TRANSCRIPTS

Break the Chains

 

FROM HARVARD TO HELL AND BACK

 

"Break the Chains”

 Broadcast

 

Host:               Gwen Carden 

Guests:            Dr. Sylvester Sviokla

                               

 

Gwen:             Dr. Sylvester Sviokla, known by most people as Dr. Skip, earned accolades and riches as a successful, driven and brilliant graduate of Harvard Medical School.  He eventually became a physician to some of the biggest rock bands in the world, including Bon Jovi and Def Leppard.  For years he reveled in wealth and glamour, he jet set across the U.S., he belonged to the finest country clubs and he lived in a California mansion.  But then he became addicted to Vicodin and to alcohol.  That led to the disintegration to his cushy, extravagant life and he found himself stripped of his license to practice medicine, broke, homeless, shunned by his beloved wife and four children and working in a sandwich shop, a job from which he got fired.

 

                        At one point he was taking 150 Vicodin a day, yes I said that right, a day.  And he was drinking massive amounts of alcohol.  After finally getting sober and enduring many years of battling the bureaucracy in California in a fruitless bid to get his medical practice back, he moved to Rhode Island and there they did eventually reinstate his license.  And he now works in the addiction medicine field as Director of Medical Assisted Recovery in Warwick, Rhode Island.

 

                        We’re going to spend the entire hour with Dr. Skip and he’s going to detail his journey from “Harvard to Hell and Back”, which also happens to be the title of his new book.  Welcome to the show, Dr. Skip.

 

Dr. Skip:         Thank you, Gwen, thank you very much for having me.

 

Gwen:             Let me begin by asking you this question; why did you write this book?

 

Dr. Skip:         Two main reasons; first, there are many faces of addiction and some of the ones are more commonly thought of than others and I certainly didn’t have the most common faces of addiction.  But in the end, addiction to alcohol and/or drugs or both leads just about all of us to either death or darn close.  And I just wanted to show that I’m just one of many faces of addiction who was able to carry it off until he was 52, but that didn’t make me any different from the final fall. 

 

And the second and probably more important reason I wanted to write the book was, although I didn’t realize it at the time, once I finally got on top of the addiction, I don’t think I’m ever cured of it naturally, but now some 13 years later I find that there is enormous joy in recovery.  Something which I don’t think people who are struggling to stop really understand.  It doesn’t look like being normal is very much fun when you’re trying to beat the addiction and everybody is down on you that knows you and loves you.  But bottom line is, when you finally let go and get better, you actually experience more joy than you ever did at your highest moments.

 

Gwen:             That is a wonderful message and I hope that people who need to hear that are listening today.  Let’s move forward a little bit, I’d like you to tell listeners about your early background; I read in your book, those were pretty heady days where fame and fortune befell you and what seemed like almost a magical fashion.  What was it like?

 

Dr. Skip:         I was very fortunate; I was born from a middle-class family in Brockton, Massachusetts, a working town.  And my family was wonderful; I never saw drinking or drugs in the family.  My grandparents who were immigrants on my father’s side were hard working and had more money than most people in the little ghetto in which we lived.  But we were basically middle-class. 

 

                        I happened to be fortunate in that I loved school and I started to do very well in school.  I was a big guy, I had a silly name, Sylvester; I got teased a lot and I used to get beaten up by older, smaller kids and I couldn’t understand why.  I guess it was because I was being a smart aleck in school.  I really all the way through grammar school, it was very easy for me to go to school.  And the reason I mention that is football became a very important part to me when I got to high school. 

 

I had done very well in Brockton; I graduated at the top of my class and then went onto, Boston College High School, which is a Jesuit high school in Boston.  It was a bit challenging but that became a very easy target for me.  I also wanted to play football and the combination of getting pretty much all A’s through high school and becoming the co-captain of the football team and playing pretty well, allowed me a chance to visit a lot of Ivy League schools.  And I essentially applied to a bunch of them and even a couple of schools outside the Ivy League that were eager for me to play football for them and eventually ended up getting into Harvard.

 

I chose Harvard, went there, again I had to start my football career all over again.  But by the end of the time at Harvard College, not only was I doing very very well in studies, but I had become a pretty good member of the football team.  I actually my last year garnered one vote for the Heisman Trophy; now anybody who knows about the Heisman Trophy vote as the best college football player in America knows that the winner gets thousands of votes and I got one-third place vote.  But bottom line, I did get it.  That was a very kind sportswriter.

 

I also was not drafted by the NFL, but I got a letter asking me to try out for the Chicago Bears and if I made the team they were going to sign me with a $5,000 bonus.  And to put it in perspective, that was a time when the famous, Joe Namath had made a $400,000 bonus.  So I wasn’t a great football player, but I was good enough to at least be asked to try out for the NFL.

 

At the same time, because of a lot of accomplishments in college, I was accepted into Harvard Medical School; I decided to go to Harvard Medical School instead of going and trying out for the NFL.  I’m not sure that was the right decision at the time, I never would have made the team but it would have been fun to have been flattened by some really good pros.

 

But in any event, I went to medical school and for the first time in my life I didn’t really grasp the situation.  I was one child among 99 other adults; I didn’t realize that until mid-way through my first year of Harvard Medical School, I had been accepted, I certainly had done well enough in terms of all the studies and all the preparation for it, but that all came easily to me.  I went to Harvard Medical School and they began a pass/fail system that year.  And my first sort of immature, and I think immaturity and addiction can go hand and hand and we can talk about that later if we have time. 

 

But basically I continued to try to lead a pretty leisurely lifestyle and I got all the way through my first year at the Medical School at Harvard, thinking I was doing okay, but since they weren’t putting grades on exams, I had no idea how badly I was doing.  It was also the summer when the Boston Red Sox had a guy named, Carl Yastrzemski and they were trying to win the pennant.  Fenway Park is very close to Harvard Medical School; I used to leave my anatomy class with serious students and go watch the Red Sox.  I took the thing too lightly. 

 

I did fall in love with the most beautiful woman I had ever met and decided to marry her at the end of that first year.  And the day before I was leaving to go home to get married, I got a call from the Dean who called me over to his office and said, ‘Well, Skip, I’ve got some bad news for you, I don’t know what you’re doing tomorrow’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m getting married’ and he said ‘Well, you didn’t pass your first year’.  And so for the first time in my life I was really handed a reality sandwich.  And he said, ‘Well, we should have told you, perhaps been in more contact with you during the year, but you must have known you weren’t doing well’.  I said, ‘Yes, I didn’t think I was doing very well, but I didn’t think I had failed’.  And he said, ‘Why don’t you go and have a good wedding if you can and come back and see us after your honeymoon and we’re going to test you and see if you can stay here’. 

 

The real first evidence of my addiction I think popped up there.  Like any good incipient addict, I went home and was pretty sick to my stomach and thought, ‘What am I going to do with this horrible news?’  And my poor wife who had thought she was marrying a prize, I couldn’t very well tell her.  And so I did what all good addicts do and that’s lie.  I ignored it, didn’t mention it, went down to Rhode Island, married my wife and took off for a 10 day honeymoon, which needless to say wasn’t as good as it might have been.  The whole time I was at the honeymoon I thought, ‘Well, I’ll tell her tomorrow’…

 

Gwen:             And tomorrow never came.

