How Do You Treat A Doctor For Addiction?

It’s not easy. It would be easier to try to stop a bull from charging. My cousin was a doctor. She was brilliant, beautiful, successful and free. Now, she is none of these things. Years of an incorrectly diagnosed and treated mental illness fueled her true illness, rapid cycling Type II Bipolar Disorder and an addiction to meth that cost her everything; her home, her practice, her family, her sanity and her freedom.

My cousin has always been an over-achiever. She has also had a savant-like intelligence since she was a child. I remember one day at our grandmother’s house taking the big blue container of Morton’s table salt, pouring it into my hand and then sticking my tongue in the salt and loving the taste. My cousin saw what I was doing and, at the age of eight, proceeded to tell me that increased salt intake could lead to hypertension.

Fast forward 30 years. She had a husband, a home, and two children. She had finished medical school, endured sleepless nights of being on call and spent hours in surgery. Blurry-eyed and battle fatigued, she had opened her own medical practice with one of her fellow interns. Then one of the other physicians in her practice diagnosed her with depression and there began a five year run of ineffective treatments. However, over the years, her energy did seem to increase – she could function at a hyper-manic pace. She worked all night at the 138 bed hospital facility where she had privileges in her small Texas town and kept going all day doing rounds, seeing patients in her clinic, picking up the kids and eventually making her way home.

Following a routine surgical procedure, she was prescribed pain killers and that was the beginning of the end of my cousin as I knew her. She quickly became addicted. She said it made her feel like “Super Doc” – giving her the ability to work more hours, work better and work harder than she ever had in her life. She felt invincible. Once she hit the limit with the amount of pills she could get, she started supplementing Vicodin with alcohol. Then Xanax with alcohol. From then on, she would prescribe her own “cocktail” of meds and she thought no one was the wiser. Except everyone was the wiser. Her erratic behavior, literally sliding out of her chair during a new patient consult and the questionable death of a patient under her care landed her in the first of numerous stints in rehab. She would always carry out her peer-mandated, court-ordered or family ordered stays in rehab, but the results of her sobriety only lasted a few weeks – a few months at best.

Like most doctors, she was used to calling the shots. She didn’t like doing things any other way. She wanted things her way and that is exactly what she got, but since when is what we want what we really need?

Her own determination, the very thing that propelled her through medical school and landed her her own practice, took her to the other end of the spectrum. At her last rehab stint, she met a psychiatrist who was also in treatment in the same program. They were both kicked out of rehab for fraternization, and instead of going home a week early, they locked themselves in the nearest hotel and did drugs and drank for a week straight. This was my cousin’s first introduction to meth and she only needed one. Her marriage was over and she faced multiple DUI’s, a dwindling practice and the possibility of losing her medical license. She was eventually arrested for another DUI, assaulting a police officer and possession and it was this arrest that landed her in prison.

Her medical license is now a thing of the past, not that she would be able to practice medicine at all anymore. Her IQ has dropped 40 points because of the drug abuse over the years. So my question was how do you treat a doctor for addiction?Hands up if you’ve ever been asked why you went into nursing instead of medicine. I imagine that there are a lot of hands up in the air right now.