The Barebacking Doctor

By Dr. Bernard Vincent Burns

A fascinating insight into ‘crystal meth’ addiction. A very personal, first-hand account of a doctor living in Newtown and Enmore, addicted to ‘crystal meth’, and his subsequent journey through recovery, persecution, the mental health system, being labeled schizophrenic, suspension from practice, and his struggle back int

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Barebacking Doctor
• Release date: Jan 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9780987642684

Book preview

PART 1 - The beginning

This part describes how I started to use ‘crystal meth’, up to my first psychiatric hospital admission. I started using weekly. This quickly became daily after the first 3 months. It was great to begin with, but I slowly developed ‘problems’ as time went on. After the first 2 years these problems had become extremely intrusive, but by then it was too late for me to stop.

I was working full-time. I had no prior psychiatric history.

Sydney

I moved to Australia in 2008 from the UK. I had managed to secure a job in Emergency Medicine in Ipswich, Queensland, with my 4-year working visa sponsored by Queensland Health. My early years in Australia were spent moving around different jobs within Queensland Health but I resided for the most part on the Gold Coast.

After three and a half years I finally got my Permanent Residency. This freed me from my obligation to work solely for Queensland Health so I could finally seek the jobs I wanted, with any employer.

Two of my good friends had moved to Sydney a few months before me. I had wanted to live and work in Sydney since I was a child. My parents had planned to emigrate to Australia when I was 8 years old, but it all fell through, much to my disappointment. And now I had friends living in Sydney. It felt like the time to move. So in 2012 I moved. I found work as an after hours GP.

I did 4 shifts a week, starting at midnight and working until 8am. This basically gave me three and a half days off a week to do whatever I wanted.

I wasn’t completely new to drugs at this stage. I had dabbled in my mid-20s with ecstasy and speed. This was mostly on the weekends though, for about two or three years before the novelty wore off. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it at the time. Nowadays I refer to this as my ‘drugs honeymoon number 1’.

My real weakness had always been alcohol. I had been drinking regularly from the age of 14 years. As an adolescent it gave me the freedom I needed to be myself, growing up in a repressive homophobic world.

Alcohol was a close companion of mine for many years, and it got a bit out of control for a while. I drank 240 standard drinks per week for a time. Then I started to have profound memory lapses. I would wake up and not be able to figure out who I was, let alone where or when I was, and this would last for hours. I suspected I was developing early Korsakoff’s syndrome, a well known complication of alcoholism. I knew I had to reign this in. And I managed it. Well, I cut my drinking down to a more sustainable level at least.

I gave up cigarette smoking in 2004, but I still can’t get off the nicotine replacement therapy. Fourteen years later and I am still on it. I suppose I have a bit of an addictive personality. But my prior experience with stimulants was different. I never felt addicted to these. They had led me to believe I could manage them without any problems.

I had started to use ‘crystal meth’ in Queensland. A work colleague of mine could get hold of it through a friend of hers. I made use of this contact, infrequently at first, but then weekly.

I was fat, and desperate to lose weight. Amphetamines had helped me lose weight in the past, and they were doing so again. And I discovered that using ‘crystal’ was a great way to keep me off the alcohol. I just didn’t want a depressant drug like alcohol on board when I was taking a stimulant. It sort of dulled the effect of the stimulant. Not only did it help with the weight loss, ‘crystal’ was helping me with my alcohol dependence.

Through a friend, I quickly discovered a contact in Sydney who I could get drugs through. So from the early stages of my arrival here I could source ‘crystal meth’. But my usage at this point was still weekly at most.

Darlinghurst

‘Crystal’ was a very exciting drug for me. I had given up on having a sex urge many years ago. I used to have one as a teenager, but it fizzled out after the aversion therapy I devised for myself at the age of 15 years. But that’s a whole other story. Now, ‘crystal’ gave me an incredible desire to have sex. So did GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyric acid). It made me feel young and alive again.

