My journey into recovery
So. Here I am at the age of 82 and a half, thinking about my memoirs. Now it seems there is much too much to say, and yet I don’t have a good answer to the question WHY should I take this on?
Maybe for today I will concentrate on the period immediately following my discharge from Silver Hill. The situation is this: On June 26th, 1978, my two bosses (CEO and CMO at YNH_H did an intervention in which they indicated the only way I could save my job was to agree to in-patient rehab for my ‘drinking problem’... I didn’t want to leave my job since I was in the middle of an intense power struggle amid the four VP’s and the CEO involving a restructuring demoting us and assigning us to a misogynist arrogant fellow who would later become the COO. I feared my absence from the daily skirmishes would result in success for the reorganization, an outcome which eventually happened. There was no alternative to agreeing to in-patient rehab, and I was sent to Silver Hill. I had to wait a week for a bed, during which time I remember connecting with a responsible woman who moved into my house to take care of my kids, Claire and Mark. I also recall sewing name tags in all Mark’s clothes for a summer camp he went to later.
As I look back on it now, I see that my homecoming was a time of great fear, deep shame and a total lack of support. The hospital issued some kind of a weird note saying I was on an indeterminate leave of absence due to a medical problem… which provided me no way to responsibly close out my experience. I suppose they didn’t want to say they fired me… but the consequence I experienced was no mechanism to say goodbye to my closest colleagues. I had around 15-18 direct reports (all clinical services plus all nursing) with strong and generally positive relationships. The only way I could conceive of acknowledging to them that I was leaving… and at least respectfully terminating our relationship was to invite them all to my house for an afternoon event. The only experience I had with that sort of gathering was a wine and cheese event, so that is what I did. I invited about 20-30 close colleagues to my home two weeks after discharge from Silver Hill and served wine… and of course I didn’t have any myself.
At this event, I told MY truth. I felt this truth was at least real… anything else would be figments of another individual’s imagination. I also did one other thing: I telephoned the President of the ANA, the editor of the AJN and the highest educator I personally knew. There was Myrtle Kitchell Adalyotte, Thelma Schorr, and Ingeborg Mauksch and told each of them I had been fired from my job as VP at YNH-H while in treatment for the disease of alcoholism. I just felt the rumor mill would be harsh enough… I wanted some professional ‘leader/colleagues’ to know the whole truth. I also came to see that as putting my ‘stake’ in the ground for the sake of strengthening my hope of recovery.
Since I didn’t understand how I went for not being able to not drink… to actually not drinking… without a pill, shot or other medical act, I spent several months being afraid of being ‘struck drunk’ again… afraid of waking up to being drunk. I saw these actions, plus my decision to take Antabuse as the steps I could take to relieve that fear. I remember being so relieved to hear at an AA meeting that I would not be ‘struck drunk’. Alternatively, it was also comforting to learn I couldn’t “fall off the floor".
This period was all quite painful, as were thoughts about the future. All typical roads leading to a next employment opportunity seemed to me to be blocked. I had negotiated a paltry three months of severance pay, had a mortgage, a car payment and two kids… one in high school and the other in middle school. I tried each road to employment I could see, and none were passable.
I made two career decisions during this time of total blockage. One is that I would start writing the book on Primary Nursing and two is that I would say “yes ‘ to every request to speak. From those two decisions came my first book, and the beginnings of a consultation service that continues to this day.
I remember feeling stunned about the way I had reined my life and maybe the lives of my children. In my bleakest moments of greatest fear of financial failure… I wondered what would happen if they were taken from me due to my inability to care for them… I felt their father did not want to raise them and feared they might become wards of the state. Theses fears were unfounded, but my reasoning capacity was damaged due to my alcoholism. Those damaged brain cells take many months to recover, and I am happy I had sensible people around me to help me think things through.
The ‘stunned‘ feeling was akin to what I imagine a person feels when a bomb goes off nearby. My whole world was upside down and I didn’t know if I/we would survive.
I will expand more about that time in a following post.