The Doctor’s Opinion on a Life Mismanaged by Alcohol and Drugs – John M.

Thank you very much, Colleen. That was beautiful. It really was. It's a great pleasure for me tonight to introduce to you our speaker. He's a doctor from Seaside, Oregon. His name is Doc John. They tell me he used to drink. But we'll know more about that after he speaks. Doc, would you come on up, please? I'm dr. John and I'm an alcoholic does my voice carry yeah I it's very nice to be here tonight I want to thank Pete for the invitation a while back Pete told me to come here and tell about my past life tonight he emphasized that fact and said that I had to tell everything now there are many things my wife does not know about my passed life so he gave me an out he says I could summarize in certain areas. Being a doctor, my life has been embroiled not only in alcohol but in drugs right practically from the beginning. My drinking days spanned a period over 50 years. I was first introduced to Madam Barleycorn, and I call her madam because she was seductive and gave me a lot of pleasure. That introduction occurred I believe when I was in high school growing up here in Portland, Oregon. That was in the days of Prohibition and I'm sure a few of you remember that. Those were the days where the in thing to do was to take your date to a speakeasy. A little door would slide open and you were inspected. You came into a room when you were frisked. All of this made you pretty gung-ho to the gal you were with. And then we were finally let into the drinking chamber. One thing I never forget is on the southwest side of Portland, there was a place called Italian Mary's. There you got the best drinks in town. For one dollar you could get three quarts of beer all laced with ether. I don't think they dispense that these days. In my second year of college, I used to study at night time with a very good friend. He is now dead. And he was making, manufacturing the best apricot brandy anyone would want to taste. We would bottle it in set-ups, labeled and everything, and he had quite a clientele here in Portland. The following year, my third year of college, I went down to Eugene. I had very little money. I had to spend—I had to work practically for everything I had, This was an ideal opportunity to make money, so I went into bootlegging. I had sororities and I had fraternities signed up, and even some members of the faculty, including the dean of men. This went along for about two-and-a-half months, and I was called into the dean's office, And he informed me that he hated to leave such a good source of supply. He thanked me for everything that he'd had, but he said I better quit. And he was generous enough not to evict any penalty. That two and a half months paid for the rest of my third year of college, and I was fortunate enough to get into medical school on three years. In medical school you worked hard, but on the weekends you usually went out and booze was a thing. Toward the end of my medical school I had some upper nasal difficulties and cocaine was sprayed in my nose that gave me quite a lift it was an excellent vibrant sensation believe me and I did not forget about it so I used to I used to go when I intern at the Multnomah County Hospital at that time I used to go over to the outpatient clinic over weekends when nobody was there and do a little nasal spraying on myself. I confessed that to no one prior to now. After my internship, I was fortunate enough to get a fellowship in surgery back in the Mayo Clinic. In my second year of fellowship, I I was on a service where cocaine was very readily accessible. Memory is a damn vicious thing and you remember the good things in life and that cocaine was good for me, so I began using it again. I was at the clinic in surgery for five years, and immediately afterward I went right into the service overseas. But during the last three years, I did use cocaine. You would get such a high on it that you had to come down one way or the other. And I usually came down on Foxhead Ale. That was a very, probably better drink than any cocktail would be. Also on barbiturates. was my introduction to the sedative effect of barbiturates. My first six months in the Army was back down in Santa Barbara. As probably many of you know, those days were drinking days. And a lot of wild, crazy behavior I can remember. One thing in point I remember at a restaurant there was an figurehead of an Indian with a big cigar in his mouth that had been there for 25 years. I was pretty well smashed and I smoke that cigar after I joined my outfit the 107th of that Hospital in Tyson Tennessee there the first thing to do is to go out and try to find some liquor but you bought it in vinegar bottles but you've bought it at $15 a paint. Very shortly after that we were en route overseas and we landed in Belfast, Ireland. There we were introduced to Black & Tans. It's a warm drink. Black & tans are a dark heavy brew with a lighter canned brew probably, some of you know about it. A great deal of drinking was done there. We moved over to Wales and I got orders put turning me into the Navy on detached service to go in on the Normandy invasion. A hundred doctors were picked out of the ETO who were capable of operating from the top of the head down to tow in any emergency. Out of those 100 