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Recovery

Donovan Whitley

 

 

Dear Brother Joe,
    To catch you up to speed, this past year has whipped my ass sincerely. I’ve been shot at, stabbed twice, once for each separate occasion, overdosed a couple of times, died, revived, treatment facilities twice, and so on. All those adventures landed me in the Oklahoma county lockup, where I’m sitting, right now, in my cell, giving you a little ink. Yep, the Doctor is canned, all within this year. By the way, the blue work shirts and denim pants and moccasins they make you wear in here, aren’t all that uncomfortable in truth. And they feed you cigarettes. Food is about what you’d expect. But when you get my letter, could you please elaborate more about the time you blew up elephants in the Huey? I also heard Jane Fonda was up in Northern Vietnam in I think, July? Please tell me you got a picture with her. Anyway Joe, get out your fork.

    As you know, I began the year going to an anesthesiology residency up in Kansas City. Long hours. Sometimes over twenty hour shifts, depending on wether there was a surgical operation or not. To get through those shifts I began taking pharmaceutical speed—black beauties, what they call it. That shit would make you chew holes in your cheeks, and if you were lucky your gums would bleed. I only did black beauties a handful of times, and that was it. My fate was sealed. That was the beginning of the end, friendo. I wish that it all stopped there, but hang on, it gets worse.
    You wouldn’t believe how many anesthesiologists try out different drugs on the job. A lot. It’s just too tempting. The most common drug is Fentanyl, a narcotic anesthetic that is relatively new to the hospital in which I was completing my residency in. I saw how wonderful the Fentanyl made patients feel. Their frayed moons mended. Their souls on rafts of lavender clouds. I began using it intravenously. Getting the stuff was easy. All I had to do was open up a cabinet door and take as much as I needed. And I’d take a tourniquet and syringe into the men’s room, or the OR suite, and junk the stuff into my veins. Then get up, and go back into surgery with a warm, buzzing mind. But of course I didn’t have a problem. No, no, I can handle this, I’m not an addict. Dope-heads are only in the papers or television programs, they aren’t doctors! But Joe, they absolutely are. I got away with copping Fentanyl for a couple of months. And then I really started to swim in my own poisoned blood.
    Once, during a twenty-four hour craniotomy operation—brain tumor removal—my relief would
hit about every two hours on the nose. I’d run to the OR suite, and get my fix of Fentanyl. But later on during the operation, my relief didn’t hit. The procedure was going south, and the patient at this point was losing a lot of blood. Because I was beginning to experience withdrawals, I became distracted, my thoughts zoomed. Those important connections in my own brain were misfiring and I lost focus. I injected a blood product into the wrong port of a catheter, resulting in the patient developing a blood clot that travelled to her right lower lung, and she, by medical definition, arrested. We began to panic. We did everything we could to work her out of death; Bicarbonate, Adrenaline, and a few other things of which I cannot remember. But it was the defibrillator pads that restored her life. To this day I think she still has a palsied face, and I see it on the back of my eyelids at night, every night. Just a friendly reminder.
    But that’s the thing, sometimes people arrest during an operation for no evident reason. It just happens like that. so nobody realized my mistake had caused her arrest, and the unfortunate aftermath she will have to deal with for the rest of her life. But it was because of me, I have to accept that.
    Heroin was my next love affair. It was easy to get too. If I ran dry on my supply, I’d double up the dosage of narcotics for a patient, and give said patient only half, and keep the rest. I even had a few orderlies I was dating at the time write me prescriptions for Hydrocodone, also a narcotic. I never got questioned, never accused. Who accuses a doctor of a drug problem?
    Every morning I’d carry with me six or twelve twenty dollar baggies of heroin to the men’s room in the hospital. And before my shift was up, I’d have the cold sweats, and vomit into the sink. I was getting sicker, Joe, and I knew it. When I coughed I saw hot embers from the universe of my twisted soul. I was making close to a six figure salary and I couldn’t even afford toilet paper to wipe my own ass with because it took 300 dollars a day to get high. When I quit getting high from heroin, it cost me 300 dollars a day just so I wouldn’t get ill, and feel like a parasite was eating my bones. I had all the stressors every doctor can have; Anxiety, pressure, etcetera, etcetera. Everything doctors put up with, which they take drugs to relieve. But in my such case, those listed reasons were not my excuse. I took drugs because I loved taking drugs. Loved them! They made me feel like God!

