Dr. Ed: A Surgeon Leading A Double Life

A physician’s hidden alcoholism, the moment he was confronted at work, and the recovery journey that helped him reconnect with medicine, his patients, and himself.

Transcript

Mark 0:09

Welcome to Recovery Rounds, Healers Helping Healers One Story at a Time. I'm your co-host, Dr. Mark Winsburg, and this is the very first episode of what we hope will become a monthly program featuring medical professionals sharing their stories of addiction, recovery, and especially hope. Our goal is simple and ambitious. By telling our stories openly, we hope to lessen and maybe even eliminate some of the stigma and shame that so often surround the disease of addiction. Shame is what keeps us silent. Silence is what keeps us sick. And too often that delay in getting help comes at a very high cost. Before we introduce today's guest, I'd like to introduce my co-host. Marcy is a retired ICU nurse with over 48 years of experience. And she's been in recovery herself for more than ten years. So Marcy, why on earth did you agree to do this crazy podcast idea with me?

Marcy 1:16

Well, first of all, I think the word you're looking for is visionary, not crazy. But honestly, I said yes because I've lived it. I retired from the bedside three years ago, and I'd seen what addiction does to people, to patients, to families, and to colleagues. And for a long time I didn't realize I was watching it in myself too. I was listening to others' stories and seeing myself in those stories that started me on my road of recovery. Recovery gave me back my life. It gave me clarity, humility, and a community that I didn't even know I needed. We're trained to take care of everyone else. Admitting we're struggling, especially with addiction, can feel like professional suicide. I want to do this because if even one nurse, one doctor, one therapist hears these stories and thinks, Oh my god, it's not just me, then this crazy idea becomes something pretty important. And besides, if I'm gonna be in recovery, I might as well be useful.

Mark 2:16

We have our first guest, Ed, and I'll let him introduce himself.

Dr Ed 2:21

Hi, my name is Ed, and I'm an alcoholic, and I'm also a provider, a physician here in Rochester, New York.

Mark 2:27

Aaron Powell How long have you been in Rochester?

Dr Ed 2:29

I started here in July of 2004, so quite a while. Almost 22 years.

Marcy 2:35

Ed, what drew you to medicine and what do you like most about being a doctor?

Dr Ed 2:39

My father was a physician. He worked very hard in his practice and clearly took a lot of joy and satisfaction out of it. And I think that in the background influenced what I thought would be a good career. It's interesting because my father was one of a group of doctors, and of the 13 doctors in his group, he was the only one to have children actually follow him in the career of medicine. So I think he was an incredible role model, but ultimately what I really saw was someone who was incredibly smart using a God-given talent to help other people. Also, my mother was very sick for a long time when I was a kid and ultimately died of breast cancer. And I think seeing the journey that she went through made me want to help people. And that combination of things and the fact school was very easy for me. That made it easy to excel. I did like science. I liked biology. And I think that set of circumstances conspired to make medicine a very obvious path. And then once you're in it, it's kind of like you get on the treadmill and then off the treadmill goes, and you're just running to stay alive, and it becomes a self-fulfilling destiny. But at no point did I feel like I was in class thinking, oh gosh, I wish I could do something else. Again, the being in class, learning about science, learning about biology, learning about medicine always seemed like a happy place for me. And what proved most challenging, actually, in making that journey to being a doctor was not so much the science end, it was the learning how to talk to people. And that also plays into probably more stuff that we'll get into. But that was something that I definitely had to work more on, but managed to continue my training through medical school, through residency, and then ultimately into practice here in Rochester.

Mark 4:42

So before the addiction entered the picture, how would you describe yourself?

Dr Ed 4:47

So that's an interesting question because when I tell my story at AA meetings, I honestly say that I think I had the addictive phenotype from the moment, the earliest moments I can remember, even though I wasn't drinking. I I feel like I exited the birth canal and someone forgot to give me the book on how to be a normal human being. And I can remember feeling that way from the youngest time. And it's that feeling of not being part of, not belonging, not being enough, that ultimately leads to addiction. So had I been asked before I was drinking, how would I describe myself? I would describe myself as very smart, very hardworking, but in a lot of ways deeply unhappy.

