Death From Drugs, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Staying Alive

In my previous entry to this blog, I talked about heroin overdoses and how people might be rescued – even if no doctors or EMTs are around.

Due to the timeliness, I mentioned the latest celebrity fatality, Philip Seymour Hoffman.  I am usually asked for my take on these things when a high-profile person dies because of drugs – whether legal prescription or illegal street drugs.

I hate doing this – mainly because it is a sad and depressing topic.  And yet, I do this not to capitalize on the notoriety of the victim, but with the intent of teaching the public about the dangers, possible solutions and new developments in treatment and education.

More than this, though – it gives me a chance to get back on my soap box and preach about my true passion in life:

Staying Alive.

Regular readers know that I return to this topic frequently – and I hope it has been of some help.

It takes at least two or three things to stay alive, maybe more.

The first thing is a desire to live.  I used to think that everybody had this, because I do.  I love life because it is great fun.  Most of the patients I see, pretty much all of my family members (living or deceased) have expressed a feeling of being “stuck” — something I absolutely do not have.

My father of blessed memory always felt “stuck” in the role of breadwinner.  About 60 years after he accidentally/on purpose was too late to get into dental school the way my grandmother of blessed memory had wanted him to, my father had settled into music as a profession.

He went into teaching for stability, to fill the permanently gaping and hungry mouths of my mother, brother, and me – since his true love (arranging and composing music) was an erratic income at best.

In a few moments when he shed his sense of male responsibility, both before and after the nursing home placement that saw his final days, he told me he felt “trapped” and unappreciated.  He had been a meal ticket for the three of us, nothing more.  Only then did I learn that this had been the genesis of a nickname which I had never understood nor liked as a child.  While growing up, I had been the “ungrateful child,” no matter what.

He had talked sometimes, when I was a preschooler, about writing “The Great American Symphony.” (His old professor of music composition, Aaron Copland, had done a pretty good job of it, maybe.)  But this sense of purpose had never been strong enough to propel him beyond a sedate retirement from synagogue music and public school teaching.

The saddest I ever saw him was lying in his nursing home bed, telling me I had been “permitted” to go to France mostly because his mother had not permitted him to do so.  He could have studied with Nadia Boulanger at the American School of Music, the way Aaron Copland had done.

Even though he had missed that chance, he could have had a recommendation from Copland to go to Los Angeles and write music for the movies.  He always said that if he had done this, my mother “would have been a movie star,” which was obviously not a reference to my biological mother and caused her no end of distress when he said it.

You have to have a desire to live and a sense of purpose. These are two twins — maybe one issue and maybe one and the same — but I used to take them for granted, thinking that because I have them both in spades, everyone else does, too.  This is not the case.

I was blessed or cursed, depending on how you look at it, by being a gifted child.  One of the rightest things my mother of blessed memory did was to sit me in the synagogue out front while my father was revving up the organ and choir for the sacred Jewish music that was his specialty.  She told me that I was heaped with intellectual gifts (reading at three and such) because my God and creator had something very special in mind for me, and I better do it.

Oy!

The readings from the prayer book only confirmed what she said, and the perceived pressure was so immense, I think this is why some gifted children get ulcers early on.

And yet, unlike my father, who was “trapped,” I never felt that.  I bounced from school to school because they were or became not good enough or not right for myriad reasons.

In my adult life I have changed jobs and medical specialties and modalities of practicing medicine more often than any physician I have ever met in my life.  People interviewing me for jobs frequently have asked me why — generally intimating that I am somehow more unstable than the average bear.

Childless by choice, I have escaped the restrained or undervalued feeling that permeated my father’s life.  If and when I get it, I move on.  I am blessed or cursed with a big brain and I am trying to help a civilization full of hurting and broken brains as best I can.

My “friends” often explain to me that I may not be taken all that seriously because I am female and cute.  Me, I think that my God creator has a heck of a sense of humor.

So I am alive and well and producing intellectually.

The third thing?  I have a sense of mortality.

Of course, I would love to live forever.  I really want to make it to the “Singularity” predicted by Ray Kurzweil and get (probably buy — this is mostly what I would like my pennies to be for) some kind of computer-based immortality.

I know how fragile life is.  I have seen and touched death, prayed daily for my patients, lost some on the operating table or when they got drunk and drove headlong into trees.

Many people do not know or care how fragile life is.  The desire to live and/or sense of purpose seem to have evaporated in favor or perhaps a desire for pleasure in the moment.  Perhaps an addiction.  Something that does not seem to be intellectual stupidity, but may be more akin to stubbornness, although I persist in believing that a part of it is just not knowing or valuing who and what a human being is.

There is no doubt that Philip Seymour Hoffman was a great actor.  Tributes abound already.  Your favorite search engine will give you pages upon pages of links attesting to this fact.

Me, I remember especially being blown away by his portrayal of Truman Capote – for which he won (deservedly) the Oscar for best actor.

There were 70 bags of heroin in the room where he was found, allegedly with a syringe still in his arm.

This was a great tragedy, because he could have done a lot more.  He could have remained a powerhouse as a senior actor playing senior roles as a virtuoso.

Now he will not.

Adolescents resist substance abuse treatment as part of a rebellion that is inherent in that age.

My own rebellions were so benign as to be laughable in comparison.  I remember vividly my father deriding me for saving my money to buy a ticket for the Boston Opera, let alone crocheting myself a long “opera cape” by hand to cover up my lack of what I perceived as appropriate clothes for such an event.

He thought opera was not “real” music with all of the singing and theatrics.

This is a minimal adolescent rebellion indeed.

Amy Winehouse was a gifted vocalist.  Far and away the biggest legacy of her career seems to have been, the only song of hers I have ever heard sung spontaneously outside office doors,

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said, ‘No, no, no.’ 

To be an adolescent is to be invincible.

When I went to medical school in France failure was not an option.

I have kept moving, always on the path that makes the most sense at the time, never regretting what I have learned, as my grandmother of blessed memory had told me, “What you learn you do not have to carry on your back.”

Although my parents did several things right, I am not holding them up as paragons of virtue in child-rearing.  I am still realizing just how strained and abnormal my childhood was, for numerous reasons.

I was, somehow, spared the peer pressure and sense of rebellion that seems to dominate this adolescent stage of life.  Perhaps it is because from earliest childhood I was nurtured for being isolated and “special.”  But here I am, pressing forward.

Staying alive.

 

THE END