Wasted: An Alcoholic Therapist's Fight for Recovery in a Tragically Flawed Treatment System (17 page)

Even to many health care workers, mental illness does not present with the same kind of urgency as a heart attack. But the sad reality is that addiction and mental illness can kill just
as efficiently as heart disease.

After several hours, a young, blond, ponytailed nurse surveys the waiting room. Her eyes come to rest on me.

“Mr. Pond? Come with me.” She leads me to a tiny examination room and takes my vital signs. My pulse and blood pressure are through the roof.

“What brings you to Emergency today, Mr. Pond?” Her voice is calm, soothing and sympathetic.

“I’m an alcoholic. I’ve lost everything. I don’t want to live anymore,” I say.

“How much have you been drinking, and when did you have your last drink?”

By rote, I deliver every answer. I know my response to the next question will make or break this deal.

“Do you have a plan to kill yourself, Mr. Pond?”

The shred of hope I have left for my future hangs on
my next words. The debilitating depression, the extreme anxiety, the paranoid delusions, the auditory hallucinations, the repeated thoughts of suicide urge me to scream yes.

And then I see myself in a Tim Hortons uniform. Oddly fitting, because Tim Horton, the professional hockey player who founded the chain, was a notorious alcoholic who killed himself by driving drunk.

As I open
my mouth, Monk steps into the room.

“I want to be here for this,” he says to the nurse. “This little fucker will scam you. He’s smooth and he’s slick.”

Monk knows the medical staff, and they know he works at the recovery house. His story of redemption is legend in these parts. He’s also engaged to an
RN
in Pediatrics. He leans back in his chair. “I have seen over four hundred men
come through the house over the last two years, and this guy by far is the craziest motherfucker of them all. He scares the shit out of me. He tried to jump out the van going 110. He wants to off himself.”

That’s it. I know at that moment that I will be pinked—sent straight up to the psych unit, stripped naked, put in pajamas and locked in the seclusion room with nothing but a mattress,
a strong blanket and a bedpan. In my past career as a psychiatric nurse, I performed hundreds of assessments myself. Now it will happen to me.

The doctor limps in, leaning on his cane.

In a strong Scottish brogue, he introduces himself.

“I’m Dr. MacIntosh. I’m the attending psychiatrist.”

This is the dude, the one who signs the certificate. He holds the power. He
looks to be in his mid-sixties with shaggy eyebrows. Like two miniature potted plants, thick tufts of stiff hair grow out of his ears.

He rests his cane on the arm of the chair and rattles through all the questions I’ve just answered.

“Do you have a plan to kill yourself, Mr. Pond?”

He and I both know I do. But I’m not crazy enough to admit it.

After fifteen frustrating
minutes, Dr. MacIntosh cannot get me to say that I want to kill myself. He knows I am doing a very good job of eluding involuntary admission. He’s angry and lets me know it.

“You are full of unexpressed anger, Mr. Pond,” he sighs. “You are a bleeding-heart social worker from the eighties who does not trust the medical profession. I will not admit you. It is a waste of a good hospital bed.”

“Thank you, doctor,” I say with relief.

“I want you to tell me that you do not have a plan to kill yourself.”

I lie and comply. “I do not have a plan to kill myself.”

He writes me a prescription for olanzapine, a new-generation antipsychotic, and Celexa, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressant, and hands me one milligram of sublingual Ativan, an anti-anxiety
agent. Dr. MacIntosh then snatches his cane, rises up and gingerly limps out. He pauses in the doorway.

“Good luck, Mr. Pond,” he says. “You’re going to need it. Most men your age whose alcoholism has progressed to the degree yours has don’t make it. Or they end up spending the rest of their years in an institution.”

I return triumphant to the waiting room, where Monk sits reading
a magazine.

“Fuck!” He shakes his head.

By the time we return to the van, the Ativan has kicked in. My anxiety diminishes considerably. This is a highly addictive benzodiazepine that works. Trouble is, like every addictive thing, its relief is temporary and elusive.

I slump against the passenger door.

Monk fumes. I’m his problem again. But not for long—our recovery
house does not take men prescribed psychotropic medications.