 

Dr. Skip:         Tomorrow never came, certainly not for three of four months.  So I flew back, we got back in at Boston. I told my wife that I was going to go do some research at the Medical School in between my first and second year and I spent that first week back from the honeymoon being examined by a whole flock of doctors, trying to see whether or not I was crazy or whatever the problem was.  Of course I lied about doing any drinking or drugging.  And at that point I really sort of did do sporadic drinking and occasional drugging, if there was some amphetamine around to study or something like that.  But it hadn’t controlled my life yet, except of course my immaturity and my lack of study had really set me back.  This was the first time in my life I had really failed at anything and I was lost. 

 

After weeks of pretty much day long exams I got called back in the office and I was told that I guess I was smart enough to stay.  I had scored highly enough that they weren’t going to just bounce me.  But there was a very good medical school in North Carolina that would accept me as a second year student, along with some special tutoring if I wanted to go down to North Carolina.  I immediately took umbrage at that and thought, ‘Heck, I can do the medical school again’ and I repeated my first year. 

 

The bottom line is, I started to study, I got better and I fell in love with surgery.  All of a sudden I grew up in a hurry in terms of my career and I started acting much more like an adult, although I will say that I occasionally drank.  And I would occasionally deal with what some college students would do and smoke a little marijuana, take a little amphetamine.  But bottom line, I got much more serious, fell in love with surgery, wanted to be the world’s greatest gall bladder surgeon.  I loved the right upper quadrant where your gall bladder is hidden under your liver.  If I thought if I could take those out for the rest of my life, I didn’t even care if I got paid. 

 

And I developed a second passion after football and that was operating on the abdomen.  It wasn’t quite as sexy as the neurosurgery, or cardiac surgery, but bottom line is I loved it. 

 

I went on, decided to leave the Boston area, went to California and began a surgery residency, which was wonderful.  I never had so much fun in my life.  I was well into my senior residency year when the operating room had become a real haven for me, life was good, I had gotten back on track and I loved doing what I was doing.  When I had an accident on my right hand and I’m right handed, and suddenly after many hours of surgery and many months in a cast, my right hand didn’t function that well in the operating room.  And that accident by the way had nothing to do with drinking or drugging, it was just an accident where a bowl exploded and cut my right wrist and right hand. 

 

And although the Department of Surgery at UCSD where I was told me they would keep me in doing research while I rehabbed my hand.  After nine months of rehab, I decided to try to go back into surgery.  It was a foreign place to me now, I was afraid to go in there.  I got my first change in careers, I got a chance to go to Los Angeles, my hand was good enough to do emergency room work and I started a 25 year emergency room career, which wasn’t as much fun as surgery, but which offered me a second chance.  Because the operating room had become a very scary place to me, where I had been previously very good at surgery and now I was afraid to be in there.

 

Emergency medicine turned out to be interesting, wonderful in a lot of ways.  And also began my slow downfall, with lots of money, lots of time off, I developed habits where I would go to the finest bars, hung out in Beverly Hills bars and restaurants that are well known and began to drink too much.  Would occasionally indulge in getting some opioids or some amphetamines, and although I could control it, I thought it slowly started to grab at me. 

 

So at that point I met a man who was the half owner of The Roxy and The Whiskey and The Rainbow, which are big nightclubs on the Sunset Strip and began a medical career of taking care of a lot of rock-n-roll stars.  And over the next 10/15 years, I took care of some of the greatest, at least rock-n-roll stars in the ‘70’s, ‘80’s and early ‘90’s.  Life seemed to be good; I had a home in La Jolla, California, moved down there, had wonderful cars, had four beautiful, wonderful children, all accomplished.  Life seemed good on the outside, but alcohol and drugs were slowly eating away at me. 

 

My career actually was doing pretty well, I had other doctors working for me, life seemed good on the outside.  But obviously something was wrong, I ballooned up to over 400 pounds and ended up having in the early ’90’s one of the early gastric bypass surgeries.  That I really think, I was supposed to stop drinking after that surgery, I did try to cut down, I found that I couldn’t, I started to really get into trouble.  And then with a side issue of a little pain, I got hooked on Vicodin.  And the combination of Vicodin and Vodka eventually took me all the way down.

 

Gwen:             Let’s stop right there for a moment, unfortunately we have to take a break.

 

(Break)

 

Gwen:             Dr. Skip, right before the break you mentioned that you had ballooned up to 400 pounds and had gastric bypass surgery and that had some definite influence on what happened to you next in terms of your addiction.  I’d love for you to continue a little bit with that part of your story.

 

Dr. Skip:         Sure, terrific.  Of note, it looks as though gastric bypass surgery, which is becoming more common, is really affecting a whole lot of people.  I have contracts with the nursing board, the medical board here in Rhode Island.  And one of the things that I do now when I get people in here is ask them when they had their gastric bypass surgery and they look at me amazed.  The number of people who are succumbing to addictions later in their life after gastric bypass is on the way up, but anyway, I’m living proof of that.

 

                        I was not supposed to drink at all, I had lied to the psychiatrist who interviewed me prior to the surgery at Scripps Clinic and then I said that I would be able to not have anything to drink afterwards.  Bottom line is, previous to the surgery I could easily hold down six, seven or eight double-vodkas.  And very very few people even knew that I drank; I certainly did not act drunk, I never had a DUI, although God knows there were many nights…by the Grace of God. 

 

But in any event, after the surgery, I tried to drink again and I started to drink two or three doubles was the limit and sometimes that amount of drinking would put me in a blackout.  There were some post-op complications a little bit after the surgery; I was stabbed in the sciatic nerve by a nurse who was giving me an injection of antibiotics that gave me a pretty severe pain down my leg.  And had gotten back on Vicodin, which I had successfully gotten off of right after the surgery, and when I got the taste for that over the ensuing months after my doctors wouldn’t give me anymore and I didn’t want to ask new doctors, I began to write my own prescriptions for it. 

 

And because I had good relationships with a lot of medical staff and nurses, I had this elaborate plan, again I was already deep into the addiction at this point where I would send nurses and other people who would help me go get prescriptions in a false name and bring it back to me. 

 

The bottom line is I had developed the tolerance to get up to 150 Vicodin a day.  And the reason I know I was taking 150 a day for the last 40 days was the District of Attorney of San Diego told me.  They had started to follow; they had been tipped off by some pharmacist and they kept an eye out.  And I had been writing prescriptions in other names and then having them come back and I would give them money to go buy it, come back and bring it to me. 

 

And I remember that when I was driving home one day while I was at that terrible rate, I drove by my house in La Jolla, California; it wasn’t quite a mansion, but it was a beautiful home near the water in La Jolla.  It was certainly a mansion compared to what I live in now.  And I saw three people standing at the door with my wife; I can’t remember if they were exactly in black, but metaphorically they sure were.  I was hoping they were Jehovah Witnesses or somebody selling something, but they were in fact the Medical Board of California. 

 

I could tell by the pained look on my wife’s face that something was up; she looked beyond them, looked at me, I stepped on the gas and took off.  And I though while the jig is up now, and I went and hid in the best hotel in La Jolla, California; it didn’t take my wife long, a couple days to find me, I locked myself in a room, ordered the finest booze and the finest food and tried to wean myself off those 150 Vicodin a day.  I probably had 100 left in my pocket and I tried to do that by drinking.

 

I was clearly a mess, I was disgusting. My wife finally found me.  Actually called one of the psychiatrists that had dealt with me before, who I had been lying to right along.  Had him come in and try to coax me out of the room and he went out screaming, ‘I can’t help him’.  Finally my wife with the help of some of my kids got me home and I had to face the music.  The Medical Board immediately suspended my license, eventually revoked it and told me I could reapply after a couple of years.

