I was feeling good, so I was able to work even more hours than the hundred or so hours per week I’d been working. But I was setting myself up on a schedule that was impossible to maintain without chemicals.
I was overworked, I was under huge financial strain, I was mourning my brother’s death for which I felt very much responsible, and I was about to welcome my third child into the world.
I couldn’t talk to anyone about any of this, which created the ideal conditions for drugs to reenter my life.
I knew pretty quickly that I was starting to unravel, but I felt like I had no choice but to keep doing what I could to support my family. That meant giving in to the cravings.
Soon, I had no choice, anyway, because I was totally dependent. I wasn’t using drugs for fun. I was using them so I could achieve everything I needed to achieve.
As a doctor, there was nowhere I could turn for help without fear of losing my license. And so I could see no way out. And so I kept on taking the pills.
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
October 17, 2002.
Beth called me at the office. A few questions confirmed she was in labour. I tended to my last couple of patients, popped a pill, and headed home to get ready for the arrival of our new baby.
The fact that I went in to work the evening clinic while my wife was at home and in labour will give you some insight into where my head was during that time.
When I got home after leaving the clinic, I realized that I shouldn’t have taken anything. I wanted to be on my game while this was happening. The love of my life was having our child and I would be present for this.
I was there with her throughout the labour, which lasted all through the night. I was completely sober the next morning when our daughter was born. The high I had when I looked into her face for the first time was a natural one. But within hours, I was high again.
Taking care of a newborn with my schedule was proving difficult. I was now not just the major breadwinner in our family… I was the only one bringing in an income. I still wasn’t working shifts at the hospital, but I was working my regular office hours, and I was making good money doing evening clinics and clinical trials. I was going back and forth between OxyContin and Percocet in order to keep up with everything. And though I was, indeed, chemically dependent, nobody (aside from me) was concerned, because I was able to keep up with all of the demands that were on me, and I was bringing in about $300,000 per year.
I just had to keep up.
To make matters worse, that winter the dynamic at home changed. My marriage failed. The only way I was able to cope was with my friends, Oxy and Percy. The following spring I came upon a car accident that triggered a series of events that had a tremendous impact my life. Though I wasn’t in the accident myself, it almost ended up killing me.
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
May 2003.
He sees the crumpled car on the side of the road and instinctively brings his car to the soft shoulder of the highway.
His pace quickens, a surge of adrenaline speeds through his veins.
Pulls an Oxy from his pocket. Swallows.
Runs to the wreck. He hears sirens in the distance.
He notices her right away. She’s thin with jet-black hair, performing chest compressions on a man. She’s covered in blood.
“I’m a doctor,” he tells her. “How can I help?”
“Under control,” she says.
The ambulance is there now. One of the paramedics takes over for the woman.
He can’t take his eyes off the woman. “We’re both witnesses. We should exchange information,” he tells her.
She pulls a pen out of her purse and reaches for his hand. Writes her phone number on the palm of his hand.
He feels sparks.
He takes the pen, starts to write his number on her palm. Notices marks on her forearm. Trackmarks? He is both unnerved and excited with the Oxy coursing through his veins.
And he knows he’s in trouble.
Her name was Scarlett—the woman I met at the accident. I called her that same evening because I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was beautiful and dangerous. She reminded me of Beth.
I should have known better than to get involved with another user, but I was under the influence. Too far gone. It might have been the trackmarks that made her so attractive to me at the time.
I called her and asked her to dinner. She said yes. I would start a secret affair with her that would last more than two years. My memory of our encounters are foggy and controlled by my diseased brain.
The following day, I went to the pharmacy after work to see about putting together a proper roadside first aid kit. The accident made me think that, as a doctor, I really should have an adequate kit in my car, just in case.
I simply asked the pharmacist, “What should a doctor have in a proper roadside kit? Can you help me put one together?”
The pharmacy team put a kit together for me. It was pretty impressive, really. I had cardiac meds, epinephrine, a stitching kit, an intubation kit, and injectable pain meds. Not your average first aid kit. I put it in the car and didn’t think anything else of it. Until a week or so later, after Scarlett and I had gone back to my place after our first date.
It was a little unusual, as first dates go. I sat across from her at the restaurant, sipping red wine. I noticed not her beauty, but the marks on her arms. I was both nervous and intrigued. She saw that I noticed, but she didn’t hide them. She whispered, “Have you ever tried?”
I shook my head, no. Then she smiled at me and said, “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
I asked her, “Which drug?”
“Demerol.”
“What does it feel like?”
“It makes you feel warm all over. Like some blissed-out state of euphoria.”
“I have some, you know.”
“Some Demerol?”
I nodded. “I’ve never tried it before. I have vials of it in the car. In my first aid kit.”
She grinned mischievously at me, almost a dare. “Do you want to try?”
“I want to try with you.”