Mark 5:33

When did substances first enter the picture?

Dr Ed 5:37

My mother died right before I started high school, and all through high school, I just was disconnected. Didn't want to talk to family, didn't want to talk to classmates, did very well in school, but did not have really any social connection. I would get home from school and work on schoolwork and be alone and want to be alone. I had a serious issue trusting anybody to be on my side. And once I finished high school and got to college, not talking to people really wasn't an option anymore. So I had to figure that out. And that's when alcohol showed up for me. And it worked. Alcohol worked, although even from the earliest moments of drinking, it worked, but it didn't. And what I mean by that is I drank alcoholically even though I wasn't drinking every day. Typically, I would only drink when confronting social situations, so weekends, parties, things like that. But then I would drink to blackout. It was never healthy drinking. It was never just one or two. It was always off to the races. That just became routine through college. Continued, although less frequent, in medical school, where since you're working so hard, the social interactions are more limited.

Mark 6:55

Did it ever concern you when you drank?

Dr Ed 6:57

No. As far as I was concerned, it was time traveling. And it did not concern me. In hindsight, that's part of the addictive phenotype, too. And even once I got to my low point, I knew there was something wrong with my consumption of alcohol, but it was not something that I spent a lot of time thinking about. And this gets to the compartmentalization, which I know we've talked about before, that as physicians, as healthcare providers, I think it's true whether you're physician, nurse, practitioner, nurse EMS, we deal with very stressful things by compartmentalizing. We build walls around different elements of our life. And so much of active addiction is about living a double life, not being honest or authentic, that we have this superpower to compartmentalize, then sometimes makes addiction even worse.

Marcy 7:47

I think it's shifts where there were three deaths in the unit in one day, and I would go home and not think about it again. There were patients that really touched my heart in a different way, but for the most part, it was the job to help the family through it. And so it wasn't something I took into my heart.

Dr Ed 8:03

And I think it's getting better to the extent that in medical school, in residency, and even in practice, people are beginning to call out things like critical events and instituting debriefings. I think folks realize that there is a sustainability issue and burnout issue in the medical field and are nibbling at the edges to address it. Whether it's truly been incorporated into our culture, or are the folks who are selected to pursue careers in medical fields naturally, instinctively chosen to be folks who diminish that need. One way or another, it's still not sufficiently recognized how stressful it is to be interacting with other human beings when those human beings are having the absolute worst day of their lives. And we may not have a solution. We may not even have a clue, but we're trying to do something. And the impact it can have on us when we are not able to save a life or when someone's life is inexorably altered by a new diagnosis. Yes, that impacts the patient, and clearly the patient is the primary concern, but it impacts us too. And that wear and tear builds up over time. We need to come up with a culture that acknowledges that, doesn't view it as a weakness, just views it as you know, miles on the odometer. And much like you take your car in every 3,000 miles to get the oil checked, we need to have some way of building into our practices and our protocols things that promote sustainability.

Mark 10:03

I agree. And I think you've heard me talk before about my emergency medicine career and how the micro traumas, day in and day out, dealing with people that are having the worst day of their lives really need some sort of place to decompress. And I know a lot of EMS people, a lot of emergency room docs, a lot of people use substances to do that decompression. You went to medical school, you went through residency, and you said that the drinking was somewhat limited by that experience. When do you think it started becoming pathologic?

Dr Ed 10:46

Well, I think it was always pathologic, but I think it became a more downward trajectory once I was in practice and had more alone time and went through other life changes, getting married. Those things all put additional stresses on me and led to drinking that became more regular, more isolated, hidden. And ultimately, my wife at the time figured this out and took me to my first AA meeting because she had a friend who was very much in recovery. But I wasn't ready for it at that time. I othered myself from everybody in the room. I'd managed to become dry, not sober, but dry, stopped drinking through meditation and just willpower, white knuckling it. But then I got so dry that I was a fire hazard, started drinking again, and this time didn't want my wife or family to know ultimately my bottom, so to speak, was when my drinking was called out by someone at work. I would drink before work. I had three different breathalyers and I would consult all three to make sure that I was sober before I would go to the operating room. And in that way, I thought I was in control when obviously I was not. I was merely finding a way to live this double life without I thought encountering consequences. And I was wrong. And thank God I was wrong.

