Wasted: An Alcoholic Therapist's Fight for Recovery in a Tragically Flawed Treatment System (6 page)

Finally, weakened by successful battering rams, the wooden door gives way and pulls from the frame. We are in. Only one thing matters now: where is the damn liquor cabinet?

We lay waste to Vicki’s house. We devour every cracker, every box of cereal, every can of tuna. In five days, we consume literally everything in
the house.

Now we both know we’re in trouble. We have no money. No booze. No food. Dreaded withdrawal, waiting patiently in the wings, pounces. And so the agony begins again.

Sobriety slinks in, slow and painful.

“Dana, I need to go to the hospital,” I say. “This is going to be a bad one.”

“I’m not going,” she replies.

• 7 •

I’VE BEEN THROUGH
enough rehab to know what comes next. Intolerable vomiting, shakes, fevers, chills, blinding headaches. Every noise magnified ten thousand times. Even the softest touch is too much. And that’s if I get off easy.

My first stint in treatment was at Pine-Winds Recovery and Treatment Centre in the Okanagan in November
2005. Taylor and a couple of guys from
AA
ambushed me. I stayed at Pine-Winds just long enough to detox and then I left. April 2006, a few months later, back to Pine-Winds. Fast forward a few more months and I’m in the back of our Honda Odyssey family van gagging and heaving, yet again in the throes of detox. In the front, Rhonda drove as our family doctor glanced over the seat, his face furrowed
with worry. We sped to Kelowna, about an hour’s drive away, where Rhonda and my doctor intended to admit me to the psych ward. He wanted to save me, a fellow health care professional, the embarrassment of being hospitalized for alcoholism in my own hometown. All I could think about in the back of that van was my practice. What would become of my practice?

My doctor wanted me certified.
I was too sick, too agitated, too distracted to fight him.

As I clung to the edge of the car seat, Rhonda—beyond exasperated, tears in her voice—kept asking the question that I’m still not sure I can answer: “Why would anybody do this to themselves?” She blinked away tears as she drove. “Mike , you have a very serious problem. You’re destroying everything you care about. Why? Why? Can’t
you see what you’re doing to all of us? Why won’t you stop?”

She broke down and sobbed until I heard a big long sigh. Then silence.

Why would anyone in their right mind do this to themselves? I’m not in my right mind. I lost it long ago, probably when I was twelve and my brother, Roger, was eleven and we bought a kit to make root beer. We’d heard that if we added yeast, it would
get really fizzy. If not capped properly, it would also ferment. We spent half that summer drunk on a bad batch of root beer. Roger and I continued to drink through our adolescence and young adulthood. Most times the booze would be mixed with pot and hash. Acid trips were commonplace. I somehow managed to retain some semblance of control. Roger, on the other hand, would regularly drink himself into
oblivion. Every time, I would pack him home from the party, sneak him into the house and plop him in his bed to sleep it off.

From that early age, everyone noticed how much Roger and I could drink.

“Man, those Pond brothers can sure put a lot of booze away.”

“Last night Mike drank a twelve-pack and didn’t even look drunk.”

“Roger Pond drank three bottles of Baby
Duck in less than an hour.”

We wore it like a badge of honour.

I remember when he was thirteen, his friend Don called me over to their house. Roger had drunk so much of a Texas mickey of cognac and grape Kool-Aid, he’d passed out in a puddle of purple puke. I hoisted him on my shoulder to my car and drove him to the Canadian Forces Base Shilo hospital. He had alcohol poisoning.
Then I went home, got my mother and took her to the hospital. When Mom saw Rog unconscious on that hospital bed with a gastric tube in his mouth, she fainted. The nurse had to catch her.

The doctor said, “Get her out of here.”

After that, Dad
CB
’ed Roger for a month—confined to barracks. The only time he was allowed out of his room was to go to the bathroom and school. I remember
listening to him cry alone in his room. We weren’t allowed to talk to him. My sisters would take him his meals. When Dad wasn’t around, we’d sneak him in cookies and powdered milk.

Rog was the family clown. When Dad was hungover and Mom was pissed off, Rog diffused the tension with his jokes. We would laugh so hard at the table milk would spew out of our noses. His impressions of all the
kids and their parents on the base broke everybody up. He would draw caricatures of everyone he met and then imitate their voices and mannerisms. My aunt Shirley called him Rich Little.