After dinner, we went back to my place. I carried the leather first aid bag in from the car. We sat on the couch, had some more wine. After a while she tied her hair back in a ponytail. I opened the bag. My heart was racing. I found two vials, two syringes.
“Have you tried anything before?” she asked me. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
I surprised myself by admitting I had taken Oxy.
“Well, it’s hardly different than that. It’s basically like smoking a joint, really.”
I smiled at her and broke the top off the first vial.
“You do me first,” she said coyly.
I drew the clean Demerol into the first syringe. Then the second.
I put my hand on her arm. “You ready?”
She looked into his eyes. “I am.”
I injected the Demerol into her bicep and dropped the empty syringe on the coffee table. Then I took the other syringe and injected myself. I put the syringe down. We lay back, holding hands in a state of euphoria.
Even though I knew we were going down a dangerous path, I had justified it to myself. If I injected intramuscularly, I reasoned, it wouldn’t really be that much different than taking oxy orally like I’d been doing.
When we did this, it really lowered the bar for me. I shot up drugs with this woman and it felt amazing and we got away with it. I had easy access, and I knew what to do. Within a couple of weeks, I went from shooting into the muscle to shooting into the vein.
Our relationship quickly intensified. That tends to happen when drug use becomes a couples activity.
Scarlett and I acted like bad kids together. We would experiment with anything. Whether it was co
ming upon a nude beach and dropping our clothes or injecting Demerol, there was little we couldn’t convince each other to try.
We fell madly in love, and we had so much fun together…mind you, not always in the healthiest of ways.
My go-to drugs were still OxyContin and Percocet because a) I was hooked on them, and b) they gave me a pleasant numbness for twelve hours. They were still the culprits who held the most power over me.
I was also injecting Demerol and/or Dilaudid that summer, but only once in a while for that rush of euphoria I would get from it.
So there I was again at the point where I had to take a pill when I woke up in the morning, or I would be in withdrawal. I was never really stoned, except when I decided to inject Demerol, but I was walking around just as numb. Like any other person suffering chronic pain who is on opiates. You could only really tell by looking into my pupils that something wasn’t right.
I was sick when I didn’t take it. I wasn’t taking it at this point to get rid of any feelings, because I had stopped being able to feel ages before. I was taking the narcotics at this point because I couldn’t not take them.
At one point, I found myself stuck in traffic, late for work. I inched along. I called the office to tell them where I was. I checked the mirrors, turned the radio on and off. I was getting tense. Then, I reached into my pants pocket. I used my teeth to pull the shoulder of my shirt tight around my arm. One hand on the wheel, one on the needle, I injected Dilaudid into my vein.
Nerves stopped screaming. Light turned green.
By the summer of 2004, I was in serious trouble. I was now using intravenously on a regular basis, on top of the oral Oxy and Percocet use. Access was becoming a problem, because I was using so much. I was out of pills.
I’d started going around to all the pharmacies in the Charlottetown area and getting large quantities of Dilaudid. It’s ironic that Dilaudid became my drug of choice after what had happened to my brother, but I had gotten it in pill form one time and liked the way it made me feel, so it went from there.
The pharmacies kept giving me these vials of Dilaudid for office use. I knew I was going to get caught because a doctor going around from pharmacy to pharmacy for heavy-duty narcotics in a small town is going to raise a red flag. But I wasn’t thinking clearly at this point. I was using intravenously every three hours around the clock.
That’s how quickly it escalated. And it got uglier and uglier. Faster and faster.
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
July 2004.
Scarlett had gone to the mall. I sat on the black leather couch, watching TV. Beside me were two vials of Demerol.
My daughter was playing in the next room.
I broke open a syringe, drew up the Demerol, injected myself.
I could feel pleasure rising from my toes to my ears.
Five minutes passed. I injected the second vial.
Within seconds, my body slumped down, my heart beat irregularly. Blackness fell over me. I felt like I was dying and I panicked. I managed to get my phone out of my pocket. I begged her to come home immediately.
My daughter had come into the room. I looked at her and all I could think was, what did I do?
I got a good scare then, the first time I accidentally overdosed. My daughter was playing by herself and here I was unable to get up off the couch. I kept thinking: oh my God. I killed myself. I overdosed! What has happened to me?
I honestly thought I was going to die.
That night, when my doctor (also one of my closest friends) showed up, he had no idea what was wrong with me. He thought maybe I was having a reaction to something. Of course I couldn’t tell him what had really happened, so he was trying to do a diagnosis and was at a loss because he didn’t have the facts.
And yes, I overdosed more than once.
Right after that the first time, I stocked up on Narcan and always had some in my drug chest at home. Narcan is an antidote used for opiate overdose so that I could accidentally overdose without having to worry about calling for help. Narcan blocks all of the receptors that an opiate lands on and brings them back to life.