Monk furiously works his phone as he drives. “Hello, Randy? Do you still take guys on bug pills? Yeah, I got this guy. He’s crazy and has to take psych drugs. Do you want him?” Monk drives with one hand on the steering wheel while the other cups his phone to his ear. He nods with satisfaction. A big cheesy-assed grin on his round
face, he whips a U-turn and hits the gas, and we speed north on Highway 99.

“You’re going to Mission Possible,” he says. “I guess you’re getting certified anyway. Only in a different kind of way, Crazy Mike.”

• 17 •

MISSION POSSIBLE SITS
nestled in the lush farm country of South Langley, literally a stone’s throw from the American border. In the distance, a low, steady hum drones from the two highways that run for miles directly parallel on opposing sides of the
US
–Canada border. This stretch of road is the largest illegal drug portal to Canada. Only someone with
a wicked sense of irony would situate a recovery home here.

As Monk negotiates his way through the potholes of Mission Possible’s long driveway, the effect of the Ativan begins to wear off. The
SUV
comes to rest in front of a typical nineties rancher.

Monk escorts me into the house. Where We Surrender feels claustrophobic, Mission Possible feels expansive. A large open foyer stretches
into a spacious multi-windowed meeting room. The house office sits off the foyer.

“Hey,” a six-foot-tall, lanky guy addresses me. His long neck hunches forward, cutting an Ichabod Crane–like figure. “Hear you’re a shrink. Well, here you’re just another fuckin’ addict.”

This is Randy, Mission Possible’s program director.

“I run a better program here than We Surrender” He
points proudly to a large clipping from the Vancouver
Province
newspaper, framed and displayed on the wall in the main foyer for all to see. A picture shows Randy with a large grin, standing proudly on the recovery house’s porch. The headline reads “Recovered Addict Devotes His Life to Helping Others.”

Another guy in his late thirties, with shaggy greying hair, peers out of the office
behind Randy and introduces himself.

“Hi, I’m Ken, the house manager. I’m two months clean and sober. Actually it’s over a year, but I screwed up and smoked a joint a couple months ago. Ken, I soon learn, is a former heroin addict.

Two months. I have come to learn that length of sobriety is the true measure of a man in recovery.

With his usual cat-like stealth, Monk slips
out of the house and backs the van out of the driveway. As he drives off, he yells out the window, “I’ll get someone to bring your stuff out here later.”

He can’t wait to see the last of me. And I could care less about getting my belongings. Stuff is becoming less and less important to me—except for my briefcase.

“We’ll transfer your welfare cheque over to Mission Possible. Now
read this tenancy agreement and sign it.” Randy shoves the contract my way.

Ken takes me on a tour of the home. Upstairs are three bedrooms, two for men who have graduated to a state of semi-privacy, and one for Ken. He’s got the master bedroom. It’s huge, with a balcony, walk-in closet and Jacuzzi tub. A massive new flat-screen
TV
dominates one wall.

For the foreseeable future,
the dorm in the basement will be my home. I follow Ken down the narrow stairs to a large former rec room, now crammed with six sets of bunk beds. I imagine a Ping-Pong table, and a big entertainment centre on the far wall. Kids playing and laughing, now replaced by down-and-out men snoring and crying out in their tortured sleep. When the house is full, eighteen guys share two showers.

Ken assigns me a mattress on the top bunk in the corner with a Rorschach inkblot pattern of brown and yellow stains on its surface. A beat-up chest of drawers sits adjacent to the old grey metal bunk bed.

The odiferous body on the lower bunk stops snoring, rolls over, smacks his lips too many times and sits up.

“You the new guy?” He blinks at me. “Ken says you’re crazy. I’m Jordan.
Welcome to a psych ward posing as a recovery house. We’re all fucking crazy here. You can take three of the drawers in that dresser. Just throw my stuff on the floor there. Where’s your shit? Or are you like the rest of us here? Shitless. Ha ha ha.”

Jordan rolls his legs over the side of his bunk and I identify the source of the stink—an open sore the size of my hand oozes on his left
shin. I see exposed white bone. The infection is rancid and close to gangrenous.

He glances down and laughs. “Yeah, nice, eh? I had Gary pull out one of my surgery screws with a pair of pliers the other day. I’m going to go to the hospital, and they’ll probably have to amputate.”

