When I started college, I entered as an English major with a passion for Emerson and Thoreau as well as poetry and Russian literature (an interest that started in high school). I had "a thing" for Anton Chekhov and his short stories, several of which hovered on the topic of drinking and alcoholism and all of the turbulance that accompanies it.
As my freshman year transcended to my sophomore year, I changed majors again and again and again. It got to the point where I would call my parents and my mother would ask "So, what are we majoring in today?" - As Jimmy Buffett once said "I may or may not be indecisive".
Having finally ended up majoring in Psychology, I never really gave up my passion for literature and poetry because of the way the novels and stories that I read accentuted the lessons I learned in my Psychology courses: Abnormal Psychology, Developmental Theory and one of my favorite courses of all time - Perception and Psychophysics.
When the topics of addiction and alcoholism came up in our senior Psychology seminar, Anton Chekhov returned to my life. It was never just "psych" it was the lessons of Erickson, Skinner and James along with those who wrote about relationships, history and the consequences that came "with a dream deferred".
Over the weekend, a masterful lesson in Alcoholism extended throughout our hospital in a way that was like a fishing net cast over a wide ocean. In one part of the hospital, a patient was detoxing and trying to communicate her needs through shaking and the slurred speech. She referred to my colleague as her sister and asked her family (none of whom were present in the room), to "push in the chair!!".
Our discussion flowed into a collaborative fusion of our knowledge via lessons learned from our own insightful experiences and lessons learned from alcohol: previous use, abuse, relationship struggles with our families, our children and our own upbringing. Everyone from the physicians to the nurses and techs had both similar and different perspectives of alcoholism and addiction. It was fascinating to watch as the topic seemed to hover like a stormy cloud on the second floor until it got on the elevator and headed downstairs to our Emergency Department.
The two traumas were called right around shift change. A car accident with two people needing to be "extracted" from their vehicles.
Like the progression of addiction, the rest of the night became worse as each moment went from one discussion to the next. I looked at my colleagues working feverishly to save each life in the two trauma rooms in our department. Then looked into the faces of the families as we told them the news of their critical loved ones.
Nothing good comes of alcohol use.
I walked into the chapel, our Chaplin who had been called in met with one family while the other family still sat quietly in our consult room - waiting for more news. It seemed like everyone was crying.
Our clinical team was steadfast in the way they navigated through hours of care for our patients and their families. In the end, one patient had died while the other remained in critical condition, stable enough to be transferred to receive the continued care he needed. His wife sat stoically in the passenger side of the ambulance. I waved as I walked by her hoping she had the inner strength to get through the next several hours.
Nothing good comes of alcohol use.
A life once filled with an immense amount of talent and potential was gone. Two families will never be the same.
Anton Chekhov once said: " We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds."