men, 10 were killed. I was lucky. I went in on the Easy Red at Omaha Beach, evacuated on D-day. Actually we pulled off the beach to H minus 2 which is two hours before the actual landing. We evacuated wounded and returned to the Plymouth, Weymouth area in England. One of our screws was shot away we're on an LST which was converted into a hospital ship on the way back with two operations going all the time and we were told that we had to pull in for repairs for that screw that was shot away but instead there was a line of trucks loaded with high demolition stuff and they boarded us as the ambulances took away the wounded. We were told by the skipper that we would, we could all get drunk when we hit England because he had cases of bourbon down below in the hold of the ship. We will be over for three days before we cross again, but we crossed immediately. And quarter to three in the morning on D plus 3, five of us were crossing the channel back to France and we had a destroyer escort of two British vessels who caught some German e-boats in their radar screen and they and they scooted away, and two of our ships were torpedoed. Out of nine hundred and some odd men, a hundred and twenty-seven of us got out alive on the two ships. We were in the water clinging to a raft for a little over two hours, and a British destroyer sighted us in the dawn and picked us up and radioed back to England, and they were told to reverse course and return home we landed in Portsmouth and we were our first area we went to was a very elite British naval officers Club incidentally I went ashore naked from the waist up with a greasy old pair of dungarees, British Dungaree's on barefoot and with a rope around my waist. My jaw had been fractured and quite a few ribs. They poured us a lot of good scotch as a welcome back. However we were almost afraid to drink too much because we were pretty well bunged up and fatigued from that cold water. And believe me, that English Channel is cold and the seas were high. That evening we went across to Portsmouth, Wynmouth area, and my being an army officer, the following morning I was sent up to to Tavistock to an army station hospital. Meanwhile, I took a board from my Iraq hospital to technical sergeants skilled in helping you operate and all of that. Both of them were killed. I was in Tavistock healing up, and there again because of my injuries I was giving shots of morphine and allotted, and the monkey again came back on my back and really put his claws in hard. So by the time a month later I was reported dead back to my outfit that were in Southampton at that time and the exec officer of my evac hospital happened to be sitting in a bar next to another army officer and he said, Dr. McCallaghan we lost one man Captain McCallig was killed and the guy picked up his ears and he said what name? He says Captain McCallie. He said hell he's back in our Hospital in Tavistock. Here at the bar, I was rescued again. My life seems always wound around a bit of alcohol. Uh, so they phoned back and the CO of the hospital woke me up about 1130 that night, asked me if I'd like to join the outfit and gave me an ambulance and a driver, and we drove across the blackout English coast to Southampton. Arrived there just about a half an hour before my outfit pulled out for France again. And we went into northern France at the same spot I had gone in originally. From then on booze was very plentiful. In Northern Ireland there in the hedgerow of the country, Calvados made out of apples was a prevalent drink. However, all German pillboxes there were well stacked with Spanish Cognac and Portuguese anchovies. I don't know how the two go together but we enjoyed them. We had plenty to drink from there on in, always. We liberated a great number of German when we were in northern France and all the time as they passed through our hospital their musette bags were always filled with Spanish cognac. So we, of course, confiscated it as a matter of principle. We went across France. I was the Third Army under Patton. We went up through Paris pretty rapidly, and into Belgium and Luxembourg. In Luxemburg we stayed probably longer than we had stayed anywhere else about two or three weeks. Usually we were on the move all the time. I always remember the city of Luxembourg because I and a young lady were seated in the hotel bar again, and a gentleman dropped by and asked if we were enjoying ourselves. Of course, we replied in the affirmative, and I made this statement about how I wish we could have some good old-fashioned German beer. At that time all you'd get was one percent beer because Hitler used all the grain for food rather than making up all her beer and so he said he winked at me he said you coming along turned out he was a manager of the hotel the Hotel Cravat and we went up the elevator to the third floor and there's private dining room and bar up there. And he manipulated a button and the whole section of wall slid back, and there was every type of American drink you could possibly think of. Bottles and bottles of it. My eyes bugged out and I was thirsty. But since I had asked for 10% beer that's what they got and it was delicious. It was the only good German beer I ever tasted then and in the future. Before we left Belgium, an ambulance driver reported that there was