During the weeks that followed, I went table-hopping every night to a different meeting, each featuring a slice of New York life. There were blocked writers expressing their angst on the Upper West Side and blue-collar workers in Brooklyn recalling bars they had loved.
Soon I began to see why A.A. members kept going to meetings. They comforted and centered me. The people in them steadied and supported me in ways as small but crucial as an arm around my shoulder. I helped make coffee, unfolded chairs, cleaned ashtrays when the meetings were over.
Veterans asked me to come with them to nearby coffee shops afterward, and in these little clusters I enjoyed their stories, told my own, made friends, swapped telephone numbers. Some of the old-timers thrilled me with their firsthand tales about Bill Wilson, who had founded A.A. in 1935 with Dr. Bob Smith.
But I was afraid to speak up in meetings. A shyness foreign to me stopped me every time I wanted to open my mouth. Finally, after four months in A.A., I raised my hand in a group that gathered near my apartment, six floors up in the parish house of a Presbyterian church. The group was small, and after attending several meetings there I felt at home.
Overwhelmed with nervousness, I said, ”My name is Nan, and I am an alcoholic. I have been sober four months, and I am so grateful to be here.”
I could not go on. My voice trembled, and I knew that if I said anything more, I would burst into tears. Everybody in the little group turned to me, smiling and applauding. They knew that the beginners are the bravest ones, enduring the hardest times. They knew that as you go on it gets easier.
My last and most terrible compulsion to drink gripped me in September, 1976.
My newspaper sent me to a far corner of northern Maine for an interview with a family of authors. Helen and Jose Yglesias, their son Raphael, and Lewis Cole, Helen`s son by a previous marriage, were all writing books in various corners of an old farmhouse. The interview proceeded smoothly with this lively, articulate and amusing family.
I stayed for lunch, and Helen brought out the white wine to accompany it. Without warning, I began to come apart. I wanted to drink that wine with the kind of sickening urgency only an addict knows. My concentration was going; I could not sustain the conversation. I abruptly terminated the interview.
I drove like a madwoman, heading for the Bangor airport an hour and a half away, where I had reserved a room at the airport hotel for that night. By this time the obsession to drink had seized me and was shaking me like some great dog. I could barely see the road. Every bar along the way seemed to be beckoning to me.
I wanted to drink, but I could not drink. I had been taking a little white Antabuse pill every morning for several months, prescribed by a doctor who worked with alcoholics. With Antabuse in me, one ounce of liquor-or less- would make me dangerously ill.
I pulled up to the Bangor airport sweating with fear. I telephoned my A.A. sponsor, Anna L., in New York. She was not there. I called another close A.A. friend in New York.
Jerry said instantly, ”Don`t stay there overnight. Take the next plane here.” He told me to come straight from La Guardia to his apartment and to stay and talk to him until I felt better.
”Stay overnight with me and my wife if you need to,” Jerry said. ”We`d love to have you.”
Jerry`s calm assurance, the unhesitating willingness to help that is typical in A.A., catapulted me onto the next plane to New York and through the hours that followed. After an hour or so with Jerry, I went serenely home to bed. I am convinced that without Antabuse in me, I would have pulled in at one of the bars on the road to the Bangor airport. In those early months and years of sobriety, I was deeply grateful to the drug because it protected me from even the most overwhelming urge to drink.
In the spring of 1977 I found myself becoming increasingly confused and frightened. It was a horrible ordeal to go to the office and even more agonizing to try to write. I felt as if I were breaking into pieces. On my days off I would lie in bed, the curtains drawn, never answering the telephone. At times I contemplated suicide. Finally, I could not function at all. I called my psychiatrist.
”I want to go to a hospital,” I said.
”Do you think you might do harm to yourself or others?” he asked.
I said yes.
I committed myself to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic of New York Hospital that night. When the nurse brought me off the elevator on the seventh floor and locked the door behind me, and I saw the disoriented patients roaming the hall, I was terrified. I had made a ghastly mistake. I was trapped. I had signed away my freedom. I rushed to the pay phone for patients. ”Get me out of here,” I told my psychiatrist. ”I don`t belong in here.”
The doctor laughed scornfully.
”Oh, baby,” he said. ”Yes, you do.”
I frantically dialed my internist and friend of more than 20 years, Dr. Ira Cohen.
”Ira, for God`s sake, get me out of here,” I said, sobbing. ”I don`t belong here.”
”Nan, dear,” said Ira, ”this is the sanest act of your life. You could have thrown yourself out the window. You could have taken a drink. Instead, you asked to be put in a safe place. I am proud of you.”
I told myself, ”That is the way a doctor should talk to someone in trouble.”
Within a day or two I calmed down and began to realize that I really did belong in a mental hospital. The diagnosis was acute depression. I remained for five weeks until I was discharged with the doctors` approval.
After about four weeks there the Payne Whitney staff had begun to indicate in their conversations, subtly but persistently, that my own psychiatrist was wrong for me. They suggested I try another, a young psychiatrist at Payne Whitney named Margaret Gilmore, whom everyone seemed to admire. With her help in the years that followed I began to heal. My work went better. I fell in love for the first time since my husband Stan`s death.
And then I was struck with a nearly fatal attack of toxic shock syndrome. It hit me on Thanksgiving night, 1981, while I was visiting my family in Rockford. That grisly and still mysterious disease is caused by a deadly strain of a common bacterium, Staphylococcus aureus, and is found most commonly in menstruating women who are wearing tampons.
Almost every major organ of my body, including my heart, lungs and liver, was deeply poisoned.
The doctors at St. Anthony Hospital in Rockford told me there had been
”almost inconceivable muscle damage.” By measuring an enzyme the disease had released into my bloodstream they could measure that destruction. Anything over 100 units is considered abnormally high; I showed 21,000 units.
At first the doctors thought they would have to amputate my right leg and the toes of my left foot. Because the treatment had been swift and correct, my leg and toes were saved. But the dry gangrene on my fingers persisted, caused by the collapse of my circulatory system on Thanksgiving night.
Before I slipped into a coma at dawn the next day, I had been awake and aware enough to tell the emergency room doctors that I was a recovered alcoholic, in A.A. for years. That warned them not to give me addictive drugs or medicine with alcohol as a base. The information went into my hospital record.
When the critical phase was over, I had eight partially dead and gangrenous fingers, a form of paralysis in both feet that could have left me with a permanent limp, and severely poison-damaged muscles all over my body.
It was clear by then that the end joints of all eight fingers would have to be amputated. The day the surgeon told me he would have to operate, I was filled with horror.
I was certain I would never be able to write again. I was certain that nobody would ever love me again. After 10 dark, troubled years I had finally emerged the previous summer into what Winston Churchill had called the
”broad, sunlit uplands” of life. Now fate had once again struck me down.
As soon as they took me off the respirator and I could speak again, I began to heap my anger onto my family, the doctors and nurses. I reviled everyone who entered the room. I became imperious, demanding, argumentative, impossible.
One day, when my sister materialized at the foot of the bed, I looked at her with hatred.
”Go home,” I said icily.
For at least 10 days I was possessed by fury at everyone. Then one afternoon two strange women appeared in the doorway of my room. I turned to the nurse, saying, ”Who are these people?”
There was a little silence, and then one of the women said, very gently,
”We are friends of Bill Wilson.”
I welcomed them in.