 

And then the criminal authorities came in and I could have went to jail, we were able to plea bargain down to fraudulent prescription writing, but I was scared to death I was going to go to jail.  I wasn’t afraid of much, but I didn’t think jail was a good thing to do when you’re 52 years old, or at any time for that matter.  And my will fell apart; I had to sell my beautiful home in California, the IRS came and took it away because although I was making about a half-a-million-dollars a year, I was probably spending about a million.  And I hadn’t paid my taxes in a couple of years.  And I had wrecked my life because I was able to fake my prosperity for so long.

 

I didn’t drink or drug for about three months and then I fell into a second cycle of addiction where I resumed drinking.  And we had to leave our home in California, I had to go mooch off some of my children, who were kind enough to let us do that, my wife had to go back to work.  We eventually ended up in Manhattan Beach, California, living in a very cheap, one bedroom apartment over a big yoga studio, where it was very hot normally and in California it was even hotter.  It was a horrible place.  My wife was working hard just to pay that little rent.  We had lost everything and I was essentially homeless. 

 

Technically, I could come into the house, but I was ashamed to come home, she was working hard after not working for 30 years and I was still drinking, running away, hiding, sleeping on the beach.  I was a total, disgusting wreck.  I looked like every classic picture of an alcohol dependent person; I looked bad, I smelled bad, I just wanted to die.  I took up residence on the roof of that apartment that we lived in and I would occasionally look over the edge and look down and think, ‘I’d really like to end it all, but if I jump off this three story roof I’m just going to make matters worse’.  So I’d go back to sitting on the roof and drinking.

 

I began sort of my salvation started creeping in when I would go to AA meetings and I would sit in the back of the room, they were very kind.  As long as I shut my mouth and sat in the back of the room, I could watch and listen to people talk and I would think over and over again, ‘God, I’m just like these people’.  And I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t stop, but I knew I was just like those people. 

 

Well as my life really degenerated, as I got to sleeping probably 30 minutes a day, I looked and smelled like every horrible alcoholic and I know the misery.  And I just wanted to die, but I was so deep into the alcoholism that when I would pass out, I might sleep for 30 or 40 minutes and then wake up and then have to face another whole day ahead of me.  I thought this was hopeless.  And I kept thinking, ‘I’ve got to be able to figure this out, after all, I’m a smart guy’, even though the evidence was all the contrary. 

 

And I was staring at this bottle of Popov Vodka on the roof, it was about half empty, it might still be up there in fact.  And I was trying hard to figure out, ‘How can I control this?’ ‘What can I do?’ ‘How do I stop?’  When all of a sudden I had an insight; a lot of people insists it was a spiritual moment, I personally think it was, but I’m not so spiritually certain that I would project that.  Maybe it was just I finally got as smart as I thought I was. 

 

But suddenly, I had what I thought was an MC Escher moment; MC Escher does these wonderful prints where; ‘Are the stairs heading up or down?’  ‘Are the birds flying left or right?’ ‘Are they blackbirds on a white background or are they white birds on a black background?’  You’re looking at a print which has the same amount of information in it, but suddenly you see the opposite side, you can see it one of two ways.  And at that moment, something in my brain clicked and it was as simple as, ‘Gee, you know what, I’m not like those alcoholics, I’m one of them’. 

 

Now that sounds ridiculously simple and I do think that getting sober sometimes is too simple for smart people.  And I suddenly went, ‘Wow, I’ve got this, I know a whole bunch of alcoholics who are happy and living a life and what do they have in common, they don’t drink anymore, they stopped trying to control it’. 

 

So at that moment, December 1st, 2000, the urge to drink left me, I knew I was in for a pretty bad detox, I climbed down off the roof, went and said to my wife, ‘Can I come inside tonight, I think I’m done?’  She said, ‘I’ve heard that before’ I said, ‘You’re just going to have to wait, I really think this is it, but I’m going to have to prove it to you’.  And I haven’t had a drink since that day. 

 

The detox was bad, the climb back to get my license was horrendous, California was very punitive and they had a right to be.  It just seemed they kept moving the goal post.  After I got sober and did everything I was supposed to do, they made it very difficult.  And so then we decided to move back to Rhode Island.  I was able to come back.  I still had to do everything I had left California with to get my license back in order for Rhode Island to honor me, but they didn’t keep changing the rules and I was able to get my license back. 

 

Then decided that I had a second chance in life at changing my career and again for the second time in my life there was a new career beckoning in emergency medicine that had bailed me out the first time when I left surgery and now addiction medicine was a brand new specialty.  And I thought, ‘Look, I’m an addict by experience, I might as well be an addict by training too’.  And so I studied hard, when I got my license back, became board certified in addiction medicine and now I love helping people getting better, hopefully before they are 52 years of age the way it took me.

 

So that’s how it all went down and now for the last decade or so I’ve been able to help a lot of folks.  We use Suboxone in a recovery-base mode here to help people off opiate addiction.  And here in my office we have contracts with most of the professional boards in the state of Rhode Island and we help a lot of professional people get back in, monitor them, and life is good again.

 

I had been leading a horrible, horrible existence, a double-life when I was taking drugs and alcohol and now honesty started to flip my life and by-God it’s a heck of a lot better.  To be honest was something that never occurred to me until I got recovery.

 

(Break)

 

Gwen:             Dr. Skip, when I was reading your book over the weekend, I could not put it down.  There were so many gritty details and just trying to imagine going from being so wealthy and living such a high life, to the depths to which you sank were just, it was really hard to put down.

 

                        I would like it if you could tell listeners just a little bit more about that really horrible time in your life.  Because I think it serves to show the wonderful contrast that we’ll talk a little bit later to what your life is today.

 

Dr. Skip:         Sure, I initially was insulted, I don’t know how I dared to be insulted, but was insulted when they took my license away.  And like a lot of the patients I treat today, my first thought was, ‘Well the heck with this, I don’t want to be a doctor anymore anyway’, which was really my withdrawal talking.  And I thought, ‘Well anyone will want a guy with a couple of Harvard degrees’; somehow I managed to be arrogant even then.   I thought, ‘I’ve lost everything but I’m going to go and get a job because after all, I’m smarter than anybody’.

 

                        Well I found that even though I tried to clean up a little bit before I started to drink again and I went and looked for many kinds of jobs.  I never got a call back for the first time in my life; no one would even give me the time of day.  I tried to get sales jobs, I tried to get administrative jobs, I tried to get any job that I could and no one wanted me. 

 

                        That’s when my wife realized that we were going to have no income.  When the IRS forced the sale of our house, I had really run through all of our savings and I had credit card bills of $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a month.  So we really were broke and that’s when we had to move in with one of my kids.  And we were up in the Los Angeles area, I tried job after job. 

 

My first job was a guy in AA, because I started to go to AA off and on, who came up to me after a meeting and I had spoken a little bit about my state and he said, ‘Maybe I’m insulting you, but would you like to have a job chopping cilantro and onions in the kitchen of my restaurant, I’ll have to pay you minimum wage, but you’ll have something’.  And I was so grateful, I absolutely wept.  I had never thought that I would want to take a job; I went to work with this guy for a little while, I did work hard but frankly, the young guys next to me were a heck of a lot better at chopping than I was.  And eventually he had to let me go.