To our great surprise, we both graduated from high school. In our late teens, we both moved out west and began working in psychiatric nursing at the mental institution in Ponoka, Alberta. If this was even
still possible, our drinking ramped up; Roger’s went into overdrive. He drank daily. He smoked pot, hash and banana peels. He took acid, mushrooms and mescaline. He swigged bottles of Benadryl cough syrup. He stole a prescription pad out of a doctor’s office and forged prescriptions for Valium, phenobarbital and Demerol. He ended up in jail on fraud charges but escaped a tough sentence when his
appendix ruptured. One night he took a fistful of the antipsychotic haloperidol. The side effects were so severe, his arms contorted to his sides, his tongue protruded two inches from his mouth, and his body jerked so badly that he couldn’t stand. I had to take him to the hospital. I thought he was going to die.

Roger’s over-the-top addiction allowed me to let myself off the hook. “I’m
not like him,” I told myself. “I don’t have a problem.”

I’m exactly like him. He’s lost everything already. I’m just a little bit behind.

THE DOCTOR, RHONDA
and I travelled the rest of the road to Kelowna in stony silence. I stayed one night in the psych ward. Had to get back to my practice.

“No, you don’t.” Rhonda revealed yet another rehab plan. “Everyone has chipped
in to pay for you to attend out of province treatment. Your mum, step-mum, Loretta and Danette all gave me money. You are going to the Claresholm Centre in Alberta.” A few hours later I found myself white-knuckling as my plane pitched and rolled its descent through a blanket of heavy wet snow into Calgary, where my mom would pick me up and drive the hour to the treatment centre.

It was
a month before Christmas, and my aged mother and stepfather had braved a vicious snowstorm to pick me up and ferry me to treatment. Mum’s mouth grimly set, she peered out the windshield as she navigated the treacherous highway. She slowed down to a crawl each time she passed someone spun out in the ditch, enraging all the impatient commuters who aggressively swerved out and passed her. The airline
had lost my luggage, so on the way, she pulled in to the snow-packed parking lot of the Deerfoot Mall. We pushed with purpose through the frenzied crowds to Winners for necessities like underwear, deodorant and some T-shirts. I remember Mum pulling out her wallet. Then an odd feel of disconnect. Then nothing.

I came to on the floor of the store. I was on my side in the recovery position,
so I wouldn’t aspirate. Around me, a circle of winter boots pushed collectively back.

“Give him some air.” A gruff, burly ambulance attendant crouched at my side and shone a bright light directly in my eye. Checking my pupil dilation, I surmised. I conducted my own clinical assessment and my heart sank. I’d had a seizure. It happens after a heavy bender, usually within the initial twelve
to forty-eight hours of withdrawal. When alcohol is abruptly withdrawn, the brain kindles, over fires. It doesn’t know what to do with itself. Seizures signal end-stage alcoholism. I’d drunk so much booze for so long, my brain could no longer function without it. I needed to keep drinking to prevent seizures. But the very act of drinking was hastening my own death. Addiction is the ultimate paradox.

As I was loaded into the ambulance, I spied my mom, looking small and frail and weary and worried. She had relied on me so much growing up—“Watch your brother and sisters while I go to the store.” “Can you get the kids bathed and put them to bed? I have to go to the Al-Anon meeting.” My little chest would puff out with pride. I was the man in the family she could rely on. It sure as hell
wasn’t Dad. Now she was at a stage in life when her burdens should be lightened. What had I done to her? Why couldn’t I stop?

Tears welled at the corner of my eyes as the attendants collapsed my gurney and pushed it into the back of the ambulance. At the hospital, I disappeared in the pre-Christmas crush of holiday flu sufferers, just one of dozens way down at the bottom of the triaged
list. I waited hours before the attending physician saw me, prescribed Ativan to diminish the chance of another seizure and kept me overnight just in case. He was blunt.

“Mr. Pond, I don’t know how to say this in a way you’ll listen. Another seizure could kill you. You must stop drinking.”

Five o’clock in the morning, Mum was back at the hospital, and in the cold, dark crackling
dawn we drove to Claresholm, where I stayed for three weeks.