Marcy 12:27

So what was your fear about your reputation or your licensing?

Dr Ed 12:31

Oh, any and all the above. Yeah. First and foremost, hurting a patient. Second, getting found out either at home or at work. I think one of the biggest barriers to licensed providers as far as seeking help is the concern about licensure, credentialing, certification. Those things are like real estate. And I've heard someone else who is a healthcare provider in medicine say that, you know, we'll suffer through divorce, we'll suffer through separation from children, we'll suffer through all kinds of things, but we'll be damned if we let someone take our license away. Oftentimes it is the threat of losing licensure that really hits as bottom for a lot of providers. And certainly those fears were there for me. But when I was finally called out by someone at work, and I don't think I'm alone in this, it didn't feel like a shot across the bow. It felt like genuine relief. It's like, thank God, someone finally noticed.

Mark 13:36

How did they notice? I don't know.

Dr Ed 13:38

You know, they weren't going to tell me specifically, and I fully understand why they want to protect the confidentiality of whoever raised the concern. If I knew who that person was, I would fall down on my hands and knees in front of them and say thank you a thousand times because that is where the veil was finally pulled away and I was able to start in recovery.

Mark 14:01

Who can predict that when they're in the midst of the addiction? All you can see is this darkness.

Dr Ed 14:09

Yeah. And to give a little more specifics about it, I was asked to schedule a meeting with this person on a Monday. They called me on Friday to set up the meeting on Monday. And somehow my spider sense was, uh-oh, this may be about drinking. And that meant I spent the entire weekend coming up with 20, 30 different stories about how there really wasn't a problem, that they would obviously see that, oh, this was all a mistake, everything was fine. And I I mean I had this scripted out to like millisecond accuracy. When the meeting actually came and when this person said, We're concerned you have a drinking problem, none of that came out. The best way I can describe this is that God treated me like a sock puppet and made me say the words that I could not say myself. What I heard tumbling out of my mouthhole was, instead of all those things I had come up with, the words, you're right, I have a problem and I need help. Those words were nowhere in any of my scripts. But somehow they came tumbling out of my mouthhole like clowns pouring out of the car at a circus. And thank God I was able to say those things. And that truly it, you know, I wasn't connected with a higher power or God at the moment, to my knowledge, but now that I am, I can look back on that and say that that is the moment when God entered the room and loved me at a time that I could not love myself and made me say those things.

Marcy 15:40

I've heard so many people over the years say that DUI turned out to be the best thing that ever happened.

Dr Ed 15:46

Absolutely.

Marcy 15:47

And what has turned around is I don't know, I didn't realize that my life was so bad until it got better.

unknown 15:55

Yeah.

Marcy 15:55

So what happened after that?

Dr Ed 15:57

Aaron Powell It was suggested to me that I contact what's called the Committee for Physician Health, which is a service provided by the Medical Society of the State of New York. The Committee for Physician Health consists of case managers and then a board that oversees all the different cases that they're managing. My case manager, Vanessa, who I consider to be an absolute angel, heard my story and where I was at after talking with her colleagues. It was recommended that I go to rehab. They recommended two places. One was Geisinger Marworth in Pennsylvania. The other, I don't remember the name, was in Florida. I chose Marworth because it was closer. And again, that is a circumstance where God was directing me in the right place because I truly view Marworth as my second birthplace. That is where I finally started to become the person that God really meant for me to be. That's where they started showing me that manual and where I finally started to learn things about myself and about life that has now made life so much better. So, so much better. Now they told me, okay, you'll you'll go there for an initial evaluation, they will probably recommend a 28-day stay. I think that, especially for MD providers going into rehab, it's important to know we are the hardest of the hard when it comes to rehab because we are highly intelligent, we are motivated to hide, we have resources, and we have access to substances.

Mark 17:33

And we're wonderful rationalizers.