My new job wasn’t very taxing, and it gave me plenty of free time. So it wasn’t long before I found myself in ‘drugs honeymoon number 2’.

After being here in Sydney for 3 months, I met a guy online called Jamie. I spent a lot of time with Jamie. He would come over when my ‘weekend’ started and stayed until my driver from work came to pick me up the following week.

Jamie had been smoking ‘crystal’ daily for a while, a habit he picked up from his previous boyfriend. After spending so much time with him, it wasn’t long before I was using daily as well. We smoked continuously during my three and a half day ‘weekends’ without sleep. You don’t feel the need for sleep on ‘crystal’. And if you do, another puff on the pipe and you’re good to go for another few hours.

I liked Jamie a lot. And he seemed to like me. At least I thought so. I can’t say I ever trusted Jamie though. He never opened up to me. And I didn’t push him. I thought he would in time, once he got to know me. But he never did.

As time went on I suppose I got a bit more dependant on Jamie. I had never spent so much time with anyone before. I didn’t really see my two friends from the Gold Coast any more. I never went out. All my time was spent smoking ‘crystal’ and being with Jamie. But we never grew closer. Jamie still kept me at a distance, even after knowing him for 6 months. That’s a long time considering I spent 3 and a half days without sleep with him per week. In fact, we grew further apart. We had little to talk about, and as time went on it was clear that neither of us enjoyed being in the other’s company any more.

More and more things started to worry me about Jamie. I would find him going through my phone and my personal papers. He would frighten me with his tendency towards anger, and I started to suspect he had a history of violence. He became more involved with his friends that dealt drugs, and began speaking in awe of one of Sydney’s most notorious organised-crime bosses who had a reputation of involvement with drugs.

Jamie and I had a break from each other towards the end of 2012. When we met up again a few months later he had changed. Something seriously bad had happened to him during that break. But he still wouldn’t confide in me. Then one day he told me that on his way to my place the police recognised him in the street and took him into custody because they feared he was a flight risk, knowing he was due in court the following day.

Oh my God! Who was he? I realised then I didn’t really know anything about the guy. And he was seriously involved in some heavy ‘shit’. It was time for me to move on.

But I had spent so much time smoking ‘crystal’ daily with Jamie. And now, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t get through a single day without smoking ‘crystal’. I was already beyond my ability to control my usage. ‘Crystal’ had become a fundamental part of my life whether I liked it or not.

I managed to keep drug taking and work separate though. This was important to me. But it wasn’t easy going. I was so tired without the effects of the ‘crystal meth’ to keep me awake. Plenty of coffee was my saviour. Then, once the shift had finished, I could take another smoke to perk me up again. For a few hours at least, until I was back at work the following night.

There is no doubt I was chronically sleep deprived. I hardly ever slept, and when I did it would be by accident. I would fall asleep about twice in a week, for a total of about 7 hours sleep per week. This went on for 3 years. I had no idea anyone could survive on such little sleep.

I didn’t invite anyone back to my place for a year after Jamie left. I couldn’t trust anyone. I was too afraid that I would fall asleep with a guest in my place, then wake up and find I had been cleaned out. Or worse. I was living by myself, and finding a stranger online and inviting them back is an inherently dangerous thing to do. Especially if drugs are involved. And almost everyone I have met online has ended up being an ‘ice’ user.

I became paranoid in fact. My drugs were delivered, so there were drug dealers coming to my place all the time. And some of the characters I had met online had sexual fantasies scary enough to warrant being under surveillance.

I started to suspect I was being watched after an encounter I had with a guy I met online on New Years Eve 2012. He wanted me to be his, but this wasn’t fantasy. I was high on ‘crystal’ at the time and reluctantly said yes, I would be. He wanted me to confirm. I thought ‘Oh my God!, I think this guy is serious.’ It really scared me. I fell asleep under the effects of the GHB, and when I woke he had seen himself out, and texted me to enquire if I was ok. I replied and said I was. But I was too frightened to meet him again.

