A lifelong pattern of use and abuse finally caught up with Dr. A. C. Gross when she was forty-three years old. She had been using drugs and alcohol to "fix" herself for as long as she could remember. Now, in You Can Trust Me-I'm a Doctor, Gross shares the story of her addiction and her journey to recovery. In this memoir, she describes growing up in a respectable, middle-class, Californian household where she was introduced to alcohol at a young age. She had her first taste of alcohol at age nine and first experienced being drunk at age fourteen. During her twenties, Gross tells how she continued to drink and experiment with drugs despite her rigorous studies. With her compulsive personality, excessive drinking and reckless use of pills became a constant part of everyday life. In 2004, with her physician's career in jeopardy and her family life unraveling, Gross was forced to seek help. Recovery was her next step, but it was not easy. She narrates how it took her nearly ten months to realize that recovery involved surrender of the old self to the will of God. You Can Trust Me-I'm a Doctor tells Gross's story of learning a new way of life.

You Can Trust Me—I'm a Doctor

A Physician's Story of Addiction and RecoveryBy A. C. Gross

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 A. C. Gross, MD
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-4540-9

Contents

Foreword to "You Can Trust Me ... I'm A Doctor".....................viiIntroduction........................................................ix1. More Is Never Enough.............................................12. The Early Years..................................................33. The Roller-Coaster Years.........................................94. Wedding Bells....................................................165. The Beginning of the End.........................................196. Jackie...........................................................267. The Meltdown.....................................................328. Rehab............................................................459. Oregon...........................................................6110. Finally Impacted................................................7211. Growing Pains...................................................8212. My Spiritual Awakening..........................................9113. My New Life.....................................................9814. New Challenges..................................................10915. A Positive Urine Test...........................................12316. Graduation......................................................129Epilogue............................................................133

Chapter One

More Is Never Enough

I sat alone in my smoke-filled garage. It was 9:00 p.m., and I had just taken a few more sleeping pills, since the one ten-milligram tablet was not quite cutting it. I slumped down in my favorite folding, green chair, the one filled with holes from many nights of smoking while in a blackout. I looked down at my pink nightgown and sighed: I must have fallen asleep the night before with a cigarette in my mouth and burned my pajamas.

I began to obsess about the busy day I had had at the California hospital and clinic where I was a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician. For the prior three months, I had been taking care of a total of fifteen patients at one time recovering from strokes, traumatic brain injury, and amputations, plus doing consults in the hospital and managing four outpatient clinics in the afternoons.

As I begin to feel the warm glow and relaxation from the sleeping pills, I pondered whether I had given Mr. Smith the right pain medicine:

Maybe I should have started him on a different drug ... like a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug instead of going straight to Vicodin ...? Also, How well did the family of Mrs. Torres accept my discharge plan during the family conference? ... Did I finish all my consults and follow up on the ones from yesterday? Where did I put the notes that I did? ... How much longer can I take being on call for three months at a time?

I told myself that nothing mattered as long as I could sleep at night and have this time alone. My three-year-old daughter, Kim, was asleep, and my husband, Mark, was on the computer upstairs. But who was I trying to fool? I knew that I had been an addict for a long time, but I wasn't ready to stop. It was November 2003, and I had been using drugs to fix myself for as long as I could remember. I was forty-three years old.

Pretty soon, these relatively organized thoughts gave way to hallucinations. I began to see yellow and blue bubbles in the garage and was mesmerized by them as they danced around in the dark. I lit up my tenth cigarette of the night and suddenly began to long to talk to my deeply missed sister-in-law, who had died from breast cancer the year before. I cried, "Jackie, if you are there, please give me a sign. I miss you so much! Please come back. You wouldn't believe how Kim has grown!"

I waited and waited for a sign from Jackie, but none came. Hours passed, and I could hear Mark upstairs snoring in bed. Then I began to nod off. Soon, I felt a sharp, burning pain over my right thigh and winced. Next thing I knew, Mark was there, having run out because he smelled smoke, yelling, "Adrianne, you started a fire again; look down at your leg! Your pajama is burning! No, your leg is burning! Don't you feel anything?"

"No, I'm fine. Leave me alone," I muttered, oblivious to my surroundings.

Mark looked at me incredulously as he threw some car towels he kept on a nearby chair onto my leg, dousing the fire. "Please come to bed, Adrianne. It is 11:30 p.m., and I have to be at work tomorrow at 5:00 a.m. Have a heart." Mark helped me out of my chair and removed my partially lit cigarette from my lips. My head was down, and my speech slurred.

"Adrianne, please don't do this again. I can't go on like this. Someday, you are going to burn down the damn house. I worry about you every night. You really need help. You must know that."

By this time I was no longer coherent and couldn't hold up my head. My husband walked me up to bed for the two hundredth time over the last three years. It was pitch black, except for the night light in our daughter's room.

Chapter Two

The Early Years

I had a pretty typical childhood, growing up in a rural area outside of San Diego in the 1960s and '70s. My father, Lou, was an employment counselor for the State of California, and my mother, Veronica, worked part-time as a teacher's aide and later as a real-estate agent.

My father grew up in a home where the men were distinguished Harvard lawyers; they were also alcoholics.

Lou Harris was the pampered younger son of Mavis and Howard Marold Harris. His mother waited on him hand and foot, and at a young age he became quite self-absorbed. It was wartime, and there were several female relatives living at the Harris residence. Little Lou, with his big blue eyes and dimples, was loved by all the old ladies in the little, central Maine town he grew up in.

Young Lou partied throughout prep school and college and had plenty of women flocking around him. He was not drafted into the army, because of high blood pressure and a fast heart rate. According to my mother, jobs were not plentiful in the late 1940s for a college graduate with a degree in psychology, so Dad took a job with The American Hemp Company, which sent him to work in the Philippines as their human resource specialist. He lived there for a few years and then contracted malaria. He was sent to Europe for treatment and remained working for the company there for two years before returning to Maine.

Lou stayed single until he was thirty-five and met Veronica D' Agatha. She saw him as a charming, handsome man with his thick, brown hair and bushy eyebrows. He had a prominent cleft in his chin and kind, blue eyes. In his older years, he was the spitting image of the talk show host Johnny Carson.

My father loved my mom's wavy long brown hair and cute figure. She had boundless energy and was always up for fun and nights on the town. He found the Roman Catholic religion she practiced very foreign to his conservative Protestant upbringing.

My mother had long been an independent sort. At sixteen, she lost her mother to rheumatic fever that had affected her heart. Her father went completely blind after a cataract surgery, when a foolish intern inadvertently ripped the bandage from his eye. He had lost his first eye as a child, when some boy threw a rock at him. Nevertheless, he was very successful in chair caning and several other businesses he ran in New York during the depression....