On drinking, medical trauma, and pain
It is completely natural—if not always helpful—to try to anesthetize trauma and pain.
On August 4th, 2006, sometime close to midnight, I was curled into a ball outside the bathroom of a truck stop near Truckee, California. The cement in the parking lot was littered with cigarette butts, gravel, and bottle caps, but I pushed my cheek into it anyway. It felt cool. Heat radiated from my skin—so massive and unyielding that the concrete provided only momentary relief. It warmed quickly under my flesh, and I scooted, still curled in the fetal position, to a new patch of concrete, desperate for those few seconds when just one part of my face didn’t feel like it was on fire.
I was 21, and a friend and I were on our way to my grandmother’s cabin in Tahoe. A few hours prior, my stomach had started to hurt. At first, it felt like typical indigestion. But it built steadily until I was outside that truck stop, and the pain was in a league beyond anything I’d ever experienced. Sweat poured down my face. By the time my friend carried me into the Emergency Room, the pain was so bad that I was going in and out of consciousness.
Lots of morphine and imaging later, the doctors told me that I had a congenital birth defect where my colon had never attached properly to my body. Instead, it was “floating” like a shoelace—a shoelace that had now twisted into a knot, cutting off blood supply to the organ. I needed immediate surgery (which turned into two surgeries) and was in the hospital for just shy of a month.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last week. As everyone is probably aware, police arrested 26-year-old Luigi Mangione on Monday, and he was quickly charged with the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. This is not a post about Mangione or the murder of Thompson. But when I read that Mangione had gone dark after having surgery to treat a painful back condition and saw the x-ray he’d posted of the four enormous screws implanted in the base of his spine, it was impossible not to feel empathy for the debilitating pain he must have been in, physically and mentally.
Much like addiction, I don’t know if people who haven’t lived through it can truly understand how traumatizing major surgery and chronic pain are, especially for someone so young. More to the point of this newsletter, that x-ray reminded me how much the trauma and the pain of my surgeries contributed to my drinking. (I want to be super clear: this is just about me. No reports have suggested Mangione has substance use issues.)
The first surgery I had was to cut out the knot and tie the two ends of my colon back together. The second was because those stitches didn’t hold, and I went septic. I was 21 years old and couldn’t walk to the toilet without pain so blinding I literally saw stars. At night, when my family went home and visiting hours were over, I would lie awake in pain, thinking about how all my friends were packing to go back to college and start their senior year—and I couldn’t take a shower without two people holding me up. While they were worried about off-campus housing and classes, I worried about the stitches failing again or bacteria getting into the central IV line that had been placed in my chest. I spent night after night with a nasogastric tube pumping stomach bile out of my stomach through my nose. I developed a bedsore on my tailbone because it was too painful to move—making it too painful not to move.
I had a supportive, loving family there every day of my hospitalization, friends who came to visit or called, and I still felt more alone than I ever have in my life. Because only I truly knew what the pain and the fear were like. My body and mind were going through something no one else I knew had experienced.
When I finally left the hospital, I was still in lots of pain but stable. The doctors said I was too weak to go back to college, and I needed to spend the first semester at my parents’ house, getting my strength back. It sucked how right they were. While my friends were partying and doing everything else college entails, I braved walks around the block. When I started taking classes at a nearby college, I would attend one class, come home exhausted, and sleep the rest of the day.
I’m extremely fortunate that the level of pain I experienced was during the healing process and isn’t something I deal with chronically. The trauma of the ordeal was (and continues to be). I had to take anti-anxiety medication before every doctor's appointment. Alcohol was one of the few things that helped me sleep. A few months after leaving the hospital, I got an allergy test, and as soon as I was pricked with a not-at-all-painful needle, I started shaking and dissolved into tears.
When I finally got back to school, I wanted to prove how okay I was. I didn’t want to be whispered about as the sickly girl who had a mysterious hospitalization. The best way I knew to seem okay with what I was extremely not okay with was to drink. It had been my solution to so many uncomfortable feelings before, and it was my solution to the uncomfortable feeling now.
As obvious as it seems now, at the time, I didn’t realize how traumatized I was. It took me years to understand that I had PTSD from the hospitalization and aftermath. I still thought of PTSD as something a person gets when some external, bad thing happens to them. An assault, an accident—not something that happens inside one’s body, especially when that person is lucky enough to still be on her parent’s health insurance and receive excellent care. But I was wrong.
I didn’t become addicted to alcohol because of my surgery—I was well on my way to that destination long before I was hospitalized. But I’m certain that it accelerated it. Because I didn’t understand what I was feeling, I didn’t know how to ask for help or even how trauma worked. So I pushed it all down with alcohol until I couldn’t feel anything.
Medical emergencies, surgeries, the healthcare system, disability, all of it can be so painful and traumatizing, and I don’t think we’re very good at talking about it. We all want to be okay. We all want to be “normal” and live “normal” lives, especially in our 20s. Having made a valiant effort to drink away the trauma, I can tell you that it doesn’t work, and you’re likely to combust with everything you’ve tried to repress.
It is completely natural, if not always helpful, to try to anesthetize trauma and pain. I would love to have a brilliant point here about how we can magically make healthcare—including mental healthcare—better and more accessible to everyone. I’m coming up short. But I hope that sharing a bit of what it was like for me can help illustrate the lasting effects of medical trauma. I hope it can make us all more empathetic to others who are going through similar experiences. And I hope it makes us grateful for every day that we’re not in a hospital with a million tubes sticking out of our body—every day that we’re not in excruciating pain.
Send questions and feedback to askasoberlady@gmail.com. By sending a question, you agree to let me reprint it in the newsletter with your name redacted or changed. Emails may be edited for length or clarity.
I’m not a doctor or mental health professional, so my advice shouldn’t be construed as medical or therapeutic. You are free to take or leave it.
It will be two years in March since I quit drinking. I had been diagnosed with cancer at the back of my tongue. The idea of drinking after going through the radiation and chemo to get better seemed like pouring gasoline on a fire. Lucky for me, the radiation killed my taste buds, and alcohol did not taste right.
The cancer is clear, and my tastes are coming back, but the whiskey is getting dusty. At one point after the treatments, I ended up in hospital because my immune system was so compromised by the treatments. As it was hard to eat, I started to realize how the painkillers had taken over. So I had to quit those too. It wasn’t easy, but I knew the alternative was not acceptable.
Two years before the cancer, I had a triple bypass. So I’ve had my share, but thank my lucky stars that I live in Canada, where the costs for all these treatments were covered.
I have a couple substacks where I explore these health challenges. Thank you for your posts.
Medical PTSD is so real and so under-discussed. I am glad to have delay with chronic health issues in my 30s versus your 20s when everyone expects you to be sort and having the time of your life. Thanks for your bravery in sharing this story.