Weeks afterwards I would see men standing and watching on the street as I came and left my apartment. I thought I was going to be abducted. Either that or some drug enforcement agency had me on their radar.

Then I suspected people were getting onto my back patio to spy on me, and that there were bugs planted in my apartment.

I had to move. This place had too many bad memories of Jamie, and now I had attracted somebody’s attention. I needed a new start.

Newtown

As an after hours GP I travelled all over Sydney. Of all the places I used to visit, the only one that stood out to me as a place where I would like to live was Newtown. I felt drawn to it. It has a very large population of gay people living there, second only to Surry Hills, but I prefer the quirky, friendly, unpretentious and down to earth nature of Newtown. It has a good community spirit. It is lively, something you appreciate if you live alone, as many gay people do. I just feel comfortable here, relaxed and able to be myself.

So I found a flat in the heart of Newtown. It was a bit expensive, but I was in Newtown now and planned to start enjoying my life in Sydney.

I was on street level with a nice little patio out front. The blinds left something to be desired. There were two big blinds that covered the living room patio doors, which left a big gap between them. It was possible to get a good view inside at the right angle. I was the last unit on an alleyway that led nowhere so at least there should be very few passers-by to look in.

I was smoking ‘crystal meth’ daily, and had been for a couple of years by the time I moved to Newtown, so I liked my privacy. My blinds were permanently shut.

And so I went about my business over the next few weeks, unhappy about the gap in the blinds but not doing anything about it.

The rug fleas

For the preceding 12 months I had a rather embarrassing problem with what seemed to be fleas in the rug in front of my sofa. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get rid of them. I used to sit on the sofa in shorts or underwear most of the time with nothing on my feet, and whenever my feet dangled down towards the rug I could feel what I can only describe as minute insects jumping from the rug onto my bare legs.

When I moved to Newtown I bought a new rug, and that seemed to resolve the problem for a while. But after a few months at my new address the fleas were back again. The time had come to invest in a steam cleaner.

The head lice

I had only been at my Newtown address for a few weeks and I started to notice another problem. I could feel things wriggling in my hair. I made the assumption I had head lice, even though I could find no objective evidence of this. There were no nits or lice to be found on combing. And trial after trial of head lice treatments failed to improve my symptoms.

I was particularly embarrassed at work. I was working as an after-hours GP at the time. The company I worked for provided a driver who would drive me to a list of homes where patients had phoned up to ask for a house call.

There was so much activity in my scalp from the head lice it felt like my scalp was moving. To make matters worse, I was sure there were insects jumping out of my hair. I would sit there, feeling the insects jumping from my head on to the driver next to me. I had to bring the subject up with different drivers, asking them if they could see anything themselves, just for some additional evidence of my problem, and to confirm that it wasn’t just my imagination. They would deny any knowledge of a problem of course. But I couldn’t tell if they were just too embarrassed to tell me.

After the first week or two I was spending hours every day on trying to resolve the head problem. Trying to get rid of the fleas and the lice had become a full time job. The steam cleaning wasn’t working, so I mustn’t have been killing all the fleas, or whatever they were. My daily ritual now included a steam clean to all my soft furnishings, and the hard floor of the entire flat.

And for the head, I was using a different treatment for head lice each day, every day. This went on from June until December that year. Looking back, the approximate cost of this alone was $4500.

I had boxes of chemicals for head lice treatments towards the end of this period. I heard from the neighbours one day, who had just seen the amount of chemicals I had through the patio door, that they suspected I might be making a homemade bomb!

I couldn’t understand it. How could I keep getting reinfested? Was someone coming into my apartment when I slept to reintroduce fleas and head lice? Surely not.

While the source of the fleas seemed to be the rug under the coffee table, the source of the head lice seemed to be the sofa, in particular the cushions. I could almost feel creatures of some sort migrating from the fabric into my hair whenever my head lay on it. In fact, the only time I didn’t feel this was whenever I woke up on the sofa after falling asleep there accidentally.