 

Then a little bit later I had the audacity to apply for a job as a manager in a sandwich shop, Quiznos sandwich shop.  And I was trying to control my drinking at that point and I was able to do okay for a couple of weeks, but then I started to drink before I went to work in the morning.  And one day I went in, it was all overwhelming and I just left the place, locked it up.  And when the owner tried to find me, he did get in touch with me a couple of days later and actually said, ‘Look, straighten yourself out, I’ll give you a second shot and I failed the second time at the Quiznos. 

 

I was distraught and devastated; my wife working as a teacher’s aide, struggling, we could barely afford any food and we certainly had no luxuries.  And any money that I could find that I would steal from her or from the liquor store, I would be stealing bottles; I can’t tell you how many cold, freezing nights I slept on the beach or on a public toilet on the beaches of Southern California.  So life was really horrible at that time.  Tramping around, my family would come and look for me; I must have put them through the tortures of hell.  If I would see them I would run away and they would try to find me, but I had a lot of good hiding places.

 

That is so different from when I got to recovery that it blows my mind.  When I came back to Rhode Island, there were not a large number of people looking to hire me, but when I went to a couple of recovery places and said, ‘Look, I need to get my license back before I can become board certified in addiction medicine, so will you teach me recovery from the counseling side’?  I’m an old ear doc, used to seeing things, fixing them and sending people out.  Recovery is certainly a long term business and all of a sudden, doors opened to me. 

 

I found that the joy of my first job paid me $24,000 a year and again, I was ecstatic.  And this time, because I was sober, I was able to keep it. 

 

Gwen:             What were you doing in that job?

 

Dr. Skip:         I was an intake coordinator for a place called, Meadows Edge, it’s a recovery center not unlike my own now that’s down the road from me in Rhode Island.  The owner of that was a physician who hired me and he said, ‘Now listen, if I hire you and teach you all about addiction, will you go out and become my competition?’  And I looked at him and I said, ‘Well honestly, that would be great, I hope to be able to do that well’.  And he hired me anyway.

 

                        And so I was in Rhode Island for about a year-and-a-half before I actually got my license back and then I had to get my DEA back.  All that time I was learning from all the counselors about how to treat addiction.  Because doctors are relatively new to addiction treatment and there’s a pretty big clash amongst some doctors who always want to be at the top of the pyramid, rather than part of the working team.  And doctors need to understand where they are in addiction.  If you are board certified addiction medicine, it doesn’t mean you know anything about counseling, it just means that you know about medicine of addiction. 

 

So I saw from the inside that no longer could I be the big boss the way I was of all the emergency rooms I worked at.  But that I had to be part of a team because most of the people working in recovery either were in recovery themselves or had been trained in a more counseling bent.  And now this new addition of doctors who generally think they know it all, although I had been humbled sufficiently and I thought I knew it all.  I was able to assume a better place. 

 

And so as I did learn about addiction and work with a bunch of counselors and work with a psychologist, who used to do some assessment of people for their psychiatric needs in this clinic, I suddenly saw that I was really just a cog in the wheel.  Perhaps the hub of all the cogs because ultimately, a doctor who was running the clinic is ultimately responsible, but without the input from my counselors and from the psychologist who worked for us, I would be at sea because I didn’t know it as well as they did, certainly from the counseling side.

 

Gwen:             So how are you staying sober during this period?  What was keeping you straight?

 

Dr. Skip:         I had a five year contract with the medical board.  I had already been sober for three or four years by the time I got back to Rhode Island.  I had done that just because quite frankly, never had the urge after that moment on the roof, but I was going to AA meetings.  When I got back to Rhode Island, I didn’t go to quite as many, but I had to go to a doctors meeting of all doctors in recovery led by a psychiatrist.  I had to submit to random urine screens; eight a month for the first year, six a month for the next three years, and four a month for the last year and I always had to show up and they were always clean. 

 

                        I had to see a counselor who was a master of a guy, in good recovery.  And so my week was filled with a group meeting with doctors, occasional AA meetings, and urine screens to monitor me and my counselor, a guy name Donald Coach, who to this day I see some 13 years into my recovery.  I remember the first time the Medical Board of Rhode Island said, ‘You’re going to have to get a counselor’ and they picked this fellow.  I guess I had gotten a little less humble and I said, ‘I need a psychiatrist, I don’t need a social worker’.  And they said, ‘This is who you’re going to go see, we like him and we hope you like him’. 

 

                        I went to see him and I said, ‘Donald, I’m sorry, but I really think I need a psychiatrist’.  He laughed and he said, ‘Well, I guess you’re stuck with me’.  And now years after my contract is up, I see him once a week because as a guy who is sober a lot more years than I am, I can sit down and get a whole raft of recovery information from him every week.  He’s really been the thing that I’ve stayed with the longest.

 

                        My practice now allows me to see people who are coming in, still using, relapsing and it serves as a constant reminder of how happy I am to be clean.  How happy I am to put my head on a pillow at night and go to sleep.  And all the wonderful aspects of recovery that people don’t even know about when they’re using.

 

Gwen:             Let me ask you this; what was it like trying to repair the relationship that you had destroyed with your wife and your children?

 

Dr. Skip:         Well my children were standoffish, they were helpful.  Interestingly enough, I’m sure they were very angry with me, but they never showed it to me so much.  They unfortunately took it out on my wife because she was the stronger one of the two of us; she is not a drinker or a drugger by any means.  She had been the strong person in the relationship.  She certainly had gotten tired of me and now in retrospect, she said she was getting near the end of her rope and had I not walked in that night, we probably didn’t have much longer to go, we now have been married for 45 years.  She’s really the hero in my story, she saved my life.

 

                        But it was interesting, the first couple of days I didn’t drink, I just laid low, was always where I said I would be, didn’t disappear into the street anymore.  She would go off to work; I would do what I could to make a little supper when she came home, or be a dutiful spouse.  And I used to walk up to her and just plant a kiss on her cheek or neck.  At first she was repulsed by me, I don’t blame her because we had long ago stopped being intimate as I turned into a disgusting individual I was at the time, certainly acting in a disgusting way.  She would flinch when I would come over and my whole point in doing that was just to get close enough to put a kiss on her neck or cheek so that she could smell me. 

 

I know that sounds crude, but I had been for so long thinking I could have a little sip of vodka in the morning and then go around all day trying to cover your mouth and act as though you hadn’t been drinking that I just wanted her to know that I wasn’t hiding anything anymore.  If you smell any alcohol on me, then leave me.  But right now all I would do was go up and do that and slowly I began to do the things people in recovery do; I told the truth, I met my commitments.  These are things that for years I hadn‘t done, but I could always lure the money and the good times over it and now the simple things were magical. 

 

And as my counselor tells me today after 45 years, ‘neither one of us is getting out of this alive’.  So occasionally I will go home….I must say that she doesn’t doubt that I’m sober anymore but I’ve got a few years yet to repay her and she reminds me every now and then.  But we’re doing wonderfully well.  We’ve had eight grandchildren we love, we travel to see them and she’s been wonderful.

 

(Break)

 

Gwen:             Dr. Skip, we are in the last part of our hour, I’d like to know, is there anything you would like to finish telling us about your own story?  And then I would appreciate very much if you could share some of the knowledge that you’ve learned, both for your own personal experience and your profession that might help other people who are going through addiction challenges.

 

Dr. Skip:         Yes, I can.  I think that just the beginning of my joy started in California when my first grandchild was born.  Each of my four children who are all doing well now certainly saw me impaired and saw me disgusting/disgusted.  And they will each report now how it wasn’t quite as bad as I try to make it out, and they’re being kind.  But the bottom line is they all suffered somewhat, well quite a bit from my addiction. 

