Ninth Step Amends to the Doctor I Convinced to Remove My Perfectly Good Appendix – Charles P.
About This Speaker Tape
Charles P. grew up in Gainesville, Georgia, shooting Demerol and morphine in school parking lots as a teenager and using alcohol every night just to sleep. By age 19, he was so desperate for opiates that he shot himself in the leg while squirrel hunting and walked himself back to get a prescription. He later became addicted to shooting cocaine while playing in a rock band, then spent years forging prescriptions under so many aliases that when police showed him a page-and-a-third list of local opiate seekers, every name on it was his own.
His bottom included two serious suicide attempts — one with an overdose of pills and alcohol at his parents' house that he somehow survived without a buzz, and a second where he ran a garden hose from the trunk of his diesel Volvo into the interior at a closed park, drinking wine until an EMT opened the door. He cycled through the Georgia Mental Health Institute on Briar Cliff Road, state boot camp, jail, and ultimately Kickstart, a residential treatment center in Gainesville — which he tried to escape by licking his sick sister's ice cream bowl to catch the flu, then convincing an ER doctor he had appendicitis. They removed his appendix. He later made a ninth-step amends to that doctor's office.
His last DUI came while chasing his girlfriend on intensive probation after five Long Island teas, doing 86 miles per hour through a 30-mile-an-hour neighborhood. He ended up in a cul-de-sac, crashed through the yard of his appendix surgeon's parents, hit a tree, got out to run, and knocked himself out on another tree. Back at Kickstart, a sponsor who pronounced himself his sponsor took him through every step in the Big Book. About three or four months in, Charles walked down the street one afternoon and realized he had gone an entire day without wanting to use — an experience he describes as receiving a miracle he had believed was impossible.
Over 30 years later, Charles attends four or five meetings a week, sponsors people, and runs weekly meetings inside the Gainesville jail. He caught up more than $40,000 in back child support, built a business, and has a wife of eleven years, a 40-year-old son, and two grandsons. He speaks openly about an opiate slip about 15 years ago after surgeries — he had gotten complacent, stopped going to meetings, and never told his doctors about his addiction. The severe depression that followed drove him back to three meetings a day. His message: give up one thing to have everything.
Discussion
Be the first to share your thoughts on this tape.