Dr Ed 17:35

Yes. And we try and figure everything out. And the thing about recovery is don't figure it out. That often means that 28 days is not considered an adequate course of treatment. And in fact, for me, although they told me that I would probably be there for 28 days, once they'd had a chance to do their intake, the recommendation from the addiction medicine specialist at Marworth was that I actually be there for 10 weeks, which caused me to delaminate when I first heard it. This is where actually the rational brain does help a little bit. If I've just taken a tumor out of someone and that patient shows up later arguing about how many weeks of radiation treatment they want, there's going to be a rapid reorienting conversation about how there's only one surgeon in the room and they're not that person, and they need to listen to what we're trying to say. Ultimately, they're always in control, but that's not a good idea. And that rationalization helped me to then get the emotional mind to cool its jets and just go along with the program. And that in and of itself was one of the important lessons of rehab. Realizing that we have these emotional responses. We have the emotional brain and the rational brain. And the emotional brain is our lizard brain. It's the thing that reacts instantly to threat. So it'll have its running shoes and it'll already be halfway down the track before the rational brain has even started to lace up. And that understanding of how our brains work is why meditation, prayer, an intentional pause is an important part of what we learn in recovery. We learn that, yes, we're going to have these emotions, we're going to have these emotional responses, but emotions are not facts. And we need to know how to deal with the emotions before making our next choice. You can't lock them in the trunk, but you can't let them drive. We can't repress them because that feeds our addiction. We can't let them run our lives because that'll often get us into trouble. It's about learning how to experience emotions.

Mark 19:33

How did your colleagues respond in as far as you're being gone for how long? Ten weeks?

Dr Ed 19:39

Well, longer than that, actually. So I entered Marworth at the end of July. Finally, I was discharged mid-October. And it's so funny, I thought that that was going to seem like forever, but when the discharge time came up, I'm pretty sure I left some claw marks on the hallways as they were trying to drag me out. Because of the process at CPH and the timing around the holidays and everything else, I didn't start work again until end of December. So I was out in August, September, October, November, December. So I was actually out for five months. At my workplace, the party line from leadership was he's out on medical leave. That's really all we know. That's all we're allowed to know. But I suspect people had some inklings. Again, someone, you know, raised a concern. And when I came back, one of the things you always worry about when you're in rehab is that, oh my God, everybody's gonna want to know, and I'm gonna have to tell everybody. Well, first of all, we're not that important. You know, we we think very little of ourselves, but it seems like we're all that we can think about. And we think we're the center of the universe, and we are not. We are not. So when I got back, people were just happy I was back. It wasn't like people came asking me, where were you? None of that. They were just happy I was back and happy to hear that I was okay. As it turns out, I felt comfortable enough in my recovery and emboldened enough by the work that I had done that I actually shared with almost everybody what had actually gone on. And I felt that that was important as part of my sobriety being authentic about what had happened. I thought it was important because, you know, amongst surgeons, you know, the difference between God and a surgeon is that God knows he's not a surgeon. And we have such a highly developed sense of self-worth that when something bad happens, we take it really hard. And we view it as a weakness and we don't want anybody else to know. And it's that culture of shame that keeps so many people in prison. That kind of boldness and honesty was something that I felt was very important to me and very important to everybody around me. A large part of what we talk about in AA is service, and that you know, you have to give it away to keep it. You share your sobriety with other people who are struggling, and in doing that, it strengthens your. Own sobriety. I couldn't know if any of my other colleagues or any of the residents in our program were suffering or not. But if by sharing, I was able to help one of them, and maybe not even with an issue of sobriety, maybe with an issue of something else. Just seeing authenticity and openness felt like a very important thing to share with the people that I care about, which are all the people at work.

Marcy 22:25

I brought it up in a meeting one time about sharing it with patients because patients would come in with substance abuse issues. We let them know what I had experienced, and then the group kind of said, Well, you may not want to do that. They're like, someone's gonna go to the hospital and go, You've got a drunk working on your ICU. I like the honesty and the authenticity. I think it's important.

Mark 22:47

I encountered that. I'm an addiction medicine specialist, and I found that I had to be judicious about who I told, but the majority of professional people that I came in contact with who were coming to grips with their addiction said afterwards that it was really helpful that I had told them that I'd been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and just gave them a little hope.

