The conference was related to a clinical trial I was planning to be part of. I’d been supplementing my income for quite a long time by conducting clinical trials. I found them quite interesting, and I was offered many over the years because I had a very high participant retention rate.
But while I was in Paris I had this glimpse of myself, and how Scarlett and I must have looked to someone passing by us on the street. We were no different than a couple of street kids shooting up heroin. I knew I was in no shape to conduct a clinical trial and after giving it a lot of thought, I decided to give that up.
I was trying to offload some of my commitments to bring my workload down to a manageable level because even in the midst of the chaos and the sickness, I could feel myself spinning out of control.
My day-to-day was a blur. Scarlett was becoming an even heavier drug addict than I was. She was battling her own demons.
I was the functional one. I was getting up in the morning and getting ready for work. But not until I took something.
I would typically wake up to my alarm around eight a.m. and my first thought was always about using. I was injecting throughout the day, in between patients, just trying to get through. When you abuse prescription drugs, especially intravenously, you learn that if you wait for your body’s pain receptors to go into complete withdrawal, that sensation of using is amplified. I learned to wait just the right length of time so that I could enjoy that euphoric feeling because, besides that, drug use was not pleasurable.
It was a little over a year since I’d first injected and I was using about every four hours, around the clock. I would wake up through the night in withdrawal, and I would have to get up to use. I was a slave to the drug. I was getting huge quantities of Dilaudid from the pharmacies and I knew it was going to catch up with me.
And it did.
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
December 2004.
I was on my way back from the bathroom where I had injected a vial of Dilaudid into my arm. My receptionist, who was also my mother, handed me a registered letter. It was from the College of Physicians and Surgeons. I went into my office and closed the door. I sat down at my desk and cleared some papers and a coffee cup out of the way. Then I tore the envelope open and began to read the letter inside.
…regrettably brought to our attention…no longer able to prescribe injectable narcotics…
That’s all I could focus on, but that was enough. I put my head in my hands
Fuck.
I opened the letter and read it again.
…mandatory participation…pain clinic… Halifax…
They were on to me. Oh my God, they were on to me. Time was running out. What was I going to do?
My first thought wasn’t that my career might soon be over. Or really even that I’d been caught in this huge lie. It was, “Oh no. How am I going to get more if they cut me off?”
I’d been reported by a pharmacist. Now, I was being ordered to attend a pain clinic in Halifax to “learn how to properly prescribe pain medication.” I needed a lot more help than that, but that was my intervention: to go to Halifax and pretend I needed to know how to properly prescribe narcotics.
I saw this as an opportunity for me to paint a very nice picture of myself, so, in the days leading up to the clinic, I dropped my dose down as much as I could to function. And to compensate for the lack of drugs, I drank. Quite a bit.
I stayed with a friend of mine while I was in Halifax. It was the first time he’d ever seen me drinking. And we’d been good friends for a very long time. He had no idea about the drugs and he really couldn’t have known even had I wanted to tell him, because he was a police officer. That weekend he was so incredibly annoyed with me. First, I drank all his liquor. Second, he was moving apartments and I was “helping” him move, though nobody actually wants a drunken fool to help them move. Besides wanting to kill me, he probably started to question what was going on with me because I would have been acting very much out of character.
I would drink in the evenings and go to this pain clinic with these specialists during the day, trying to look normal. I really didn’t know what I was doing there. Surely the Pharmacy Board and the College…maybe even the Medical Society…would have had an inkling that I actually needed help, but their hands would have been tied without any evidence that I was the one taking the Dilaudid. They would have known something was going on, but until it was confirmed, there was nothing they could do.
It would be great to see a trigger system in place for health professionals in this type of scenario. Maybe a confrontation, a mandatory counselling session? I think I would have been ready at that time to just admit what was going on, and surrender to any help that was available. But who knows?
What I do know is that this was where things got very bad for me. Without access to my drug of choice, I had to come up with something else. I couldn’t stop using. That wasn’t an option. I had to work and pay the bills, and I couldn’t do that if I was suffering through withdrawal. I’d tried that before. Didn’t work for me.
The thing with addiction is that it plays off your strengths and uses them to get what it wants.
I was quickly able to learn how to crush pills and cook them myself, so that I no longer needed those vials of Dilaudid. I went to the pharmacy, bought a pill crusher and a lighter, and that’s all I needed. I had all kinds of glass tubes and syringes at my disposal, and so I started making my own concoction to inject myself with leftover pills dropped off by patients. Taking pills orally wasn’t enough anymore. It didn’t give me the pleasure that injecting did. I had gotten myself into a very bad situation.
I got very secretive around this time, and I was again running out of pills. I was using so frequently that whatever was dropped off by patients was no longer enough to get me through. I was going to have to find a way to get more pills.
Sick Grant was functioning in his own vacuum, unaware of others. Like a toddler sitting in the corner, playing with his toys. Except these were not toys, and he was no toddler.
