Bill Wilson Got Depressed Too — Nobody Says It in AA but a Lot of Us Live with Both – Donna S.

About This Speaker Tape

Donna tells her story at the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers Meeting at the Nava Club, approaching her 19th sobriety birthday on September 1. She was adopted out of a Louisville birth family she describes as "a Lifetime movie" of dysfunction, and from her earliest memories she never felt like she fit anywhere — two birth certificates, two names, and a square-peg loneliness that started the day she was born.

Drinking started at seven with Mogan David wine her mother poured at the dinner table, escalated to blackout champagne at eight, and by twelve she was watering down the vodka in her parents' liquor cabinet. She got through nursing school a straight-A student and a dorm designated-driver-while-drunk, but the last year broke her: depression closed in, she tried to kill herself, spent time in a coma in the ICU, and had to drop out for a year before finishing.

As a new RN in Nashville at twenty-six she pocketed leftover Demerol from a patient vial "to help me sleep," put a needle in her vein, and spent the next nine months stealing Demerol, morphine, and Dilaudid — shooting patients up with saline and Phenergan while she took their narcotics home. The jig ended when she yanked a bed cord from a socket, a spark ran up the wall, set the wallpaper on fire, tripped the sprinklers, and numbed her right arm full of needle marks so badly she couldn't go to employee health. She walked into EAP, got sent to Atlanta for three months of treatment, did five years of Ridgeview's impaired-professionals program, and lived three long years in a halfway house. A cocky 2001 relapse reset the date to September 1, 2002.

What it's like now: she walks through the Ninth Step promises one by one, admits the volcano-sized hole is currently being filled with COVID-stockpiled food instead of bourbon, and closes with Dr. Silkworth's story of the man found in a deserted barn waiting to die — who came to scoff and remained to pray.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Lisa opens the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers Meeting at the Nava Club and introduces her longest friend in AA
• 2:30 Donna — alcoholic and addict — born in Louisville, adopted out of a birth family with "two birth certificates and two names"
• 7:00 Mogan David wine at seven, champagne blackout at eight, watering down the vodka bottle at twelve
• 16:00 Last year of nursing school — depression, heavy drinking, a suicide attempt and a coma in the ICU
• 24:00 First RN job in Knoxville 1987 — drinking to sleep snowballs into hungover mistakes and missed shifts
• 32:00 Back in Nashville at 26, she pockets leftover Demerol from a patient's vial and puts the needle in her vein
• 40:00 Nine months of stealing narcotics — giving patients saline instead of morphine, the volcano-sized hole she could not fill
• 46:00 The bed-cord electrocution, wallpaper fire, and sprinklers that force her into EAP and three months of Atlanta treatment
• 54:00 Ridgeview's impaired-professionals program, three years in a halfway house, and the 2001 "meetings are for losers" relapse
• 62:00 Walking the Ninth Step promises and closing with Dr. Silkworth on the man found in a deserted barn waiting to die