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Maybe I just had to learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, with being scared out of my mind, and to let it go past like it wasn’t about me.

The place I felt most welcome and comfortable was AA meetings, even though there was a sticky-sweet optimism there I found insufferable.

“The grace of God won’t take you where the grace of God can’t keep you.”

“You never get more than you can handle.”

“You won’t die from not drinking or not sleeping or being afraid.”

“Ha.”

The people who had died from not drinking or sheer fright were respectfully dead and quiet and unavailable for comment. I was quite sure I was going to be one of them. I had slowly and carefully consumed a lethal dose of alcohol and alcohol equivalents and would eventually die from either drinking or not drinking. My biggest problem was figuring out how to get word back to these cheerful pabulum peddlers when I died from not drinking. I wanted to have a gravestone carved: “Mark got more than he could handle.”

Happy Joyous and Free, the fine print.

It’s only fair to inform you that if you manage to not drink, your capacity to suffer and endure is going to be increased by several orders of magnitude and you are going to need it.

Had I been any sicker for very much longer back in the seventies, I wouldn’t have recovered enough to think about going to medical school and no medical school would have let me in. I had put together a good chunk of well time—fourteen years—but now there was a substantial chance that if I didn’t get my act together reasonably quickly, I’d be put out on the curb with the rest of the trash.

One month after the hospital, I was depressed and had the zip of a soggy potato chip, so someone ordered an EEG or brain-wave test. It was mostly normal but showed generalized frontal slowing. It didn’t seem to worry my doctors much, but it seemed ominous to me. Maybe the threads on my screw were too worn down for me to be able to practice medicine again. I wasn’t arguing. I just wanted to know if generalized slowing was something people got better from or not.

I missed alcohol very much. Those little slivers of Xanax they gave me in the hospital had made me feel so very much better, it made sense that if I could just have one or even half a beer, I would be able to sparkle just a little and maybe complete a thought and be a better father or be able to read a newspaper. I wanted to be the guy who everyone thought should be a pediatrician again.

My partners took me to grand rounds at MGH, where I thought everyone was looking at me. I appreciated the change of pace and their time but wanted to blurt out, “When can I come back?” knowing it was exactly the wrong thing to say.

My wife said I wasn’t the person she had married and she couldn’t stand having me hanging around the house. I’d spent my whole life believing that by force of will I could do things and make things happen. I just wanted to be a normal guy who was married and went to work and had kids, but it all seemed to be slipping away.

My second son, Eli, was sick a lot. I had brought home respiratory syncytial virus from the hospital when he was a few months old. RSV for most people is just a bad cold, but with babies it can go down into the lungs and, as it did with Eli, set them up to become asthmatic. He was five years old when I came home.

Eli never complained but spent a fair amount of his early childhood sitting on the couch coughing and wheezing. He would get pneumonia two or three times a year, during which he’d throw up everything and run 104-degree fevers. He didn’t grow much. It didn’t help that until he was four his father still smoked.

When I stopped drinking, Eli stopped getting sick. He fattened up a little, grew a sneaker size, and started playing sports. Six months into my experiment of living life without the buffers of drugs and alcohol, it all became too much. My father was impossible, my mother was dying, I had a horrible fight with one of my sisters, my wife didn’t like me even a little, there wasn