The next time I overdosed, I was also at home. It would have been after that summer. I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom in a blissful state turned bad after giving myself too much Dilaudid. I had the Narcan in my sock drawer and injected a dose.
The problem with taking Narcan is that you end up in instant withdrawal.
Even though you’ve taken enough drugs to kill yourself, you want more right away after you’ve risen from the dead.
This was a good example of how I was blurring the line between being both a drug addict, and a drug addict’s doctor. Instead of seeking help for the disease, I just stocked up on the antidote. The line had become so blurred that there really was no line at all.
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
July 2004.
He spends the morning injecting Botox into people’s faces.
He draws up the Botox for the next patient but his hands are shaking so much he knows he needs to inject himself with some narcotic to settle himself before he starts the case. Between appointments he rushes to the public restroom in the clinic with both syringes in tow.
Enters the stall. Reaches into his pocket for the cooked Dilaudid in the syringe. He knew he’d need it halfway through the day, otherwise he’d be too shaky to inject patients.
Makes a tourniquet with his sleeve, injects the needle into his vein.
Reaches into his other pocket, finds another syringe. His heart pounds. One syringe holds Dilaudid, the other Botox, the most poisonous neuro-blocker known to man. If he had injected the Botox, he’d have taken enough to kill the entire population of the world.
He falls to his knees on the floor of the stall. I just killed myself, he thinks. There’s no time for an ambulance. And if there was, there’s no saving him.
I’m going to be found dead in this stall with these needles, he thinks. They’re going to think I committed suicide. Then his heart rate slows. And then he feels something else. Not death but the surge of Dilaudid starting in his toes. The withdrawal symptoms are gone.
He disposes of the needle and washes his hands. He goes back to work and hopes he has enough Dilaudid for the rest of the day.
Brudenell, Prince Edward Island.
August 2004.
I loaded a vial of Dilaudid into the last of the syringes. I carefully hid all but one in my golf bag. I checked my watch: 6:45 a.m. I wondered again why I ever agreed to this.
I pulled a dress shirt off the floor and smelled it before pulling it over my head. I stepped into a pair of khakis, grabbed cash off the dresser, and stuck it in my pocket, along with the other syringe.
I made the thirty-minute drive to the golf course, parked the car. I reached into my pocket and felt the syringe.
I bit the fabric from the shoulder of my shirt. I pulled it into a tourniquet with my teeth. I rolled up my cuff, injected myself, got out of the car, grabbed my golf bag from the trunk, and went to find the guys.
I felt great until the fifth hole. I was coming down, my score was going up. We didn’t use a cart. At the sixth hole, the sweat was soaking through my shirt. I tried to stay cool in front of the doctors and lawyers I was playing with. But I couldn’t concentrate; I needed to use.
I slipped a syringe in my pocket.
Then it was my shot. It occurred to me it would be easier to hit the ball if I saw only one of them. I looked down the green and saw I had a clear shot. I tried to focus. I swung and drove my ball as hard as I could into the woods. I went off to get it back. I found the ball. Then I made a tourniquet with my shirt.
I fed relief into my vein. Then I went back out of the woods and finished the round.
Paris, France.
September 12, 2004.
Though, on the surface, t
hings appeared to be normal, there was no doubt that drugs were now controlling my life. That fall I had a chance to go to a medical conference in Paris. Scarlett and I decided to turn the trip into a holiday.
We explored Paris. At one point, we stood in silence, hand-in-hand, at the Alma Tunnel. We studied the messages written in graffiti for Princess Diana, there at the site of her fatal crash. The Eiffel Tower was in the distance, the golden Flame of Liberty behind us. Our arms were laden with shopping bags from Chanel and Louis Vuitton. I looked down at the traffic roaring through the tunnel. I thought about the crash that killed Diana. It occurred to me that, if I didn’t get my life back on track, something like that could happen to me.
Scarlett’s voice interrupted my thoughts.
“What time do we have to be back at the hotel?”
“Oh, I was thinking we could head back now, maybe drop this stuff off and rest before the dinner.”
“Can we take the subway?” she asked.
“Really?”
“Yes, I really want to take the subway in Paris.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
I was surprised that even here in the wealthy part of the city there was a lingering scent of urine in the subway. Rats crawled around the tracks. I pulled the designer bags, and Scarlett, closer as waited for the train.
“It’s what I imagined it would be,” she said.
I laughed.
“Hey, do you have any more with you?” she whispered.
“Right here? Now? Do you want to find a bathroom first?”
“No, here is fine. Nobody is watching us.”
I saw she was right. The men and women all walked by quickly, their heads down, trying to avoid making eye contact with the tourists and the riffraff.
We found a vacant bench, turned our backs to the commuters. I pulled the syringes from my pocket. I handed her one, kept the other for myself.
We both injected, then locked eyes in a spaced-out daze. We kissed, then stepped on to the train. The Canadian doctor and his lover on their way to a medical conference.
The Golden Boy Page 3