    Joe, my insides were dissolving into mud. It felt like my veins were all scratched up and scurfy. I’d shoot up twenty, thirty times a day. My mind was disintegrating, man. I’d wore out all the veins in my arms and legs, so I began shooting up in my neck. You think you’re clever in that state, wearing long sleeve shirts and turtlenecks when you never did before.

    One morning, just as I’d started my shift, I got called into the administrators office, and when I walked through that door he was standing shoulder to shoulder with the director of medicine. She says to me, says, “everyone has noticed your behavioral changes, and we’re very concerned for you. John, nobody even recognizes you anymore.” I knew what it was all about, it didn’t take a genius to figure it out. They called my bullshit when I gave the excuse that I’d been overworked, so I told them, “Yeah, well, all of us here are high.” Next thing I knew, they put me on leave, sent me to a thirty-day program. A wonder program. It didn’t do much of shit for me. When I got out, I put myself around other recovering addicts, moved them into my duplex. I led meetings in my living room and went to them beat up on heroin. Hell of a guy, huh?
    I did that for a few weeks, leading meetings high, until some recovering doctor friends of mine found me naked up on the roof of a neighbors house, at a clockless hour of the night, leaning against the chimney, with the needle hanging out of my wrist. I had no idea how I got there, or that I was out cold. Or that I had overdosed and died. But there I was, owing my debts to the Devil. But he wasn’t done with me yet. Not even close.
    Those very friends delivered me through the pneumatic doors of the emergency room, where I was brought back from the grave inside the same hospital where all this began. After I recovered, the medical director came into the room, and informed me that I’d been let go. That was when things really took a turn. And a turn they went. I was at a bar—this was in Oklahoma City—I met a guy who sold dope. Asked me If I’d be interested in peddling some of the stuff for him, I said sure, what the hell. Later that night I went with him to this dirty little apartment, where they conducted business through a false deadbolt in the door. I saw what he made that night, how easy he made it. Wow man, this guy made double what I made annually at the hospital, in the same amount of time, but without all the headache that came with the territory of being a doctor. Inside of four months I was the biggest dope-dealer in Oklahoma City. I did armed robberies on small time dealers and filling stations all up and down Highway 77. Married twice at the same time, divorced from both of them a month later. Even made one of them get an abortionÉ Yeah. Me. But God decided to let the hammer come down on me. It came down so hard it felt as though my eyes had been blown out of their smokey sockets. Justice served me on my doorstep with six .38 caliber service revolvers and several warrants for my arrest. They folded me up and canned me. I am facing a slew of charges. Maybe looking at ten to fifteen years—real time, but for now, I am here in the Oklahoma county lockup, awaiting trial. Counting my sins. Writing to all of the people I’ve hurt in my life. In particular this year. I’m going to plead guilty. I deserve everything they throw at me Joe.
    I dried up real hard in here. A few times I believed I would die. I think I did die. I did. Twice. Once for real, and now in a metaphorical sense. Before you got shipped out, you asked me if I believed in God. And I told you that I didn’t know, that perhaps he and I shared similar beliefs. But I’m telling you as I was laying on my cot, drowning in sweat, vomiting, shitting my pants, God was the only force I begged to kill me. Make of that as you may. But I am here, crying while I drag my pen across the page. If you think I’m bullshitting, fine, but I’ll tell you to kiss it on the ass while it does. Anyway, Joe, my life, my experience, is the incredible truth.
    I live with one foot on the trail of regret and the other on the road of my life’s forward journey. But you know what I regret most? What I regret even more than being too doped up to see you on your last leave? There was a young man, a dying young man up at the hospital in Kansas City. Face so cold, cheeks so sunken. He was very nearly dead, and he trusted me. But I stole his drugs, and he died. I will never forget that, never forgive myself for that, never want to. I was supposed to save lives.

Most sincerely, your brother,
John

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