 

                        When my first grandson was born, which is after I got sober, I remember by then people were happy I wasn’t drinking anymore, but when I would come to see Liam, my first born grandson and I love all of eight of them as I love Liam, but Liam happened to be in the right place at the right time.  I would go over and I would volunteer to take care of Liam and since I wasn’t drinking anymore, people were happy to have me do that.  And besides, nobody really wanted to see me come over, they were glad I wasn’t drinking anymore, but I wasn’t getting work, I wasn’t getting my license back.  Yeah, they were glad I was alive, but I wasn’t a heck of a lot of fun; I couldn’t even take them out for a hamburger.

 

                        Liam didn’t realize that and Liam had never seen me impaired and Liam was only about 10 or 11 months old when I started to become the regular babysitter for him.  So the only thing I could do was let my family go out and have fun without me.  And literally God love him, when ‘Pop’ was coming over, would sometimes stand in the window of their home in Redondo Beach, California and when I would pull up he would actually do pirouettes.  He would go round and round and say, ‘Yaaaa, Papa is here!’  And at that moment, nobody else wanted to see me but Liam. 

 

And now that he is eleven years old, he and I have an ongoing relationship and I invite him to come see me and talk about this.  And he’s a little young perhaps, but we have been talking about addiction and drinking for quite a while.  It’s funny because as he got older and as he noticed that I never drank, he started giving his parents hell for drinking and they are social drinkers.  And I had to pull him aside and say, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, it’s okay for them to drink, that’s not the reason I don’t drink’.   And I’ll never forget the look on my daughter’s face, ‘my son is not telling me not to drink because you don’t drink’. 

 

Gwen:             You’ve had an amazing, amazing life.  Is there anything in these last five minutes that we have on the show that you would like to share with other people that you have learned from both your experience and perhaps from your professional career?

 

Dr. Skip:         Yes, I think one of the key things that I learned by experience is surrender, end this war against drugs and alcohol.  Well known to people in 12 step programs, but surrender, which can scare so many people away, is really the key to victory in this illness.  It’s the only surrender that isn’t really a cease fire; you actually begin to heal and get better. 

 

The attempt to try to control the use is something that we all do on our way down into the descent of our addiction.  And we think we don’t really have to stop, we just have to stop a little bit or try to control it and I certainly did that for the last year of my active life.  And it was that moment which made me realize, I wasn’t like those alcoholics, I was one of them.  In retrospect looking at it that was really surrender to the power of the alcohol; I thought, ‘I just have to stop doing it, I’ve got to stop trying’. 

 

And then everything became clear; if I had one question to ask a new patient to try to determine whether or not they understood recovery, I would simply say, ‘discuss surrender’.  There are so many people who can talk the talk about surrender because they’ve been in and out of rehab, in and out of treatment, they will give you the right words, but there is something magical, at least in my experience of talking to people who have surrendered where they light up and you really can’t shut them up about surrender.  Because like me, they have in one form or another by their own way actually seen the light and decided, ‘you know what, I can live life without the drug, I can live life without the alcohol’.  And it’s just wonderful.

 

I really think that that’s surrender is the only surrender that wins the war.  Now granted, it doesn’t stop you from relapsing, but it certainly gets you over the hump and gets you starting to get better.  And fill your life with all the good things that have been gone for so long because you’ve driven them all away.  So I really think not trying to control the illness, accepting the fact that the drugs and alcohol are going to win and that you’re not, I hope that we can somehow, sometime, some talk some people into surrendering a little bit earlier.  And if they would just try a little surrender, I think it will grab them and help them the way it helped me. 

 

I don’t think it can be too stupid to get sober, but I sure as hell think you can be too smart.  And frankly the next little handbook that I’m writing is going to be entitled, “Too Simple for Smart People”, because I do know and since I deal with a lot of professionals now who are still fighting addiction, I want to shake them and I do actually say to them, ‘look, will you just let go of all this stuff’. 

 

The wonderful paradox of this illness is that if you give up, you will win and I think that’s the main message that I want.  Plus the joy of the growth that you do when you feel, whether it’s with religion with some people, or family for others, or a combination of all of the things you threw away, brings you a joy, which I don’t think people understand is lying out there.

 

When we’re using and trying to stop and I have certainly checked with many of my colleagues on this who are in recovery, somehow we begin to think that being normal is just boring.  I’m sure that’s do to our impaired thinking while we are using.  We think, ‘why do I want to go through all this pain and anguish to look like that normal couple walking over there; family, children, smiling, car, home, that’s so boring’.  And many many people, we think our dopamine, which is the main culprit I think in this illness medically, certainly one of the big ones, our dopamine is special, we don’t want to be normal, normal is boring, why the hell should I stop this, as bad as this is, I don’t want to be boring.  Well I don’t want to be normal. 

 

Well I’m here to say that normal is wonderful and I never even knew what normal was until I got into recovery, because my idea of what normal was was living high and living fast, because everything came easy to me and because I made a lot of bad decisions.  It’s a medical illness for sure.  There are aspects of the brain chemistry that make people, it’s a medical illness but dammit, it’s a medical illness that we make a lot of bad decisions on before we climb down that ladder into hell.

 

I’m for taking responsibility, but when you finally do and when you finally ‘surrender’ in this war, life is so good you can’t stand it.

 

Gwen:             And I think people when they are intelligent sometimes are less likely to surrender because they think as you did, that those are those other people, I know better, I can figure this out on my own’.  So being intelligent can be a plus or definitely a minus when it comes to sobriety.

 

Dr. Skip:         Yes, and I’m afraid my arrogance got in the way for so long, I was so blinded by it that I hope people can take a little lesson from the caulky, jerk doctor who lost it all, even though it looked like he was doing fine.

 

Gwen:             Well you certainly are honest and I’ll tell you, anyone who reads your book will find it a very heartwarming story that you tell because of your honesty.  I think many of us don’t look at ourselves in quite that way, and yet that seems to be the real key to truly becoming happy and becoming their authentic self.

 

Dr. Skip:         Well Gwen, thank you, you’ve been very kind to have me on, I really appreciate it.  It’s always an honor to be able to talk about this awful illness.  I thank you very much.

 

Gwen:             I appreciate very much too, as I say, you’re very candid and your story if very compelling. And I love a happy ending so that’s always better as well.

 

Dr. Skip, can you let our listeners know how they can learn more about you and your book?

 

Dr. Skip:         Well they can go on my website, which is www.medicalassistedrecovery.com  and they can of course get it on Amazon, they can get it on iTunes; any number of electronic outlets will have it.  Barnes & Noble’s carries it.  But going to my website www.medicalassistedrecovery.com which is the name of my clinic; we have blogs, videos and a whole bunch of stuff.  I would encourage people to contact me on the website, I would be more than happy to talk to anybody at any time about their addiction.

 

Gwen:             Great and the book is called, “From Harvard to Hell and Back.”

 

Dr. Skip:         I had a great co-author by the way, Kerry Zukus, he’s written 45 books and he helped make that story readable.

 

Gwen:             Yes, he did.  The very first page just grabbed me and the rest of the book did not disappoint. 

 

 

 

ACROBADDICT

 

Host:               Gwen Carden 

Guest:             Joe Putignano

 

                       

 

Gwen:             Gymnast, Joe Putignano was on his way to Olympic glory when for a decade his weakness for drugs took him down the darkest of dark paths into the depths of hell.  In a matter of a few years he went from a driven but depressed young teenage boy to a mere shadow of himself.  Joe tempted death repeatedly with reckless behavior and total disregard for his life or for the feelings of those who cared for him. 

