Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [43]
Somewhere in there I started painting after ten years off, at first with oils and then back to watercolors. I did it in the basement so as to not wreck anything. I bought a Yamaha digital piano and started working on jazz standards. I started writing a novel about a depressed pediatric senior resident who gets run over by the angry father of a baby who gets mistreated in the ER. When I wanted to take music-theory courses at the New England Conservatory, my wife became exasperated; surely there was something I could be doing to get back to work faster. Why wasn’t I taking a medical course of some sort?
“You’re a doctor,” she said.
Was I a drug addict or an alcoholic or just plain crazy? There were all those questions on the medical license renewal application to deal with. The chief of pediatrics at MGH knew I had been hospitalized. He liked me, so I more or less followed his lead when he described the problem as a drug problem that I had gotten into by taking drugs as prescribed for my sleeping problem. To me it seemed a little bit more complicated than that, but if I was going to have a shot at continuing to practice medicine, I had to give people a simple, easy package to swallow.
Because I hadn’t screwed up medically or acted out in a professional setting, I didn’t have to report to the Board of Registration of Medicine. In AA meetings I was an alcoholic who also used drugs, but mostly as prescribed. Purists said that if you were a drug addict who also drank, you were supposed to go to different meetings.
An earnest, bright-eyed young man at an AA meeting told me that to stay sober most people couldn’t keep doing whatever it was they had been doing for a living before they got sober but that perhaps I could work in a bookstore until I figured it out. I had to face the possibility that I could lose my profession, but it seemed like a terrible waste of all those premed courses and then medical school and then internship and residency. What was I going to do to pay the bills when the disability insurance ran out?
Two months after being hospitalized, I met with my partners and my psychiatrist to try to figure out when, if ever, it was going to be okay for me to come back to work. It was a tentative, very soft-spoken, slow-moving tea party. I tried to be dull without being too dull. Everyone was doing the best they could.
I was on lithium, which had been restarted during my hospitalization. Lithium is a mood stabilizer, yet my mood seemed anything but stable. I wanted to be stable and could have been stable by using the mood stabilizer that came in cases of twenty-four returnable bottles and tasted really good in chilled mugs or the more concentrated stuff in the bottle with Jack Daniel’s written on it. I could have been a lot more like Clint Eastwood and less like me and probably more popular.
It would have been almost logical to ditch the notion that alcohol was part of my problem. Alcohol had, in fact, been mostly a comfort that had brought me safely through many bad times. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I felt at least a little better with every drink. Except for maybe the seizure when I stopped, alcohol and I had gotten along very well, and maybe the real issue was Xanax.
With four psychotic breaks to my credit and a solid four-straight-generation family history of hyper-religiosity, voices, delusions, et cetera, I more than met diagnostic criteria for bipolar disease, formerly known