appointments, and once more, I beat the odds and recovered completely.
    My mother could not enjoy the victory with me. She passed away on July 22, 2000.
     
    It was almost unbearable to have to face the fact that I had failed to end my alcoholism while she was still alive. In my grief, I traveled. I visited friends on Lake Geneva, in the South of France, in the Swiss Alps. There was no end to my emotional confusion, and I struggled to stay clearheaded. My thoughts centered on the medical cure for alcoholism that I felt must be possible, but that I was convinced would be found ten minutes after I died from drink. Hiking for hours at a time in the mountains, keeping a fast pace to burn off nervous energy and restore the muscle tone I lost during binges, helped me to stay abstinent.
    For a while. I bought my food in a little Swiss market. There, a display of vodka bottles called to me, day after day, like the sirens called to Odysseus. Unlike Odysseus, I had no shipmates with beeswax in their ears to tie me to the mast and prevent me from answering the sirens’ call. I eventually succumbed.
    A few days later, I struck up an acquaintance with a couple of tourists, and we talked late into the night. I was drinking, and I kept drinking after my newfound friends and I parted. The next thing I knew I was in the emergency room of a small hospital about ten miles away from where I was staying. I had been found drunk on the sidewalk and had a broken nose.
    After I returned to Paris, it took me a few days to stop the binge. Then I went to see Dr. Jean-Paul Descombey, the former chief of psychiatry at Hôpital