several cars on a siding and were all filled with wine so our CO sent some preps down there and we liberated them, the wine. And with every meal everyone in our outfit had a bottle of Rhine wine in addition to the various liquors we had on the side. Incidentally our CO was very good about sending a truck back to the zone of the interior for our monthly supply of liquor. Every officer got a quart of English gin and a quart of scotch. I always gave my scotch to a surgical team that worked with me because the enlisted men did not get liquor, but I certainly clung close to that gin. It was delicious. The way an evacuation hospital operates is that we operate probably to set up in a hurry under canvas. We operate for approximately two months and discharge all the people we work on within as shortest span is time usually fly them out and then just before we're going to move and packing up the liquor is dispensed to us meanwhile we've had a lot to ourselves too that we would get over the countryside needless to say we We had no patience, so the day before we'd move everyone got tight, really smashed. And the ones who suffered the most the following morning when we were about to move on, we laid out on the ground, ran an intravenous sugar solution into them and put some oxygen on them. And we had cylinders of oxygen, and that was the best way to get over a hangover here. It really worked. We were in Belgium when the Battle of the Bulge hit. Our outfit was, but meanwhile I had been sent up with the surgical team to Malmedy to assist the 44th of act that had a whole load of surgical cases and I was there on my birthday December the 15th and the following day von Rundstedt hit we saw American soldiers moved down in the street outside of the buildings that we were in. Uh, we waited for orders and the CO of that 44th uh said that ambulances be used to take away in a hurry just bodies alone. The nurses would pile in with the patients and all available ambulances and we were told to get out and head towards Spa on foot and hope to hell we got there. It was snowing and the ground was covered with snow and we all dispersed along the way I got into clearing in the forest it was really in the Ardennes there, there were German parachutists dropping all around there and there were a lot of German sympathizers or one of them I don't know who he was, got me in his sights and started shooting. I've never been more frightened in my life. I zinged, I zagged, I threw myself to the ground. He did catch me in the heel. Fortunately it was a pull shot and I made, I cleared the clearing and got into the woods and escaped. I never want to hunt an animal again because I know how much an animal, how frightened they are because I was scared. I reached Spa and left there at four o'clock in the morning and commanded a truck with my team, a couple of nurses and some technical sergeants. We went to a beautiful hunting lodge in Neufchateau. They were wounded all over the floor, you had to... and we worked, we operated for 36 hours straight. And we got a news that the Germans were just about on top of us, they were only four miles away. So everything was dropped. Once again I lost everything I had, and we started out for Sudan back in trench territory. At that time, Patton's tanks came up from the south, and Sedan was came rumbling through the streets of Sedan, and then Germans, that was just about the end of the ball. They were routed. In Sedan again there was a lot of cognac and wine, and when you finished your 12-hour tour in surgery you needed a little fortification usually got it we then proceeded into Germany across the Rhine just south of Cologne and we were in Germany at that time my drinking days really began. We liberated more liquor than you can possibly imagine. You could have all you wanted. I remember in Kassel, there were the Germans had Russian slaves working for them then and when we moved in the Russians were liberated and they knew where all the warehouses were and they would lead us to them. And this alcohol flowed all over the place. We proceeded on and ended up on VE Day in Regensburg, where the Reagan River goes into the Danube, and subsequently moved Dr. DeWertzberg occupied a Wehrmacht hospital there. I was there about two weeks when I got orders sending me home to go in on the Japanese homeland invasion. You see, if you go in there on one invasion, you're qualified to get killed. So, I guess they were written an offer or something. Anyway, those were my orders. I flew from Nuremberg to Paris and from Paris to New York and from New York to Sacramento. I arrived in Sacramento the day the A-bomb fell. And so I had leave to fly up to Portland where my mother and my wife was, and I knew then I'd be free of military service in the near future. But it took about six months. But during those six months there wasn't a day went by that we didn't consume some liquor. Mostly, what's that? Comfort. Yeah. That was all you could get then because it was rationed. I don't like to remember the name even. But that was all if you didn't by that time, because if your liquor was rationed we didn't have the requisite tickets for it. My wife and I drank continuously. About six months later I was free from the service. I had to drive down to San Antonio, Texas to get my discharge