I bought a macro lens for my phone camera which gave me the ability to get right up close to my scalp and the sofa fabric and photograph anything suspicious. I also invested in an ultraviolet light, also known as a black light. Organic material often shows up well under black light. Hours would be spent every night positioning two mirrors, a light source and method of magnification to look directly wherever I felt movement. Then more hours steam cleaning my rug and sofa, to make sure any infestation was dealt with. I did this every day, but to no avail. The problem would not go away. And no matter how hard I tried, I could not get the evidence I needed of an infestation.

The bald patches

I used to scratch my head so often I began to break the hairs. Bald patches started to appear, with 2 or 3 large ones at the back of my head. The skin was so thickened and dry from all the scratching and chemicals I was using. They weren’t completely bald, there was stubble at the base, but it made my head look embarrassing nonetheless.

I did it so often it became a habit to scratch my head. I still have that habit today, and a large bald patch to go with it. People often comment on why I keep scratching my head. While others look at me as though I am about to hit them because my arm is raised.

A stranger asked me the other day if I had been to a ‘Buck’s party’. She noticed my bald patch and thought someone had played a cruel joke on me by shaving a patch of my hair off. It has my barber baffled too. Oh well, it’s a battle wound of sorts, I suppose. An embarrassing reminder of what went before.

The blowfly

To make matters worse, I felt a fly crawl into my ear canal and it wouldn’t come out. They don’t normally exist in Australia but I have heard the ‘blowfly’ likes to use natural orifices to lay its eggs. Was this a blowfly?

I used to work in Ear, Nose and Throat surgery in the UK, so I had some experience with ears. I took to syringing my ears over and over again. Nothing came out. I even used those suction ear candles to clean out my ear canals. Again, no joy.

I bought an inspection camera to take a closer look at what was going on. I could get a reasonably good view inside my ear, all except for the very end. I could see almost all of the eardrum. There was nothing out of the ordinary. No wax, no swellings, no evidence of a fly. The eardrum itself looked normal. It was nice and thin and I could see through it. There was no suspicion of any abnormality behind it.

Despite this, my ear felt blocked. This went on for 2 weeks. Then, one night, I felt a sudden release of pressure inside my ear. I could feel the back of my ear canal rupture, and there was a flow of something from it into the potential space between the skull and my scalp. It felt like larvae, swimming from the back of my ear, outwards under my scalp. I was horrified. It felt like I had maggots wriggling around under my scalp. There must have been a fly laying eggs in my ear canal all along.

Still, I had no objective evidence to show anyone. I knew I would just sound mad if I told anybody. So the nightly hunt to find proof of maggots under my scalp, fleas in my rug and lice in my hair and on my sofa began.

The maggots had been growing underneath my scalp for a week or two and I could now feel them wriggling around as larger worms. Often wriggling from the top of my head, back to the back of my ear where they originally came from.

This brought with it a new problem. Something was being spat out of my ear. They were little white balls. I could only see it with my peripheral vision because that’s as far as I could get my eyes to look. I assumed these little white balls were larvae, being shot out of my ear by this worm under my scalp. Some strange tropical insect that had infested me and was now trying to infest people around me.

As the weeks went on it became harder and harder to hide what was happening. My drivers were regularly subjected to bombardments of these larvae. It was my right ear they came from, so the drivers were right beside it as I sat in the front passenger seat. I could see them look around, trying to see where something hitting them was coming from. They would look to see if I was playing some sort of trick on them, shooting little pellets at them or something.

I could see the patients were starting to notice too. They would look at my hair with amazement during a consultation, as I felt my scalp moving with all the wriggling of the head lice and worms. I could see patients’ eyes moving either towards my right ear, or to my moving scalp. I could even see their eyes following the little white balls as they shot out of my ears.

Sometimes their jaw would drop. Other times they would stop talking mid-sentence. One woman just burst out laughing. We couldn’t have a consultation. She couldn’t stop laughing. I had to leave.

What must they have thought? How could someone have such a bad head lice infestation and not do anything about it? I just wanted the ground to open up underneath me I was so mortified with embarrassment. But it kept happening.