Dr Ed 23:17

In rehab, and this may have been a particular focus for Marworth, almost everybody who worked at rehab at Marworth either was in recovery or had family members in recovery. And I don't just mean the counselors, I mean the people working in the cafeteria and the people doing sanitation work and the people working to string up lights and things. There really was a focus on having a connection to recovery in order to be part of that institution. And that really brought authenticity to the message that was being delivered to patients there. It was something I felt very palpably. And I think that was a critical part of why Marworth worked so well for me, I can only speak for myself. First is because I went to CPH and I'm now enrolled in a contract with them, if someone at a meeting breaks anonymity and shares with another person, oh, I saw this doctor at the meeting and you know, he's an alcoholic, if that were to get back to my hospital, first of all, hospital leadership already knows. Like I'm on their radar screen in a good way now, and they know that I'm fulfilling my contract with CPH, which means I'm sober and healthy. And that's an important point to make. Addiction is a disease. Just like diabetes or asthma, the only difference is my hospital knows I'm getting treated. God knows how many providers at the hospital have hypertension and diabetes and are not pursuing treatment and are therefore sick or addiction. So CPH provides an incredible service to me. They are like this magical force field that protects my license, protects my credentialing at my hospital. Because if someone heard this and called up the Office of Professional Medical Conduct, which in New York State is the actual board that licensed providers, and said, Hey, Dr. So-and-so is an alcoholic. I saw him at a meeting, they would first pick up the phone, call CPH, and say, Hey, is this person registered in your program? And the folks at CPH would say yes, and he has a green light, he is healthy. And then the phones go down, and that's it. That's as far as it goes. Second thing is I have on a couple of occasions shared with patients that I am in recovery. Specifically, I can think of one young patient that I had treated a number of times who disappeared for a while and then came back because he was suffering with pain again and thought that he might need surgery. And the reason he had disappeared is because he'd been having pain all along, but he'd gone into addiction and had self-medicated with opiates, but had gotten into recovery and now is back with pain and was worried because every time he would go to providers, they would think that he was drug seeking and he didn't want drugs. He wanted to know if there was something else he could do, surgical or otherwise, in a medical way, to help with the pain that he was having. And I shared with him that we need to get some studies, we need to look and see if there are structural issues that are contributing to your pain, but just so you know, I myself am in recovery and I know what it means to have pain and need treatment, and we can do this in a way that won't reactivate your addiction. I checked with other people after I did that, and everyone said, look, you were doing that to help the patient. I also had another patient in the emergency room. Actually, I didn't share with her, but I shared with her son because she had fallen again as a result, did not need treatment for it, but it was clear that this was a consequence of drinking for her and that she was an active alcoholism. I shared with the son that I was in recovery and uh would it help if I came and talked to her about that, not about her acute issue? And he said, yes, that would definitely help. And so that conversation happened. And again, it was not because I was trying to get something out of it. It was to try and help the situation.

Mark 27:42

Well, you've already answered this question in some ways, but how has being in recovery changed you as a doctor and changed your practice of medicine?

Dr Ed 27:54

So many ways that uh we could have a whole satellite session. But to try and be succinct about it, first of all, it returned the incredible sense of joy that one has as a provider when you are able to help people. And helping doesn't always mean fixing. There are a lot of things that we encounter in medicine that we can't fix, and yet we still have this sacred gift of helping people through that journey. And whereas before, all I could see was how patients were dragging me down, now all I can see is how patients are lifting me up. What a blessing it is, even at the darkest times, to help a patient and their family navigate what is in front of them is an incredible gift. And I'm much more aware of that gift now, and that makes working so much more enjoyable. Amazingly enough, it's much easier and faster to get the work done when you're sober. As much as I hate the electronic medical record, I hate it a lot less, and I'm able to get things done, and it's like, oh, what am I gonna do now? Oh, I can go to a meeting, or you know, I have time to review a manuscript or any number of things. It's just much faster when you're sober to do these things. And in practice and outside, the gray film of addiction has been removed, and the colors are much more vibrant, the air is clearer, everything just feels so much more real in an excellent way. Now, does that mean I no longer have alcohol to help with pain and painful situations? Yeah, but that's the work of A, that's the work of the steps, that's the work of being in sobriety, is learning how to do all those things in a way that God actually meant us to instead of depending on a substance to change how our brain feels. And I love a challenge. And it feels like good work to be doing that.