 

                        Even as he somehow managed to bounce back time and again after living in a homeless shelter, nearly dying and eventually getting himself together enough to be cast in a Broadway show, he continued to stick needles into his battered body.  After obtaining sobriety, Joe went on to become Cirque du Soleil’s ‘Crystal Man’ in the Las Vegas show, ‘Totem’. 

 

No one, least of all Joe could explain how he is alive today, seven years after getting clean.  Now Joe has chronicled his astounding life in his new book, “Accrobadicct” and Joe is here to talk to us about it and I can’t wait because his is one of the most compelling, riveting books I have ever read.  It was hard to put down but at times I would have to put it down because it was so intense, but then I would have to pick it back up because I wanted to know what was going to happen next and it was a real rollercoaster read.   

 

Welcome to the show, Joe.

 

Joe:                 Thank you, Gwen, thanks for having me.

 

Gwen:             I’m delighted.  Joe, let’s start by talking a little bit about your early life as a child before illicit drugs came into it.  How did you discover gymnastics? 

 

Joe:                 I was watching the 1984 Olympic and I believe it was Mary Lou Retton or Bart Conner, one of them and it was that one time in my life where I truly believe God came into the room and said, ‘This is what you’re going to do for the rest of your life’.  And I immediately pulled the cushions off the couch and I was trying to flip and mimic exactly what I saw on television.  And my brothers and sisters, ‘You’re going to hurt yourself, stop’!  It was interesting because I couldn’t stop, I knew somewhere inside of me that this is what I was going to do. 

 

And at first I wasn’t very good at it and I did fall many times but I kept trying it and I got better and better and better.  And it was really interesting because when I did something that I didn’t think I could do, like a backflip or something, it filled me with this euphoric sense of accomplishment.  And then I wanted more of it and more of it and that started off on my deep passion and love for gymnastics.

 

Gwen:             And you began competing and doing pretty well in competitions as a child didn’t you?

 

Joe:                 Yes, it all happened very quickly.  So it was interesting because it was kind of all I knew.  At a very early age, I would say 8 or 9, once I showed my parents they couldn’t believe it.  They owned a restaurant and they didn’t get home until very late at night and I remember waiting up for them, it was 2:00 o’clock in the morning to show them what I could do.  And the next day they put me in gymnastics class and then that week I was put on the pre-team.  And then I did well there and immediately started competing and it changed my entire life from the beginning. 

 

Because my childhood wasn’t like those who I knew, other kids at school you know they always talked about sitcoms or video games they were playing, but what I knew was to go to school, come home and go to gymnastics.  And I did start to compete very early, I loved it.  I mean I didn’t like competing so much but I did love practicing because of that sense of freedom that most people find within athletics. 

 

And then when I was 11 years old I went to the Olympic Training Center and that was the time I knew that I was doing pretty good in the sport.  It was like I may have a future in this, a big future if I continue on this path.  And I did return again to the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs when I was 13.

 

Gwen:             So you had dreams of being in the Olympics and you also had a good chance of being in the Olympics with your gifts and your talents.

 

Joe:                 Yeah, I would say athletics again, is difficult to judge because it takes an entire lifetime to get to this one position, which for a gymnast is the Olympics.  It’s the greatest achievement.  And injuries can happen and all this stuff and early on for me I did have an enormous roadblock, terrible terrible asthma.  And it’s weird because it was very seasonal for me and I don’t know if anybody out there is suffering with asthma, but definitely I’m a fall.  And I’m from the east coast so when the trees would start to die I couldn’t breathe.  And my parents thought it was stress and stress may have contributed to my asthma but it was ending me up in the hospital, not just for an emergency room visit but for long periods of time. 

 

And as a gymnast you can’t really take time off.  And not only laying in a hospital bed but they’re putting me on prednisone, which is a steroid, which kind of bloats the body.  Actually a really useful medication but it’s really terrible on the body.

 

So I would get out of shape so quickly.  I remember every time I left the hospital, I would go back to the gym and I would literally have to fight to get back into shape.  But I was determined, but I had done it so many times it became normal.  Breathing in athletics, its primary, you have to breathe.  So to have my lungs not working properly was an extremely challenging thing to go through.

 

Gwen:             It’s interesting though that early experience with having your body be in bad shape and fighting its way back kind of became a pattern, which we’ll talk about a little bit later on.  But it was kind of even teaching at a very early age that the body can come back eventually, but it does of course it will always have its limits.

 

                        What was going on though within your home, because that’s really a crucial part of this story that’s going to unravel during the course of the hour?  In addition to all the practicing and the successes you were having the illness you were fighting, what else was happening in your family that maybe was a little bit of a challenge for you?

 

Joe:                 My parents owned a restaurant, a bar actually outside of Boston.  And because they owned it they had to be there all the time and my sister was the bartender and my brother was the chef, my other older sister was a cocktail waitress.  So all my adult interaction was around alcohol and after gymnastics class I would sit at the bar and do my homework at a very very early age because it was rush hour; my class would get out at 8:30 and the restaurant was jammed packed so my mom couldn’t bring me home.  And so I would sit there at the bar. 

 

I liked it when I was younger because I felt like a celebrity, the customers knew me, but the older I got the more I could see how bad alcohol was.  And as this was happening my parents started to drink a lot, you know they started to participate in their own restaurant and they had very very bad drinking problems.  I didn’t notice this until a little bit later until I noticed that everything was evolving around alcohol.  And it made me hate it. 

 

I swore to myself I would never drink.  My mom had DUI’s, I believe my dad did as well but I’m not positive, my brother at 17 years old got in a horrible drunk driving accident where he had to have the jaws of life get him out.  He was in the Intensive Care Unit and they had to reconstruct his face because of the accident.  So all of these terrible things were happening around alcohol; the parties, the restaurant, alcohol moved back into the home and there were parties all the time, which meant there were police. 

 

I hated it, I mean I just wanted…it’s very difficult and I’m sure anybody who is listening and who has parents who are alcoholics, I’m not saying my parents didn’t love me because alcoholism is the kind of disease that people who have it, they don’t know they have it.  So my parents did love me, but when they’re drunk and they’re giving you this love it’s very confusing as a child.  Because the concept of love is off a bit, so you start to disbelieve the people around you.  They were so moody; you didn’t know if they were going to wake up hung over or angry or confused. 

 

The alcoholism definitely broke my family and by the time I think I was 13, my brothers and sisters had moved out and my mother and father separated.  So I lived alone with my mom and I watched her really drink excessively to try to fill the broken pieces of her heart.  She was still in love with my dad and it was very confusing because they both worked in the same restaurant.  So when I was doing my homework I would see my father at one end of the bar and my mother at the other end of the bar.  He was focused on his drink and my mother was focused on him.  My mother and I never spoke about this but we know, I mean she knew I knew but I couldn’t ask because it would have opened up a wound that as a child I didn’t think she wanted to put upon me.

 

Gwen:             So you have the alcoholism in your home and you have the tremendous successes in your gymnastics.  But also your social life was hard for you because from what I read in your book you just didn’t feel that you fit in.  Was that also in this mix that was going to ultimately have a bad outcome?