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
January 2005.
He grips the cold metal bars. Scans the dimly lit hallway for a guard. But there is none. He hears a man crying. Another is whistling. One is screaming at them all to shut the fuck up.
The orange jumpsuit pools around his white sneakers.
How did I end up here?
My heart pounded when I heard the mattress springs. I kept facing out between the bars, squeezing the bars harder. I bit down. I ground my teeth.
My cellmate came up behind me. He was a huge man, at least a hundred pounds heavier than me.
“I know you’re a doctor,” he said. I could hardly breathe.
Oh no, they know. How do they know?
“You know the things you can do to make me feel good.”
The man reached out to touch me. I closed my eyes, braced myself.
I woke up, drenched in sweat. I got out of bed to feed my addiction.
By the end of January 2005, I felt myself careening wildly out of control and I was afraid I was going to get myself into serious trouble.
Receiving the letter from the College scared me. I thought that the only way I was going to be able to stop going back to the pharmacies to get more drugs was to cut myself off. I contacted the College of Physicians and asked them to revoke my license to prescribe narcotics.
But coming on the end of February, I was regretting that decision because I’d run out of pills. Panic set in and I was willing to do just about anything to get more.
I was absolutely dependent on painkillers. I was a medical professional. A respected physician. A “pillar of the community.” And I was a drug addict.
I know firsthand why people commit crimes to get drugs. For addicts, drugs are as important as air. More important than food. Drugs are everything. Addicti
on learns your strengths and uses them against you.
Would I have committed theft to get drugs? Probably. Would I have sold my body? I don’t know. Maybe. But luckily I found a different way.
I firmly believe that the only way we are going to start putting an end to the drug problem we’re facing in this society is to stop thinking about addicts as bad people. We are not bad people. We are sick people.
I was sick. And when I ran out of pills, I found a way to get them.
By breaking the law. I was a doctor, but I was a human being first. And I needed the drugs as much as I needed air.
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
February 2005.
He drops the coins in the woman’s hand. She passes him a medium coffee with milk.
He nods a thank you, pulls down his ball cap, scours the dining room for his patient.
His supplier?
His dealer?
His…
“Dr. Matheson!”
Shit. He turns and smiles at the silver-haired man. Searches his mind for a name, but none comes. “Hello!” he says, distracted. He spots the man he’s looking for, in leather, sitting in a booth facing the door. They make eye contact.
The old man makes small talk. Says he’s feeling much better. “Glad to hear it,” says the doctor.
“Well, I’ll not keep you,” the old man says with a wave.
“Take care,” says the doctor on his way to the door.
He walks to his car, fumbles with his keys. Turns back to the coffee shop. Sees the biker heading his way.
He gives the man five brown bills for a hundred little pills.
Sits down in his car and drives home to cook the drugs that he just bought from a patient. Wonders what his parents would think of their golden boy.
At first, I borrowed a few pills from a patient. I didn’t really think much of it. I’d been complaining about my ankle when he was in my office, and he said he had some painkillers that might help, so I went with it. I didn’t feel at the time that I was really crossing a line. But around that same time, I started buying pills from a different patient.
This patient had been getting narcotics from me for quite some time, but he’d had to start seeing someone else for the prescriptions after I was no longer able to prescribe them. I knew he was getting large amounts of pills, so I lied about this awful pain in my ankle and explained that it would save me a lot of hassle if I could buy some from him to save me from going to see a doctor myself. I offered him $5 per pill.
He thought about it for a minute and I could almost see the wheels turning, when he realized this would be a money-making opportunity for him. To sweeten the deal, I offered to buy a hundred pills.
It was a win-win situation at the time. I was getting what I needed, and he was earning good money. I was able to feed my habit—access was no longer a problem—but I was paranoid that I would get caught buying these pills. I knew I was doing something wrong and he caught on pretty quickly that he had me in a vulnerable position. I had nightmares about it all the time. I would wake up in a sweat: both drug-sick and terrified that I would get caught and go to prison.
It was in February that the College of Physicians started to request urine tests as a result of my being reported by the Pharmacy Board.
I was going to have to be creative to pass those tests because I was using around the clock. I thought I’d found a way when I decided to use a urinary catheter to put clean urine into my empty bladder. (Quite a party trick.) It didn’t work. The test came back positive. So, they had to test me again, and I got a flag on my file.
My old friend Addiction helped me to get smarter, though. Next time I had a urine test, I was prepared. I put a tiny tube on a bulb syringe containing clean urine, and taped it to my leg. That worked. The test came back clean. They did more urine tests that spring and they came back clean, too. Because I was cheating.
During this time, I was being grilled on a pretty regular basis by the College of Physicians. I had to attend regular meetings in front of groups of health professionals to explain why I was needing all that Dilaudid. I just kept going with the same story, that I liked having it on hand for patients who couldn’t afford it. Things were heating up, though, and I was starting to worry.