papers. And on April 26th, 1946, I went into practice in Portland in the Medical Arts Building. There I practiced for twenty years. You see, I got my narcotic license. there again, memory is a vicious thing. And I had some dilaudid there and I said, let me try it just one more time, just once. So I mainlined it. The following day, well, once again gee that was good. That's finished. From then on, that monkey got on my back again And for fifteen months I enjoyed that feeling of warmth and well-being as this drug flooded my vein with each injection. I became desperate, I couldn't shake it. So I voluntarily went into a federal penitentiary down in Fort Worth. it's devoted entirely to narcotics, narcotic addicts. I stayed there for three months. It was an experience I'll never forget. I know what the call of gate down is and all that. After a few weeks after withdrawal, which was really rugged, chills, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, the shakes, you huddled up in a little ball on your cot wishing to God you were dead, but you knew you were going to live. And then I volunteered to work out on the farm there in the hot Texas sun and it really, I became physically okay again. However, the penitentiary, I met quite a number of characters. There I learned what Benny was. I had permission after a while to go into town and come back. I got cartons of cigarettes in exchange for those little benzadrine inhalers, not the Benzadrex that you have now, but benzadrene. And you stamped on them, cracked them open, pulled out the contents on a strip of paper, and you chewed that. And you really got a piece of it. You can chew it all, piece at a time, and you really get a high on it. It was saturated with benzadiene. uh everyone in the pen was using bennies it would come in everyone practically was still taking narcotics they were more readily available than they were on the outside i refrained from anything like that because I didn't want to get well, as some others did. There I met an anesthetist, a doctor from Louisiana and we became very good friends. And subsequently when I left and came home to Portland he came up to visit me with his wife and he was in the habit of buying straight alcohol, a gallon at a time. And once again my drinking days began. The only 20 years, I was using not only dexedrine and the amphetamines but liquor and barbiturates to come down on. Red Devils and Blue Heavens and what have you. The secondols and tuanols and so forth but liquor alcohol was the underlying mother drug in my own mind is my personal feeling that we who are dependent on chemicals the only difference between alcohol is that it is a drug that you can pour and ring you can take by mouth or you can shoot. Cocaine, you can snuff. Marijuana, you can smoke. Uh, peyote, you could smoke. Ashes, you can smoke." All of that is similar to alcohol. It gives us a mood change that's pleasurable and I will always undoubtedly look for a mood change that is pleasurable unless I stick strictly to AA. With the conviction that I was going to be a top-notch surgeon, a very successful doctor, well due to liquor and drugs I'm not but my attitude toward life has changed and five years ago I went back to a treatment center in Minneapolis first of all I sent my wife back you know incidentally meanwhile nine years prior to that time time, I lost my license to practice in Oregon. So I went to Pendleton, the Eastern Oregon Hospital and worked there as a doctor. That was allowable because you were under a certain amount of supervision. There I met my present wife, Lois. Just prior to the, just at the time that I went to the Eastern Oregon Hospital, I was there about six months, and my first wife came to stay with me. A day before New Year's we drove back to Portland to be with our two daughters, I had been drinking. We were in a crash and my wife was killed. The police said that I was in no way to blame. It was entirely the other chap's fault. My car was totaled. I was bumped up a bit. And that really is a big burden of guilt on me all the time because I had known that I had drinks before I started out. Maybe I could have prevented it. Guilt more than regrets, but several years after that I met Lois and we joined up married and drinking together. She had a long history of drinking and the use of drugs as well as I had had. There came a time when Lois was at such a point that she needed treatment. She needed both medical and alcoholic treatment. I had inquired from and friends, and they suggested St. Mary's Hospital back in Minneapolis, which is a nationally known treatment center. So I felt very magnanimous, and I put her on a plane and sent her back there after making arrangements for going in. Never thinking about myself, not thinking I could do it. I always had been able to do it, and stopped for just a time. And she was there for four weeks when I got a phone call from her counselor and invited me back as a concerned person. So I said yes, so I flew back there for her fifth week. So twelve hours after I arrived on the plane of course I enjoyed many Bloody Marys and that. And that night I suffered a bad coronary heart attack. I had been given a room in this treatment building and that was adjacent to the hospital, and I called on the phone and told them I was – it was the