Kick Your Addiction by Frederick Woolverton

Author:Frederick Woolverton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2014-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE RIGHT SOCIAL LIFE: PAINKILLERS & FOOD ADDICTION

While socializing can be the very thing that encourages the use of substances one is trying to quit, many addicts I’ve seen go to the other extreme. They cut themselves off from the world of people—with all of its beauty and its dangers. Isolation encourages secrecy and shame, which a healthy social life combats. As we saw with other patients, you can be the wrong kind of busy and superficially popular and still feel desperately lonely. Yet when someone removes themself from all normal social interaction, bad habits can become impossible barricades, as they were with Marsha.

“It’s completely ridiculous that I’m calling, since I’m already seeing a psychiatrist. But since I love doctors so much, I figure one more can’t hurt,” was the message Marsha left on my Manhattan answering machine in the spring of 2000. Her voice sounded knowing, humorous, self-mocking. I thought, “She has to be feeling too much pain to even discuss.”

On a first message, most patients say, “Something bad is going on,” or “I’m feeling freaked out and drinking too much.” Marsha’s upbeat tone seemed phony, as if she was trying too hard to be amusing. To be fair, I had other reasons to think this as well. She had been referred by an oncologist at an upstate cancer center where she had been diagnosed with a slow-growing kind of leukemia. “It will kill her but there’s no saying when” was the gist of his prognosis. He was stumped when she refused the chemo he recommended (which could have lengthened her life by ten years) and ignored his warning that she was taking way too much antianxiety medication.

This oncologist had previously recommended a patient who had been given one year to live. With medical treatment aiding her physically and therapy helping her emotionally, she survived for seven more years, more comfortable and stress-free than her doctor had originally thought possible. Medical doctors often recommend psychotherapy to lower stress, which is considered to be very helpful in treating a compromised immune system. Also, addiction to pills and pain medication is rampant and continues to grow. According to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the number of people seeking treatment for abuse of prescription painkillers rose 400 percent from 1998 to 2008. Unfortunately, most physicians do not specialize—or even have a cohesive plan—for getting patients to stop overusing such substances, even when the use of these medications worsens their illness.

Marsha showed up half an hour early for her appointment the next week. Since on the phone she’d sounded very crisp and put together, I was surprised to find an obese forty-five-year-old with messy brown hair and no makeup wearing a baggy beige outfit. Her clothes were too big on her, as if she were hiding her body. She seemed very anxious.

“Tell me about yourself,” elicited a twenty-minute, nonstop monologue of her physical ailments. She claimed she could not walk down the street without becoming dizzy.

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