Scarlett was worried that I was going to get caught. Because, if I did, not only was her access gone, but our livelihood was gone, too.
I still had all my bills coming in, and I was working less. I had child support, income taxes, and regular expenses. Never mind the cost of the pills. It was becoming almost impossible to make ends meet.
In March, I started thinking about getting clean again. I was trying to take fewer drugs, but to compensate, I was drinking more. And Scarlett was using pretty heavily at this point, too, which made it even more difficult to stop.
By now, my two older daughters, ten and twelve years old, were no longer wanting to spend time at my house. They could tell there was something wrong. And even though I wasn’t drinking during the day, I drank heavily in the evening and I would get very foolish.
At one point, I’d tried to remain sober for one of those meetings with the College of Physicians. My lawyer gave me a look that told me I was in no shape to face this meeting. I knew I needed to go to the washroom and do what I had to do to make myself feel “normal” again. I had an hour of grilling ahead of me, so I could not be sweating and tremulous. I exited the restroom ready to confront the wolves. In actuality, they were the shepherds, but I couldn’t see that at the time.
As badly as I wanted to get clean, I couldn’t. I was too far gone. The jig was up.
In April, I received a letter in the mail, ordering me to fly to Ontario to Homewood Health Centre for an assessment, to see if I might belong there in their Addictions program for Health Care Professionals.
I took a week off work to try and clean myself up.
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
April 2005.
Before I started, I made sure the girls would be with their mothers for the week, and then sequestered myself in the spare room. I knew that I would ruin our mattress if I tried to detox in our bed.
You need to keep in mind that I was not high, as you might imagine someone to be when they’re injecting drugs every three hours. I hadn’t actually been high for years. At this point, I was using just to stop the pain of addiction.
I knew what I was in for with this withdrawal racket because I’d tried to stop before. Quitting opiates cold turkey is almost impossible. A person really needs to be locked up and given support and medication to help manage the symptoms. I should have known better, but I didn’t have any training in managing addictions. I was going to have to keep figuring this out on my own.
I learned I was okay until the six-hour mark, but then it would start.
The pain was unbearable…it almost feels like you’re on fire.
Every nerve receptor in my body was screaming for me to inject something to make the pain stop.
I stared at the talking heads on the television, trying to distract myself from the aching in my legs. I was wrapped in a blanket. My skin was a layer of goose bumps. I shivered while sweat dripped from my forehead.
My legs were crawling. If I’d had a bone saw, I would have cut them off to make the pain go away.
I refilled the glass on the bedside table: rum and ginger ale. I gulped it down. An urge ripped through my gut. I needed to get to the bathroom but I felt like I was moving under water.
Legs were crawling. I shook them back and forth but got no relief.
As I washed my trembling hands, a skeleton of a man looked at me from darkened eyes in the mirror. Yellow skin. Did I use a dirty needle? Could I have contracted Hepatitis?
My stomach turned. I threw up all the liquid I had drunk since the last time I vomited.
I rinsed my mouth, returned
to the spare bedroom, legs crawling. I pulled the blankets around myself. I wanted to sleep but knew I’d have nightmares. I looked at the alarm clock on the bureau. The red numbers said 6:00 p.m., twelve hours since I last used. I drifted in and out of sleep, waking from nightmares. I was sweating, shaking, freezing.
The bedroom door opened and Scarlett came in.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“I want to cut off my legs.”
I drank rum straight from the bottle, then leaned over the bed and brought it back up into the bucket.
I wished I was dead.
Nonetheless, I drank the entire time I tried to get off the drugs. So much so that my skin was jaundiced from alcohol abuse. I was skin and bones. I had horrible diarrhea, I was vomiting, sweating, shaking, lethargic…exhausted. And the restlessness in my legs—they felt like my skin was crawling to remove itself from my body. It felt like there was a bear on my back and I just wanted to lie on the floor. I couldn’t get up the stairs. Everything was so hard to do.
That seductress who made me feel so good when I would take a pill, years before? She was long gone. Now, Addiction wasn’t sexy. She was a haggard old prison guard. I was a slave to this woman, and if I didn’t use when she wanted me to, she would try to kill me.
An addict knows what it will take to make the pain stop and usually the drugs win.
My parents showed up at the house that week. They were worried about me because I rarely took any time away from work. They had no idea I was an addict. They wanted to take me to the hospital because I basically looked like I was dying.
I was completely out of it, but Scarlett wouldn’t let them take me. She needed me to get clean because our livelihood and her access were in jeopardy. If I went to the hospital, the doctors were going to know what was happening and it would all be over.
I don’t remember how she got my parents out of there, but she did.
I was terrified at the time that I’d contracted Hepatitis. I was diagnosing myself without really considering my full medical history. It seemed more likely to me that I may have used a dirty needle by accident, than that I’d drunk so much over the past few weeks that I was turning myself yellow.
The Golden Boy Page 4