second attack I had and I was rushed through a tunnel system to the hospital and put into an acute coronary care unit. Well, I was there approximately four Meanwhile, Lois had stayed with me. My doctor told me, a cardiologist, that on Friday I could make arrangements to fly home. So I felt pretty good about it and in my grip, in my room, I had a bottle of Valium. So just to feel even better I got that out and took a few Valium. Incidentally, I had been on Valium for quite a long while and so had my wife, as well as alcohol. Singapore slings were our, at that time was a preferred agree. My wife finished the treatment, stayed with me and stayed there in Minneapolis, and just the day before I was supposed to be discharged she came in with her counselor with my doctor and Lois very simply told me I was an alcoholic and my life had been mismanaged as then I had my spiritual awakening I there was no hesitancy on my part for some reason or other I never no argument or anything I recognized the fact and they suggested that Louis fly home when I go into the treatment center. I followed that suggestion and then I never welcomed anything anymore it was a complete change in my life pattern as I said I had the attitude that I was going to be a success in life. I wasn't in any way the success I wanted to be, the success that opportunity had given me, but I think my higher power gave me a better success. It changed my attitude completely from being a success to being happy and for the last five years I have been a happy man. Both of us have been happy, and I'm very content. I appreciate everything that A.A. has done for me. We went into A. A. immediately after, uh, five years ago and have been in it ever since. We're active in it in Pendleton, we're active down in Seaside where we lived for about four and a half years. And speaking of Seaside, I welcome any one of you who come down to contact us and we'll show you around the town and brag about the place we live in. But we won't show you the multitude of bars that exist on Broadway. Incidentally, we haven't gone into a bar since we've been there. And that was unusual, or is unusual. I thank you for listening to me tonight. It's rather a rambling story, but it's a true one. Thank you. I hope all of you realize this could really give me a slip in my behavioral matters. I'm beginning to feel persecuted. Would you give your name over again? Would I give my name over again? I'm Colleen, a grateful member of Al-Anon. Oh dear. I want to make this more a testimony to all of you and my gratitude and my attitude changes for what all of you have given to me You have helped me accept my behavior, my resentments and my anger during all of my life that was affected by drinking. My father was an alcoholic and my brother was also an alcoholic. are both dead now. They died a year, two years before I entered this program. That was more or less when things started coming to a crisis for me and that I had to start seeing things differently in my home life and had to come to face the fact that all the things that I had been trying to do and the people that I had been trying manipulate, I had failed. And I had not been able to do the things that I wanted to accomplish by myself or with, I felt, the help of my higher power. I had a great feeling of failure and depression and I knew that somewhere, somehow I had to find help. I had heard of Al-Anon, but I associated it, rightly so, with Alcoholics Anonymous. But I thought that that's where the wives of alcoholics went after they achieved sobriety. And it was more or less a social thing, not some place for me. I was pushed into Al-Anon. I was told that I really needed help and that I was going to find the help I needed in these meetings. When I came, I was so grateful to hear that it was for me because I just didn't feel like I wanted to be very supportive to anybody anymore. I was having a hard enough time taking care of myself, just struggling. I was just surviving, and that's the expression I used, and that is the way I felt. I was living every day, breathing and walking and existing, but somehow I just wasn't enjoying the fruits of life. I came in, and he gave me the guidelines I needed, told me to read lots of literature. I did listen, come to meetings. I came to Obie's once a month and would sit here and listen to all the different speakers come from all over and share so many things with me. I went to my own Al-Anon meetings, I went open AA meetings and I thought oh my God what beautiful people you know and they have found what I've been seeking and I want what they have and the only way I'm going to get what they have is to do what they tell me to do and that's come to meetings, listen, listen and put the steps into my everyday life and that is what I really have to do practice those steps every day of my life and I have received a real beautiful spiritual gift I think because I always had a faith in a higher power whom I choose to call God but somehow I didn't seem to be able to communicate with him very well He didn't seem to be listening to me, and he certainly wasn't answering my prayers. And when I had pretty well made up my mind that he wasn't going to listen to me anymore and he wasn'T going to answer my prayers, surely he would at least answer them if I prayed in