LOWHANGERZ

I nervously showered and got dressed (not knowing what the appropriate attire was for a crack-addicted intern to wear who was about to confess to the Chairman of the Surgery Department of the largest teaching hospital I Kings County).  I threw on a pair of Dockers and a dress shirt –no tie.  It seemed that the halls were empty as was his waiting room.  At 11:05 am, his office door opened and he motioned me in and after closing the door and directed me to a couch in the corner.  He was wearing his white lab coat over a pair of blue scrubs and clogs – the residents wore green scrubs and the blue scrubs were reserved for the teaching staff.  Clogs were the Crocs of the 1980’s.   His name was embroidered on his chest; it said ‘Dr. G. Chairman Department of Surgery’.   He sat across from me on a wing-back chair.  He did not shake my hand, but he also did not appear angry.  I guess his children were my age and that had a lot to do with it.  His wall was full of diplomas and certificates, a wall that was never meant to some day hold those papers having my name on them.  He was a busy man and the last thing he needed was to do was clear his schedule to deal with the likes of me.  I wanted to be known to him, but not in this way.  It was becoming a habit with me to become known for negative, humiliating acts rather than for me to have the patience, dedication, security, and self-esteem to go through my life and do the right thing and develop a good reputation built one step at a time. I had the capability for success, but not the capacity to achieve it.

He broke the ice and asked me in a firm, but caring tone “ Jordan, tell me what is going on”.  I blurted out “Dr. G, I have a problem with drugs, particularly cocaine.  I use it at night and then I am tired the entire next day.  I need help.”  At first he looked puzzled because cocaine was not on the short list in his differential diagnosis.  It was probably a very strategically good move on my part to ask for help – because they were preparing to do things their way very shortly.  Being the son of a Senior Surgeon at the hospital probably was the only reason I wasn’t fired on the spot.  He told me “Don’t worry about going back to work today” – like he would have sent a self-confessed crack head back onto the wards to care for patients.  He said that Kathy would contact me later on that afternoon.  The next morning I was sent to see the Chief Psychiatrist – he recommended treatment.  Back in 1986 long-term treatment was just emerging as the treatment of choice for addicted healthcare professionals, but as luck would have it, I was sent to a 28-day program. 

At that time, it was 28-day rehabs that were in vogue by the masses.  I packed my suitcase and my folks drove me to Morristown, NJ.  The program was on the top floor of the community hospital.  At 26 years old, I was one of the younger patients and I was not ready for recovery.  I was in treatment because I got caught, not because I wanted help to save myself from a life-threatening disease.  In AA they call it “The gift of desperation”.  Up until that point, the only thing I was desperate for was more crack when I was on a binge and running low.  This was all new to me.  I attended the groups and called myself a drug addict.  I was also introduced to AA, but I didn’t have a clue.  Being the only doctor, I thought I was different than everyone else, and it was impossible for me to identify with them.  The funny thing is that I immediately enjoyed those meetings and I loved sharing for the attention it got me.  I thought these people liked me, but I was getting attention because they saw how sick I was and how much help I would need.  I didn’t have a clue.  During group, I thought I was there because I fell asleep during an open-heart operation… my ego could handle that (and only that).  Other than falling asleep during surgery, my life was pretty good. Ha!!!  I put my time in and was released in late March – ready to resume my training April 1, 1987.  One of the things that was different upon returning home was that I was now registered with the New York State Medical Society as a recovering physician, and they would monitor my recovery.  I had to attend outpatient counseling and go for random, weekly drug tests.  Don’t think that the threat of random drug tests was a big enough deterrent to prevent me from smoking crack – it wasn’t.