Mark 29:57

I personally have seen the changes since you returned from treatment. It's visible the changes that you've gone through.

Dr Ed 30:06

I still remember that day as clear as if it were yesterday, because that is yet another moment when God showed up. I remember going to early risers. I'd only be going a few times. I remember hearing someone in the back say, Well, I'm an emergency room physician, and my head just whipped right around. I was like, another doctor. I latched onto you like an octopus. I just remember how solid you seemed, how it felt like God literally meant for me to be in that room at that moment to hear your share so that I could begin to interact with you and learn from you and try and emulate the things that you were doing in your sobriety. I mean, and that's the magic of this program, right? Because I'm sure you also felt like, oh, a newbie. I can help this person. And that's the symbiotic relationship that is fostered in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. The newcomer helps the old timers remember how absent portable it was in early sobriety. And folks in early sobriety are able to, you know, attach to the old timers like barnacles and just ride along in that slipstream and learn the ways of the program. It's also helpful, I think, especially for healthcare providers to see other healthcare providers working the program because our natural instinct as people with you know highly functional brains is to try and figure everything out. And instead to see someone just doing the thing, not asking questions, not trying to figure it out, just doing it makes it a lot easier to suspend the watchmaker part of our brain that wants to take everything apart and figure it out and say, okay, just do it.

Marcy 31:51

You know, we really want to complicate it. We really, you know, if we're 12 layers into problem solving when you only have one layer to go to, I think sometimes that trips us up. Don't drink today. Just today. Tomorrow will happen and you can worry about it tomorrow. Yeah, we do like to complicate things.

Mark 32:10

The other thing is that a lot of us are type A personalities and we are used to identifying a problem and figuring out the parameters and fix it. Unfortunately, well, fix it with a medication or fix it with whatever is necessary. The problem with addiction is the medicine that helps us is not a pill. It's a disease of isolation. So the cure is connection. And connections are not something we're particularly comfortable with when we start into this. But it's the only way that we can get out. It's share with others and see what they're doing, and they see what you're doing, they hear your stories.

Dr Ed 33:03

The idea that addiction is a disease of disconnection is part of why I emphasize that sense of disconnection that I had from very early on meant that I was an addict long before I ever picked up a substance. And I think that gets at one of the subtleties of A is first you have to give up drinking, but that's not the real solution. The real solution is identifying the thoughts, behaviors that lead to isolation, that lead to not feeling connected, that lead to not feeling enough or not part of, and figuring out ways to manage those things.

Mark 33:52

And you can't figure it out from within. No. You have to have other people to help you. Right. And that's another problem with us. We don't like accepting help. Oh, yeah.

Dr Ed 34:04

That's a big problem. And the term I use is it's the itty bitty shitty committee that keeps telling you you're not good enough, smart enough, working hard enough. That committee is what got me into Marwork. So to think that that's going to be enough to then help me figure out how to stay sober, that's the insanity of alcoholism. What counteracts the itty bitty shitty committee is all the people in the rooms of AA and the spiritual transformation that has to happen within me to be willing to accept that help. They would actually have us read papers in medical journals about addiction. And one of the papers was written by a psychiatrist, and this was back in the 40s, he was a psychiatrist who saw the transformation that AA had had in its very early stages, the transformation it made in patients, and he wanted to study it from the psychoanalytic perspective. And these papers included lots of really great things. But the most important things I remember taking away from reading those papers was the spiritual experience that you need to have in order to thrive in AA is essential because it takes the ego offline. Especially in medicine where as nurses, as providers, we feel like we're the ones in charge and we have to be fixing everything, our egos are hypertrophy. They're they're huge. But if we have that spiritual experience and we recognize, and that looks different for everybody, it doesn't have to be, you know, a higher power that you call God. That is what it is for me. But for other people, it's the rooms of A. I remember at Marworth, there was one specialist who was very devout atheist. But you know, for him, just recognizing that there was a power greater than himself called the tides was enough for him to take the ego out. Whatever your spiritual experience is, whatever flavor it comes in, it just has to take the ego offline and say that I am not going to figure this out on my own. I need these other resources and I need to be willing to listen. Huge lesson that I took away from these papers. The other was, and I remember reading this paragraph going, what? The author writes, you know, the alcoholic, having now come to terms with their honesty about drinking, often will then stumble when they have to learn that honesty applies to all matters in their life. They have to be honest about everything. And that's where I was like, wait, wait, what? But that is the other big part of it. And in that honesty, what it means is recognizing the other parts of our behavior, the other, to use an AA terminology, character defects that make it hard for us to navigate life. If we're pushing against what life puts in front of us and we're unhappy about it, that's what leads to that emotional dissonance that makes us want to drink or use drugs. And that's where, again, one of the big parts of AAA is accepting life and accepting help and accepting all these things and recognizing that, and this is to quote the only page I've memorized in the big book, which is page 417, you know, acceptance is the answer. Whenever there is a person-place thing or situation that I cannot deal with, acceptance is the answer. I have to accept that person-place, thing, or situation for what it is, because it's all part of God's plan. And it's up to me to regulate my response, not for that person-place, thing, or situation to change.