Jordan loved the macabre attention his wound received.

“For twenty years I was the boss of
one of the biggest unions in the United States. Everywhere we went, everything high end. Whores—you name it, I had it. If anybody fucked around with the union back then... we just took care of it. If you get my drift.”

Jordan has that wild, unsettling psychopathic look in his eye. I’ve seen it before, when I worked in the correctional system in the early eighties with some of Canada’s
worst serial killers and violent sex offenders. Like most long-term crack addicts, what remain of Jordan’s teeth are rotten and stained brown.

“I sure miss my girlfriend, Lucy,” Jordan says. “She’s a good girl—twenty-two-year-old crack whore staying in my place on the Downtown Eastside. I’m a lucky old bastard. I can keep up with her all night long. All I need’s my crack. I’d wear her
out and go looking for her friend.”

Hard to tell, but Jordan looks to be something between fifty-five and sixty-five.

“I’m on a methadone program,” he tells me. “What medication are you on?” Most of the men here take some form of prescribed narcotic.

Ken returns to the dorm and laughs as he interrupts our conversation. “How do you like us so far, Crazy Mike?” He hands me
an old sleeping bag and several ancient sheets.

“You should wash these,” Ken says. “Good luck finding a pillow that doesn’t smell like a sack of shit, though.”

I don’t want a pillow. I don’t care.

I am about to share a bunk bed with a psychopathic, gangrenous heroin addict in a house run by a newly clean heroin addict in charge of administering prescription narcotics.

Biker Brad arrives with my briefcase. I stash it under my mattress in a precise position locked into my brain. If it is moved even the slightest, I will detect it.

For dinner we eat rice and boiled wieners with a bag of no-name frozen vegetables. Jordan approaches with my meds, the same Jordan fixated on pulling the screws out of his suppurating leg. He presents me with two pills—Keflex,
which is an antibiotic, and an extra-strength Tylenol.

“Those aren’t my meds,” I say. That anyone has the gall to call a place like this a recovery home defies imagination. No one medically supervises drugs. No one performs any intake or assessment. No treatment plan is devised.

Later that evening, I lie on my back on the top bunk tracking the wolf spider that’s navigating the
spackled ceiling. Throughout the night, Psycho Jordan stares at me, silently.

He just stares and stares and stares.

When he notices me staring back, he averts his gaze. Two psychotics engaged in a macabre staring match. He scares the shit out of me. It’s the dog that doesn’t bark that’s the most dangerous.

The next morning over coffee at the dining-room table, a young guy
leans over to me.

“Jordan wants to kill you. He thinks you want to murder him in his sleep.”

What remains of my clinical brain quickly deduces that Jordan measures high on the Psychopathy Checklist.

Grandiose estimation of self... check.

Need for stimulation... check.

Pathological lying... check.

Cunning and manipulative... check.

Lack of
remorse or guilt... check.

Parasitic lifestyle... check.

Poor behavioural controls... check.

Impulsivity... check.

Failure to accept responsibility for his own actions... check.

It’s true I am paranoid, but my fear of Jordan is well founded. I become hyper-vigilant. If anyone is going to kill me, it’s going to be
me
.

I later learn from the other
guys that Ken steals other men’s narcotics and methadone. He ingests anything he believes will give him a high.

Each morning, all of us attend
AA
meetings in Abbotsford. I hate the drive. The minivan is full of men smoking cigarettes. At the meetings, I stare at the walls, the ceiling, the floor. I can’t speak because my scrambled brain won’t allow me to articulate a thought.

At night, I attend the mandatory therapy group run by Neil, co-director of Mission Possible. He’s working on a master’s degree in eco-psychology. An impressive figure at over six foot five with a long, greying ponytail, he pulls up in his Mercedes.

Neil says he was once was a high-powered heroin and coke dealer who consumed most of his profits. In his therapy groups, he likes to tell stories
of his numerous near-death overdoses and his conquests of women.

“I thought I was the best goddamn fuck they ever had or will ever have in their lives. I thought they were all cumbuckets anyway.”

At meetings, Neil’s style is to confront, cajole, belittle and berate.

“You’re one crazy fuck,” he tells one of the guys. “You’re nothing but a fucking parasite. The only thing
you care about is your next cigarette.”