 

Joe:                 Yeah, being an athlete all my time was focused on gymnastics so I didn’t have the same relationships with kids at school.  And I definitely felt like an outsider, like an alien.  It’s funny, gymnastics isn’t a popular sport, it’s very difficult, I was teased endlessly for it, which was interesting because I could do more than the other kids.  Like football and soccer were popular but I was excelling in my sport on an individual level, but when I would go to school I wouldn’t get the same kind of recognition, instead I got made fun of and it definitely isolated me. 

 

Yeah, it broke me.  And then when I would go home with this emotion to kind of seek parental advice or care I was getting that alcoholism instead.  So my only solution was to go to gymnastics, which definitely became what I like to call, ‘my church’ even though I’m not very religious because it was a safe place where I felt like I was doing what I was intended to do.  And that was really my own salvation I had at the time.

 

Gwen:             Right, because socially at school you were not accepted.  I believe you were short in stature and the asthma had affected your voice in such a way that it wasn’t as deep; as boys voices deepened, yours did not.   The kids had no appreciation for the fact that gymnastics takes even more strength and skill than any jock on the field would ever be exhibiting.  Gymnastics grounded you in a way that nothing else seemed to be grounding you.  Is that correct?

 

Joe:                 Yes, I was definitely the shortest one in the class with a very squeaky voice.  Yeah, it was difficult.  I know most people in retrospect look back at their childhood and can say it was a difficult childhood, which is great because it teaches us many things on a spiritual level.  But as we go through it, we can kind of see the difficulties we had in order to create coping mechanisms later on in life, which as an adult we tend to suffer from.  And in my case this is definitely what happened.

 

                        I’d like to say I don’t blame anybody for what I did because I made the choices.  But there are contributions in our life which teach us coping mechanisms and not every coping mechanism is a positive one.

 

Gwen:             Right, exactly. 

 

Joe:                 It was a perfect storm for me.

 

Gwen:             It sure was.

 

(Break)

 

Gwen:             Before the break, Joe you were telling us about your early years when you began honing your gymnastic talents and also about some of the external factors that were becoming a perfect storm for you to ultimately become a drug abuser.

 

                        So let’s move into a little bit about how drugs entered your life and maybe what they did for you that made them feel like maybe they were okay for you.

 

Joe:                 Yes, it was very interesting because as I was talking about before, I did suffer from asthma.  And it’s very unusual for me because I was an athlete and I was trying to breath and I would go to the emergency room and they would give me medicine and then I could breathe.  And it was like day and night, I was suffering on the inside, I couldn’t breathe, everything hurt, and then after the medicine I was fine.  I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing’!  I love to talk about that because that kind of explains later on when I had my first drink how I felt on an emotional and psychological level. 

 

I think I was like 15 or 16 and as I said earlier, I hated alcohol, I saw the damage it did throughout my entire family.  The other kids at school started to drink and because my parents were at the restaurant I had a lot of freedom.  And we actually had a lot of booze in the house because they were getting free booze all the time and they would bring it home. 

 

So I would have a few of my friends over and they would drink and I would clean up after them.  And it didn’t seem when they were doing it, it didn’t seem bad, it just would seem like they would have a few drinks or a few beers and they were laughing.  I wanted to laugh too, I wanted to be a part of this, but I knew it was going to affect my gymnastics because I had seen other kids on the gymnastics team who started drinking, their athletics declined.

 

I love to talk about the pressure of athletics because in a sport like gymnastics you are judged for what you do.  You get a score and everyone can see your scores and this crazed kind of mindset of perfectionism.  Because if you don’t get, and back then it was a perfect 10, than that means there’s something wrong, you did something wrong, you did something wrong and everyone can see this.  That kind of perfectionism started to bleed into every facet of my life.  And I was putting myself under a tremendous amount of pressure to be the best, to be perfect, because ultimately you get a better score, which means you’ve avoided shame, which is an impossible feat.  Nobody is perfect, it’s impossible, so basically you’re setting yourself up for this huge failure. 

 

But psychologically I did not know that and I had my first drink and it was exactly like the asthma medication, it was the most beautiful moment at that point in my life because that perfectionism melted.  I didn’t have to be the best, I didn’t care what my parents were doing, my friends liked me more and we had fun.  If Joe didn’t have to be the gymnast, he could just be human.  It was such a relief, like I still when I hear other alcoholics describe this moment, their first drink, I can relate on such a level, it always gets me excited because, ‘Yes, I’m human and I’m here’.  We often say, ‘We’ve arrived’. 

 

I drank and this became a solution in the same way that when I couldn’t breathe, I took my inhaler, so when things got too tough, I had a drink.  And back then it was just fun, high school kids experiment, I think there’s nothing wrong with it, its natural, we all did it.  I started to do it a little bit more though; I noticed I was the first person to pick up a beer and the last person to put it down.  And I still had gymnastics class on the weekend, it wasn’t affecting that at first so I kind of felt like I was getting away with something.  I also didn’t want to tell my parents or my brother, who was a huge drinker who always wanted me to drink because they knew how much I hated alcohol and I didn’t want them knowing I actually liked something they liked.  As children we try to go against our parents and I didn’t want them to know that they were on to something, like I could actually appreciate something they were doing.

 

However, this is very important, I believe because my whole life I had seen how alcohol can spiral out of control that I had the best knowledge to prevent alcoholic drinking, to prevent things from going bad because I had seen it all.  I mean you don’t get a better learning experience than that, I grew up in a bar.

 

Gwen:             It isn’t funny, but it is interesting the irony of it.

 

Joe:                 Completely.  So I wasn’t going to become an alcoholic, I knew exactly what not to do, all of the alcoholic clichés we tell ourselves, don’t drink in the morning, don’t drink alone, I love that one.  My brother came to me once and he said, and he was very young, he’s like, ‘you’re not an alcoholic if you can go without drinking for seven days’.  It’s funny when we hear misinformation because we believe it and so when I heard that I was like, ‘Oh, well if I can go for seven days then I don’t have a problem’.  Most people can go seven days at first, before the addiction gets progressive.  So I had all this misinformation around me.  Because I saw how bad they were I was keeping it at arm’s length thinking, ‘I’ll never be as bad as them, I won’t be as bad as them’. 

 

                        But what did happen is pot came into the mix.  Again, I saw my friends smoking pot, it wasn’t like refer madness, it wasn’t like the way I was taught in health class, that you’re going to smoke weed and you’re going to jump out a building. 

 

Gwen:             Right.

 

Joe:                 I always get upset when I share scare tactics like that because it’s not how it was. I like to be informed actually how it is.  And what happened was I laughed and food tasted better, it seemed harmless.  And it was that kind of harmless fun in the beginning and it made me look at the stuff they were teaching me in health class and I said, ‘This isn’t how you guys were explaining it, I wonder if the other drugs are different then, I wonder if they’re exaggerating about cocaine and acid and things like that’.  Although I’m never going to try it, I mean to me the line was drawn in the sand; you can drink on the weekends, you can smoke pot sometimes, but gymnastics comes first because this is what saved you.

 

                        It’s very important because in my book I know I talk about how I feel like drugs saved my life.  And I know what a strange statement that is but those who are addicted might agree.  I was so depressed from the perfectionism, from being an outsider that they gave me hope to carry on.  And I feel like without that kind of shift in consciousness, that kind of moment of euphoria, I may have tried to kill myself at that age.

 

Gwen:             As a teenager?

 

Joe:                 As a teenager, yes.  It’s interesting, I heard someone speak once and they said, ‘If you drive through America you see a lot of liquor stores and a lot of churches because they both give people hope’.   Yes, and that’s true, that maybe today isn’t good but when I do this thing I believe that I’m free and tomorrow could be better.  And that is exactly what it did for me and so in one way I believe they did save my life at the time. 