I was back hard at the bottle within a month. More recriminations and fights between Rhonda and me as the beautiful life we created splintered and shattered. She couldn’t keep our masterfully renovated home. The practice wasn’t bringing in any money. I saw the clients who would pay me cash, so I could go out and drink right away.
Our bills mounted. Lines of credit extended and snapped. Creditors came around, and my boys disappeared into their friends’ homes, their girlfriends’ lives—anything to escape the insanity of their father’s self-destruction.

January 2008: More and longer detoxes followed by ever harder binges. I had no money to get a motel room. I ended up in the men’s shelter. I no longer slept. I lay
alone night after night crushed by mounting anxiety, depression and fear.

My office manager was out to get me.

So was Rhonda—she wanted to ruin me.

I was convinced that the shelter worker called the police. They were coming to put me in the psych ward.

“You’re an asshole.”

“You’ve ruined everything.”

“You are going down, my friend.”

My head
jerked around the room. I could hear the voices, but I couldn’t see the people.

For the first time, paranoia had hit. In a brief moment of sanity, the professional in me emerged.

Then nothing.

I came to in the hospital emergency department in restraints, feeling like my back was going to snap in two.

A
second
seizure.

“What is your name and date of birth?”
a voice asked.

“Michael Pond, September 27, 1953,” I answered.

“Mr. Pond, you had convulsive status epilepticus. Successive severe alcohol-induced seizures,” the doctor told me. “If you don’t stop drinking, they will kill you.”

I was given the anticonvulsant Dilantin, along with phenobarbital and Ativan to take the edge off the withdrawal symptoms. I walked out of the hospital
with an envelope containing two more Ativan.
I have to get back to work. My clients need me.

Who in their right mind would continue to have me as their therapist? Thank God for crazy people who pay cash, whose good sense deserted them long ago, because they kept me in booze. I would have reported me to my governing bodies if I’d had a shred of good sense left.

And that brings us
to today, and to Vicki’s empty house full of dead soldiers and the familiar shakes. Fear of actually dying of a third seizure, as the doctors predicted, propels me to action.

Dana phones her sister, who drives me to the Creekside Withdrawal Management Centre in Surrey. I am admitted immediately. I conduct my own clinical assessment.

Clinical Notes—Mental Status Exam:

Appearance
and Behaviour: Patient is a five-foot-six underweight (132 lbs.) fifty-five-year-old Caucasian male who appears his stated age. His clothes are dirty and he smells strongly of alcohol and urine. He is unkempt, disheveled and incontinent. His facial expression is perplexed and upper extremities are tremulous. Patient slumps in his chair with his head hung down and avoids eye contact. Psychomotor
agitation—wringing his hands, picking his scalp and constantly chews the inside of his mouth and lips.

Speech: Low, hesitant and pressured.

Mood and Affect: Patient reports depression, anxiety and fearfulness. He expresses guilt, worthlessness and hopelessness. Admits passive suicidal ideation but denies intent or plan. Restricted range of expression.

Thought Content and
Process: Thought blocking, poor concentration and distracted. No distortions in perception of thought. Denies hallucinations. Patient reports severe insomnia and a history of seizures. He obsesses about being homeless and penniless. Above average intelligence. Short- and long-term memory are impaired.

Insight: Fair.

Judgment: Impaired.

DSM-5
Diagnosis: Alcohol Use Disorder—Severe;
Depressive Episode; Alcohol Withdrawal.

Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) score: 30/100—Severe impairment.

With my seizure history, they think it prudent to admit me to the hospital for one night of observation. I agree. And so begins the medically supervised detox all over again. More phenobarbital and Valium. Dilantin wards off seizures. I lie back, seduced by the smell
of sanitized pillows and crisp white sheets. It’s going to be okay now. I know I can get through this.

The next day, I score a room adjacent to the nurses’ station, so they can observe me closely. I feel safe. The drugs begin to work. The wreck that is my life staggers out of the last spectacular crash as rational thought returns. I need to take stock of the damage.

“Rhonda, I’m
in detox in Vancouver.”

“Mike. You’re in detox just so you can stay out of jail.” Rhonda’s steamed. She hasn’t heard from me in weeks. In my absence, she picks up the pieces.