Marcy 38:03

That it's okay to not expect life to be happy and lovely every moment.

unknown 38:07

Right.

Marcy 38:08

That there's going to be good and bad days that are your fault or somebody else's fault, and maybe nobody's fault.

Dr Ed 38:14

Aaron Powell And all we can change is our response to a situation and whatever our role is in it. And first we have to be willing to look at what our role is. You know, so much of being an addiction is about saying, well, this person pissed me off, so I'm going to have a drink. Or, oh, I didn't get that job, so now I'm going to have a drink. And Mark, you've said this too. You know, it's not that we're having a good emotion or a bad emotion. It's that we're having an emotion and we want our brains to feel different. And therefore, we introduce this substance. What A does for us is understand our brains are going to feel certain ways. We're going to have emotions, and we need to be able to tolerate and look at our role in those emotions and figure out how to respond in a healthy way, how to manage without calling on a substance or engaging in some kind of behavior that is destructive.

Mark 39:08

Well, Ed, we could go on for another hour or longer, I'm sure. But all good things have to come to an end.

Dr Ed 39:17

Well, thank you so much. It's really again, we give this away in order to keep it. The opportunity to talk has helped me think again about my own sobriety and makes me feel stronger in this 24-hour period about that. And for that, this is a blessing. So thank you.

Mark 39:35

Is there anything that you would have to say to somebody that's out there that's struggling in silence?

Dr Ed 39:43

I'll say what was said to me in that meeting. You were not alone. You're not a bad person, you have a sickness, and there is a treatment. It's not a cure, but there's a treatment. And when treated, you will feel so much better. And life will come back.

Mark 40:02

Thank you again, Ed. It was a pleasure having you and being the first volunteer to kick off this podcast. I don't think we could have started in a better way.

Dr Ed 40:11

Thank you so much. Really appreciate the time.

Mark 40:17

As we close today's episode, I want to say something important. Recovery Rounds is not about promoting any single path to sobriety. Many of us have found tremendous help in Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs, but there are multiple evidence-based and peer-supported pathways to recovery. What matters most is finding the approach that helps you move forward safely and sustainably. If you're a healthcare professional in the Rochester area, I want you to know about Healers Helping Healers, a confidential 12-step-based meeting for medical professionals in recovery or contemplating recovery. That includes physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, PAs, therapists, EMS personnel, and others in clinical care. We meet Tuesdays at 6.30 p.m. at my office, 95 Allens Creek Road, Building 1, Suite 104. Remember that what is said in this meeting and whom you see in this meeting stays in this meeting. You can find monthly episodes of Recovery Rounds, listener comments and suggestions, community resources, and more at RecoveryRounds.com. That's all one word. If you have your own story of addiction and recovery and feel ready to tell it, let us know with the sign-up sheet on our website. Recovery Rounds is hosted by me, Dr. Mark Winsburg, and is underwritten by my practice, MarkWinsburg MD Medical Services, where I provide private, discrete treatment for professionals seeking help for substance use disorders. Thank you for listening. Until next time, keep showing up, keep reaching out, and remember, recovery is possible.