Do you remember when I told you about Clyde – he was that very good-looking (Heath Ledger-like) street hustler who I brought home with me one night in New Orleans.  On the way back to my house from the French Quarter we shared a joint and we were rubbing each other’s crotches and getting real hot for what was about to happen.  We sat downstairs and smoked another joint, then he pulled me next to him, put his arm around me and dragged me to him and we started wildly kissing.  He asked me to lead him to the bedroom and he undressed me and himself and threw me onto the bed.  He took some KY Jelly and lubed up his cock and then grabbed my ankles, spread my legs, and put my feet over his shoulders.  He fucked me real hard… he would lean over and kiss me and play with my nipples as he pounded away.  And he just kept fucking my butt like a jack hammer until we both exploded together.  I will never forget Clyde, but as a result of that brutal ass fucking, I got a tear down there – it was an anal fissure and it caused excruciating pain.   I saw a colo-rectal surgeon who fixed it by performing a rectal dilation.  That is just what is sounds like – he had to stretch my rectum way open and as it returned to normal size, the fissure would eventually heal.  Now there is a reason for bringing up this particular incident at this point in the story.  One of the complications of an anal dilation is bruising of the prostate.  My prostate got bruised and I went into urinary retention (I couldn’t pee).  After not peeing for 18 hours, I rushed to a urologist who catheterized me to empty my bladder (get the urine out).  He told me that it might be weeks before I would start peeing on my own, and I was to catheterize myself every 8 hours until my peeing returned to normal.  He gave me a shopping bag full of catheters and Betadine ointment and he instructed me how to catheterize myself.  So, I was going to medical school carrying around a knapsack full of catheters and slipping off twice a day to a remote bathroom in the morgue to catheterize myself.

The reason for bringing up that story is because, remember, just as a catheter is used to drain the urinary bladder, it can just as easily be used to fill up a bladder with urine.  And, that is precisely what I did when I got called for a urine test.  At every possible opportunity, I would slip into the Pediatric ward and order a child to pee in a sterile bottle so we could test his urine.  They never questioned me and I stockpiled many liters of urine in my refrigerator.   Whenever I was called to go for a urine drug test, I would run home and empty my bladder, then catheterize myself and fill up my bladder with sterile saline solution to rinse it out a few times, and finally I would fill my bladder with the child’s urine and run over to the office and pee in the bottle for the drug test. It is a given that if I had to go to these lengths to take a drug test that there was obviously something in my urine that I wanted to hide.  It wasn’t even 48 hours after returning home that I started smoking crack again.  I wont even say I relapsed because to relapse assume that there was some type of sobriety to begin with.  Those 42 days, yes it was 42 days because I was given a 2-week extension due to lack of progress in confronting my disease, were a vain attempt to cure me of my addiction.  It’s a sad fact of life that there is no cure for alcoholism & addiction – the most you can hope for is to have the cravings and urges go away  and develop a healthy set of friends and support system to replace the desire to drink & drug.  It is a day at a time program.  I won’t go into the treatment jargon now – suffice it to say that the only thing those 42 days did for me was ruin the pure enjoyment I had previously experienced smoking crack.

Those last three months were terrible.  I went back to all my old habits – cruising the city for sex and intensity, smoking crack, and just being in a state of living hell.  As will become apparent, I was never on my knees for anyone or anything until I started smoking crack.  During a binge, once my supply of rocks was getting low and I was cutting them into smaller and smaller pieces to give the appearance that I still had plenty left, it would be a regular thing that I would drop a rock onto the carpet below the coffee table, so I would grab a flashlight and get down on my hands & knees and search for those rocks that fell off the coffee table.  For hours I would crawl around, in silence and darkness, looking for rocks.  One time after starting a binge, I told myself that I had enough and threw the rocks off my 9th floor balcony into the parking lot below.  This was in January, in bitter cold.  And you guessed it, I would be out there at 3 am with a flashlight searching the parking lot to see where those pieces of crack landed.  If it even vaguely looked like a rock, I smoked it.  I would end up smoking cat litter, cereal, and anything you could imagine hoping to get one more hit of crack.  And though it all, I kept catheterizing myself to try to pass the drug test.  It was so painful to slide that catheter up the eight inches of penile urethra and then through my prostate, and finally into my bladder.  But I did it on a regular basis.