You Can Trust Me—I’M a Doctor: A Physician’S Story of Addiction and Recovery

By A. C. Gross

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 MeIm 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 physicians 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 MeIm a Doctor tells Grosss story of learning a new way of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475945416

A. C. Gross

A. C. Gross, MD, is a chronic pain physician who lives and practices in Southern California. She is married and is the mother of two. Gross enjoys writing, exercising, hiking, and reading. This is her first book.

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Copyright © 2009, 2012 by A. C. Gross, MD.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-4540-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-4542-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-4541-6 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012915314

iUniverse rev. date: 10/11/2012

Contents

Foreword to You Can Trust Me… I’m A Doctor.

Introduction

1.   More Is Never Enough

2.   The Early Years

3.   The Roller-Coaster Years

4.   Wedding Bells

5.   The Beginning of the End

6.   Jackie

7.   The Meltdown

8.   Rehab

9.   Oregon

10.  Finally Impacted

11.  Growing Pains

12.  My Spiritual Awakening

13.  My New Life

14.  New Challenges

15.  A Positive Urine Test

16.  Graduation

Epilogue

Foreword to

You Can Trust Me… I’m A Doctor.

If you know someone in your family or an acquaintance that has a Drug or Alcohol problem, you know the pain and misery that it creates in themselves and their family. In You Can Trust Me … I’m A Doctor, we see the chaos that using can bring. We are introduced to a bright, inquisitive young girl who, from the moment she takes her first drink & pill turns into someone who will do and say anything to get her drug of choice… she didn’t chose this life… it’s the life of an addict.

Many people are not as lucky as Dr. Adrianne Gross. They do not find recovery. They live their lives in hell… going from one drink or pill to another. Their whole existence is focused on how to get high and stay high. Dr. Gross’ story is one example of how, given the right circumstances, we can lead lives that are geared to helping other people—not destroying them.

I’ve been honored to know Dr. Gross from meetings that both she & I have attended. Unlike the woman in her book, I have found her to be a humble & gentle human being. Being in recovery means a life of giving away what we have been so freely given. She has chosen a career that is a mirror of her own personal life.

You will see how her story is both depressing and uplifting, at the same time. It’s a real life drama that unfortunately, is being played out on our streets a million times a day. Take heart and know that, with people like Dr. Gross and others… there is a place for those people who suffer from this disease.

I am truly honored to have been asked to write a forward for this book. I’ve been lucky in my recovery and I’m grateful to give back in any way I can.

Barry D.

Redlands, CA

Introduction

Most of my youth, I lived in a suburb of San Diego, California, called Bonita. I had loving parents who did their best to raise my brother and me. I attended a private school and had many pets, good friends, and an overall excellent quality of life. I adored the God of my understanding, whom I considered to be my best friend.

School came easy for me, and I set my goals high for the future. I loved to write compositions, so naturally I would become an English teacher. I would marry after college and have two children—a boy named Shane and a girl named Leisel. I’d stay in sunny San Diego and send my children to the same private schools I’d come to know and love.

Fantasies aside, I’d always thought that I had a pretty normal childhood and didn’t think that there was anything unusual about my drinking alcohol at a young age. Both my parents drank, and my father was drunk every single weekend. By the time I was fourteen or fifteen, I was getting drunk too.

I didn’t particularly like the taste of alcohol, and later, I never really enjoyed pills; I just had no control over my consumption. Once I took a drink or a pill, the compulsion to take more overwhelmed me. I was never satisfied until I was drunk or high on whatever mind-altering substance was around.

Despite the fact that I abused alcohol and pills, I was able to function, for the most part, for many years through my twenties and thirties. This enabled me to focus on my studies, and I was able to successfully attend and graduate from medical school and become a doctor.

My lifelong pattern of use and abuse caught up with me at the age of almost forty-four, when I crashed and burned after mixing cocktails of pills for weeks on end. I nearly lost my family, my career, and my life until, out of fear, I cried out for help. Once I learned that addiction and alcoholism are diseases, the shame and guilt over the past began to heal and lessened with time. Like cancer and diabetes, there are people from all walks of life affected by this disease.

It took me nearly ten months of rehab and meetings to realize that recovery involves surrender of the old self to the will of one’s Higher Power or God. Despite my strong track record of achieving success through my self-will and hard work, these would not work with this disease. I had to learn a new way of life.

It is my hope that if you have a drug or alcohol problem, you will not be ashamed to reach out to the community for help. There are private-, state-, and county-funded programs for drug-and-alcohol rehabilitation. In addition, there are free 12-step recovery meetings with group support for everyone from coke addicts to pill poppers. There are listings of these meetings online and in the meeting directories that are available at any the various 12-step meeting places.

I hope to illustrate how drug addiction is rampant in society today. The problem isn’t always easy for laymen or family members to identify, especially in its early stages. My addiction was hidden in the guise of taking medications prescribed by my doctor, first for chronic pain and then for anxiety and stress. People made excuses for me for years, and some of the time, I appeared to be functioning pretty normally. It wasn’t until I started mixing several drugs together and then experienced additional stressors that I got sloppy and it became obvious that I was using.

If you are concerned about a potential for addiction or addictive behavior in yourself or a loved one, I hope this book will be helpful to you. I have always wondered how different my life—and my family’s life—would have been had I identified my problem and received treatment in my youth instead of in midlife after causing so many people pain. Nonetheless, recovery has saved my life, for that, I will be eternally grateful.

Chapter 1

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 2

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.

Before my mother met my father, she had various jobs in both New York, where she was born, and Arizona, where she moved with her father and, by this time, his third wife (his second wife had also become ill and died). When my dad met my mom, she was working at an air force base in Tucson, Arizona, where he was living at the time. When they decided to marry, my mother was twenty-six years old, and they relocated to San Diego. Her father and his wife followed. My mom worked in a department store until she became pregnant with me; then she quit working for many years to raise her children.

While I was growing up, my mother’s favorite word was no—a common answer to all requests for privileges on my part. Anytime I asked her if a girlfriend could spend the night, she would say, No, and walk away. I would approach her again and get a stronger no. Defeated, I would retreat to my room and write her a long letter with a plea, explaining why I should be allowed this privilege and how I would behave, clean up my room, etc. Then I would timidly run and put the letter under her bedroom door, and wait for a response.