From Harvard to Hell...and Back by Sylvester Sviokla

Author:Sylvester Sviokla [Sviokla III, Sylvester; Zukus, Kerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781937612306
Publisher: Central Recovery Press, LLC

CHAPTER SEVEN

IDLE HANDS, BULGING WITH CASH

Moving back to Massachusetts was a good move for my marriage. I had created havoc in my relationship with Maurine while we lived in California but now, with the change of coasts and the passing of years, things had settled into a comfortable and more acceptable pattern. I was still not the perfect husband but I was, in her eyes, a bit better. Tolerable. But now Massachusetts held nothing for me professionally or emotionally. The end game with the weight-loss clinics had left me emotionally miserable and I was searching everywhere for a solution. Never did I seem to turn inward, but instead felt the answers lay in some external realm.

I had really enjoyed living in California and thought perhaps with my growing maturity (or what I perceived as maturity) a move back there would rekindle my soul. Maurine was skeptical, but outside of the mistakes of my personal choices, she had an affinity to the place as well. I called up a few contacts I still had out there, and, as would be expected, finding a job was not very difficult. But that’s all it was—a job. Not a career, not a passion, but a job. It was actually a step down career-wise, but that didn’t seem to matter much. I was still in medicine and still pulling in the kind of money doctors are used to. But depression lingered over me whenever I sat still long enough to allow it into my brain. I could not be further from the career track captains of industry were on. They employed people; I was an employee. And when I got depressed, I drank.

I got a position in a clinic around Burbank, near Disney Studios. Here I was, close again to the LA club scene, but this time the whole family and I rented a place near where I worked so there was no excuse for staying out all night and sleeping away from home because of a long commute. Burbank morphed into Glendale, but again, it was all around LA and close to where we lived.

I was no longer in any level of management. I was a grunt taking care of every kind of patient who came through the door. I’d been spoiled for a few years, having had a lot of administrative duties prior to doing the weight loss thing, so my hands-on medicine was a little rusty, but it all came back after a few weeks. Meanwhile, when I allowed myself to think about it, I had trouble pushing the thought out of my head that I’d tumbled down the ladder of life a number of rungs while other guys, Harvard educated or otherwise, were climbing ever-higher.

One day while I was picking up hours here and there to augment my primary salary, I found myself alone in a room full of medication. As a doctor, this is like a lawyer finding himself in a courtroom—business as usual. But I noticed some bottles of Vicodin staring me in the face.

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