This is the reason I bought a GoPro camera. I needed an action camera to be ready at a moment’s notice to film myself in these situations so I could see what the fuck was going on.

I started to use surgical clamps on my scalp to try to crush the worms I could feel wriggling beneath. I bought 15 surgical clamps off eBay. I would use them to chase the worm around under my scalp, clamping wherever I felt the worm wriggle. Then adding another clamp. Then another. Making sure I squeezed the life out of whatever was in there to rid myself of the problem once and for all.

It started to leave marks on my scalp. Little craters were developing where the tips of the forceps would break in through the skin, and where I had applied so much pressure in attempting to crush the worms beneath.

Then I had an idea. I arranged for a private CT scan of my head. If there were worms underneath my scalp they might show up on a scan. So I had hoped, anyway.

The only thing that showed up according to the radiologist’s report was an enlarged occipital lymph node. That could be enlarged from all the trauma I had exposed my scalp to. Or it could have been a coiled up worm. I knew a CT scan couldn’t differentiate the two. I was none the wiser, it neither confirmed or excluded my suspicions.

With all the bald patches and holes in my scalp, my head looked terrible. It was looking so bad, in fact, I had no choice but to shave all my hair of to try to blend the bald patches in. And I wore a cap to work, to cover the fresh holes and healing scabs the clamps were making.

I took care of the ear problem by blocking off the ear canal with cotton wool whenever I went to work. At least this way I could continue to go to work.

I continued to work like this for the next few months.

Maggots

From time to time I used to get a more troublesome sensation. It would start like sand being thrown, often in my face. Then it would start to feel like it was wriggling on, or burrowing into my skin. Whatever it was, I could never see anything. They felt like tiny maggots. It was a tingling. It could even be akin to itching powder, or an acid.

The typical place I used to feel this was on my face. They would start to spread out, as well as burrow downwards. I would have to be careful if it was near my eye. They had no problem wandering onto my eyeball and burrowing into that as well. I would be left with a gritty sensation on the eyeball. In fact, I’m pretty sure they used to burrow through my eyelids into my eyes as well.

Less often I used to feel a similar sensation around my anus. I was sure they were putting these maggots there. I would get an itch. I hadn’t had sex for months so I knew it couldn’t have been a sexually transmitted disease. It would only last an hour or so, then the feeling would fade away over the next few hours, if that.

Wobbly white patches

My oddest discovery were white patches of skin migrating up my body to my scalp. Each patch was about the size of a 5 cent piece, and there were literally hundreds of them all over my body. They were easiest to catch on camera on my legs and on my neck, but they were literally everywhere. If I was looking with my peripheral vision they would shake about randomly, and move slowly, as if floating in a fluid, upwards towards my scalp. If I looked directly at them they stopped moving, at least at first. It was as though they could sense I was watching them. If I kept staring at them they would start to wobble again, slowly at first, then gaining speed to a proper shake resembling ‘Brownian motion’.

It wasn’t just on me I saw these either. I noticed these wobbly white patches on some of the actors I saw in bareback porn films. What the fuck were they?

Whatever this was, it was freaking me out. There were weird creatures I couldn’t understand inside me.

Reflections

Call me paranoid, but I was convinced that I was seeing movement in my peripheral vision whenever I was home alone, when I knew everything should be still. But whenever I moved my eyes to look directly at something suspicious, I could see no evidence of movement.

Things were much more likely to move when they were reflected on a surface, particularly if that surface was curved. Now this is possibly because reflections tend to move in the opposite direction to what you would expect, and curved reflections move at different rates, depending on where they are on the curve. Nevertheless, if there was a reflection in my peripheral vision, I knew about it. I was bound to see abnormal movement in it.

Even the walls seemed to have shadows move across them, like there was someone in the room with me, invisible, yet they still cast a shadow.

Reflections on the screen of my phone or tablet happened all the time. I usually kept them on my coffee table in front of me, with the glass side up so as not