Drinking

He routinely slept through the day, sedating himself into a stupor with alcohol, benzodiazepine, hypnotics, and narcotic pills — some obtained legally from doctors, some bought on the internet from India — so the fact that he slept long into the afternoon did not alarm me much at first. I checked on him throughout the day just to make sure he was still alive.

He was my doppelganger: where I could go if I chose drink over life. I was his advocate, supporter, commiserator. I supported him in his choice to drink himself to death, and it was one of the hardest and most meaningful journeys I have had with any of my clients. I will always be proud of the fact that I was able to bring together a team that supported his right to live life on his own terms.

I confess. I would drive drunk on nights I went clubbing. I’d dance until my knees hurt and drink until the brand of gin in my drinks didn’t matter. With my windows rolled down, I hoped fresh air conjured some semblance of sobriety, in case I encountered a cop. I’d bellow my favorite songs, head hanging out the window. Me. An R.N.

In December 1996, I walked into my urban ICU, before color-coded uniforms, wearing my home-made Santa Claus scrub top, and found myself assigned to T.J. Dalton, a 30-year old victim of a drunk driver. The driver was a recidivist. His small pick-up had hit the bumper of T.J.’s Expedition, touted as being the safest car on the road. T.J.’s car had flipped end over end, shoving T.J. back into the second row of seats.

I was a third-year medical student on a scholarship trying to make a few extra bucks in order to survive. So I applied for a job as the overnight lab technician at a local community hospital. My job required that I go to the ER when they called for labs, draw the blood from the patient, take the specimen back to the lab, run the tests, and then go back to the ER and deliver the results. Which was fine.

I live a “say no” life — as to drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol. Yet on my twenty-first birthday, I deviated from my rule and, with a group of fellow graduate students, sat at a bar and imbibed one celebratory drink after another. I cannot remember what the bar looked like, but I do recall that it was loud — filled with voices and music — and that it got progressively louder with each drink I had. I cannot remember what I wore on that warm August evening in Evanston, Illinois, but I can still feel the clamminess of my skin as the alcohol began to take effect. I also cannot remember how I got back to my apartment; the next morning I found myself atop my bed, my shirt stained with drops of saliva and bits of vomit.