the name of my children. He certainly couldn't deny them a sober father. Now when I talk to my higher power, I talk him off and on all day long. and he listens, and I hear his answers. And I think one of the neatest things that I've come to know is the greatest gift that he could give me is my fellow man. And when he speaks to me, he doesn't speak to me verbally out of the sky. Thank goodness, I think that would scare me. He talks to me through you, you know? And all I have to do is be willing to hear it. I'm a happy person now, a joyful person now and my family life is happy now. I want to be here to help other people get this same feeling. I know that it can be done. There isn't anyone out there who could have gone through any more pitfalls, depressions, failures miseries, self-defacing, ego problems. You know, when you grow up in a family where there's raging alcoholism, my father was placed in a mental institution when I was 17, caused from the effects of this disease. I watched my brother die from this disease of convulsions. There was no doubt in my mind that it was an illness, you know. but somewhere I had a problem of finding out where that invisible line was that I knew existed I kept thinking you know, I knew my husband drank a lot I knew that it was affecting me and I knew I had to keep an eye on it you know but someday if I was real good he would wake up and everything would be beautiful and all our hopes and goals and dreams would come true if I just did better, you know, if I just tried harder. And it just didn't work that way. You know, he came to sobriety on his own, not because of anything I said or did. I've got to share something cute with you though. About five years before we got into this program, i decided that i was tired of my husband living in the taverns and i just had to do something about this and of course i'd been trying things you know all along to solve this problem and none of them had worked and one day he announced to me that he was no longer going to indulge in his drinking in public places and i thought oh you've answered my prayers you know I knew that he wouldn't drink as much if he wasn't in these, you know, dens of iniquity. And he would be sober a lot more and we'd do all these wonderful things. And gosh darn it, I had to find out what combination of things that I had done, you know that had made him come to this decision. I knew it couldn't have just been one thing but somewhere along the line I had hit on some right things and I just simply had to sit down and think about this rationally and put it on paper and I could write a book and I knew there was a million of you ladies out there that would buy it and I'd be rich. But it didn't work that way. He continued to drink and it seemed like a lot heavier and I began to have to face the fact that it wasn't those dins of iniquity and all those terrible friends he associated with that was forcing this stuff down him. He was doing it on his own. And when he decided to try to strive for sobriety, I think he did it naturally for himself, but he was really living with a crazy lady, you know? And I can remember when we had gone to a marriage counselor and a marriage counsel had recommended that I try Al-Anon. And he didn't say anything to him about trying AA. He just pointed out that I needed Al-Anon, and I was just crushed, you know? I knew that he was confirming the fact that I was goofy and I was the one that needed help. And he did not realize that this guy over here was the one that was making me this crazy. And I just sobbed my little heart out, you know? Well, my husband had never heard the word Al-A-Non before, I guess. And so a few nights later we were having a family dissertation and I was becoming my usual goofy self. He said, I think you need to go see that head shrink, Elanon. You know, how true those words were. Anyway, to get to where I am now, I'm able to get up here in front of all of you and speak and share with you some of the things that you've shared with me. I got a beautiful Mother's Day card today from my daughter who lives in Texas and it was a real neat thing for me because for a long time we were really kind of estranged and it just felt really nice to have a special card then I knew she picked out for me and it said a lot of neat things that I needed here I have four children I'm going to be a grandmother in October this This program has just given me a whole new family life, hope, strength. I used to think that if I could just come to Al-Anon for a year that I would get better and then I could leave it and I'd be strong enough to survive again. I just couldn't hardly stand the idea of thinking that I had to come to these meetings and be around all of you for 15, 20, 25 years. Good heavens, you know? And after about a year, I just felt comfortable and I just didn't worry too much about how long I was going to have to keep coming. And now after two and a half years, I just think I can't even imagine life without all of you. I can imagine my life without my meetings. I don't really think that I would fall apart without them, but I don' t want to. It's neat. I have a whole bunch of friends out there, and I think I'm going to shut up now, and I'm gonna wish you all peace and love, and thank you for letting me share with you tonight.