How do I feel about it now versus when I wrote it? I appreciate it more. It inspires me to run with ideas that may teeter on the edge of propriety.

Surviving Darwin

Alicia Gifford

I met Curtis Greene in AA. He told me he’d gotten too fond of his Pouilly-Fuissé despite his dry Southern Baptist upbringing. He said he’d started to drink socially after moving to California, and then he’d started to look forward to getting home at night for a glass or two every day. He never wanted to go to restaurants that didn’t have a good wine list. He figured he had a problem, he said, and started to come to meetings.

We got friendly and I could tell he liked me by the way he’d look for me and save me a seat. He’d get red and tongue-tied talking to me. He told me he was a pharmacist and owned three drug-stores in the Los Angeles area, Greene’s Pharmacies. He drove a new BMW the color of midnight and he smelled good, like money. He was married, he said, and had a little boy named Alex.

I got caught stealing large amounts of Vicodin from the hospital floor I worked on as a nurse. I’d pop a few and get to work, tending to my patients’ needs while loaded on their pain meds. I loved my job when I was high. I felt connected. Actualized.

Things were great as long as a couple of pills would get me loaded, but then I needed six, and then ten at a time, to get the kind of buzz I needed. I started to wake up feeling like shit until I could get a few Vicodin in me.

Nurses are in such short supply that they can’t get rid of all of us druggies or the patients would be wiping their own asses; or worse yet, the supervisors and administrators would have to do it, so they send us for our shot at redemption to a program called Diversion, a rehab for licensed health professionals operated by the state of California. They assign you a color and make you call a phone number every day, and if it’s your color you have to go piss in a jar for random drug testing. You have to go to Diversion meetings once a week and AA or NA meetings the other six nights, and every six months a committee of tight asses evaluates you to see how you’re progressing with your little problem.

NA was full of street drug addicts—meth freaks with open sores and junkies with the jitters. I found the AA crowd more to my liking, but I was desperate for a way out of this mess. I hated Diversion, and, without Vicodin, I hated nursing.