 

Gwen:             And you did move on to other drugs like ecstasy, at what point did it start escalating beyond say on the weekends, when did it start getting to be a problem?

 

Joe:                 I definitely started drinking alcohol pretty quickly, all those rules that I had I stepped over.  And it was that 90’s rave era and I went to my first rave, it was probably 1996 and I took my first ecstasy and it was like heaven crashed into the earth.  It changed my entire life.  And a rave is very very opposite of what you would expect from a gymnastics competition.  So this was like, ‘Oh my God, this culture is amazing’ and from that moment that became, drug seeking became the new gymnastics for me and that became the top of the list. 

 

And it happened so fast for me I cannot even express it.  It was like one day this was what was important to me and the next, this was. So I chased that culture for a long time and it was within that element I started doing acid and K and crystal and ecstasy all thinking it was recreational in face.  But it wasn’t because it started to affect my life very quickly; I was missing gymnastics class and you know, changing my behavior because chemicals do change our perception and our behavior and I started to getting moody and fighting with my parents. 

 

I was pierced from head to toe, which was a huge problem competing because you get deductions for having body piercings.  But I didn’t care; I was starting to get that almost antagonistic childhood rebellion.  Like I’m going to change the world and this is what I stand for now, not respecting anything around me.  And really I believed I was finding myself.  So my mother, who was like, ‘I don’t know what’s happening to you’ and my response was, ‘I’m finding myself, leave me alone, this is what’s important to me’. 

 

And yet things really started to spiral out of control and at that time I was 16, 17 and I knew I wasn’t going to the Olympics, I knew I missed my chance.  There’s a moment in every athletes life where we have to accept reality; I did good in nationals but I knew it was over and that opened the door, it was like ‘Okay, now for the rest of my life, every day I will wake up a failure’ because I had one goal, one dream and it’s never going to happen.  And when you do, for me I went on an extremely long road to destroy my life.

 

(Break)

 

Gwen:             Joe, before the break you were describing how you began drinking alcohol and you experimented with some drugs at raves.  At one point in your life though your drug taking got really serious and in part you mentioned before having to do with the fact that you realized you weren’t going to the Olympics, it had been your only dream and you were kind of a lost soul.  Let’s talk a little bit about when life and drug addiction got really tough.

 

Joe:                 For me it got tough quickly.  I did go to college and I competed on the men’s gymnastics team.  And I originally went to college because it was a place to live, I did not want to get an education, I just wanted to get out of my mother’s house because two addicts can’t really live under the same roof peacefully.  And I met a cocaine dealer and eventually started doing lots of coke.  It’s funny, as an addict we always find them.  And it really got bad very quickly, it was the kind of addiction where I didn’t want to get out of bed without it, it’s kind of the same way I am with coffee now. 

 

                        Yes, it’s interesting because I didn’t have any energy unless I had coke and I was only a freshman.  But I was going back and forth to Boston and all these rave kids, we started taking benzo’s, it was very big where I was from; we were taking klonopin, valium and xanax, lots of them, which makes you very tired.  So of course you need more coke.  So that was my introduction to benzo’s and I loved them because they make you feel calm and peaceful and everything is okay, which was really what was missing from my life. 

 

And my cocaine use got really bad and I started to talk with a counselor at the college because I realized, I wasn’t going to any classes, I had all F’s and the gymnastics team, which I was getting grants for, they were started to get really worried about me.  I mean everybody knew my usage, it was pretty public.

 

Gwen:             So you were on the gymnastics team at your college and using all these drugs pretty regularly?

 

Joe:                 Yes, oh yes, I was missing practice and you live on campus and so everybody knows each other’s life style, it’s a small private college.  She asked if I wanted to go to a rehab and said I could try it out.  Well yeah, this has been ongoing for a long time, ‘Yes, I would like to try it’.  And that was my first attempt at any sort of recovery.

 

                        What I found out in the rehab is that I really didn’t have a problem because I wasn’t ready to put the drugs down.  And it was very interesting because I remember I left against medical advice on the fourth day and the counselor told me, ‘You will be back here someday as a heroin addict’ and was like, oh my God, that’s the worst thing you could ever say to somebody.  But I left on the fourth day and the college did not like this so they kicked me out and said you have to finish treatment if we’re going to allow you back in.

 

                        So I went into another treatment and I found a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist ended up putting me on tons of medication and I knew what I was doing at this point, I became very manipulative.  I was basically guiding her into give me benzo’s and I succeeded.  I knew exactly what I was doing and she started giving me klonopins and now I know I’m an addict and I’m getting a prescription for these with a refill.  And I manipulated this woman down to getting the highest milligram, free from the state.

 

And I was taking oh my gosh, I was taking about 10 as soon as I would wake up, getting more from people from Boston, and I started to have seizures without the medication.  I was blacking out all the time; I was on campus, so this was in public so I was getting in trouble, there were cops.  So eventually I got kicked out of college, lost my scholarship grant and everything.  I couldn’t go back home.  Every time I had gone back home during the college breaks my mom would call the cops on me because I became violent.  I mean this was a dramatic jump from where I was. 

 

Then I was homeless and I had to sleep outside in the park near the school.  I also would stay on drug dealers couches; I always, always stayed too long.  You know I could tell and they would be like, ‘Okay, it’s time for you to go’.  And I lost all my friends at that time because my behavior was so unpredictable.  And during that time I traveled the country, I kept getting more and more pills.  I kept calling the psychiatrist and telling her all of the addictive things; people stole them, and this and this and this.  And then something terrible happened. 

 

So I had been doing this for about a year-and-a-half, my parents didn’t know if I was alive anymore, I would call collect, I was in homeless shelters, everything to make it work because it was still a solution. And then one time I ended up back at home in Boston and I did my usual, I had all my pills and I saw a doctor because I wanted more and he gave me painkillers. 

 

And that night I took all my pills, I took the painkillers; I was told and this was in the book that somebody found me and they dropped me off at home and my mom found me and I was foaming at the mouth.  And apparently my heart stopped and so they had to resuscitate me and put me in the ambulance and I woke up in another rehab.  This had been my fourth rehab.  The doctor told me that my heart stopped twice and I had a cardiac death, which still wasn’t enough to make me stop.  It kind of made me feel like I had beat death, like I was unstoppable.  The kind of feeling all of us had in our twenties.

 

This went on for so long, my entire life fell apart.  Like I wanted to die but I was afraid to die, so that addiction is that place between life and death.

 

Gwen:             So when did heroin come into your life?

 

Joe:                 Heroin didn’t come in until a little bit later.  I actually learned if every time I took a pill something bad was going to happen, so I was like, ‘I have to stop taking these pills. And I was trying to get clean, like I was making attempts; I was going to 12-step meetings. 

 

I moved to New York City and I got a job as a waiter and I noticed he had a peculiar behavior.  Oh, that’s painkiller behavior, I know it; he was itchy and he was nodding out.  And I was right, he had heroin and I had been warned so many times from people not to do heroin.  But warnings mean nothing to a person like me and I started sniffing heroin recreationally.  And I know that is an oxymoron because there is no such thing as recreational heroin use. 

 

We’d like to think it but it was very textbook; for two years I sniffed it and on the second year I started shooting it.  That drug, and I know this is important now because heroin is really on the rise again, which is kind of shocking to me.  But he did everything for me that I ever wanted.  Like the pain I felt inside, the depression, the anxiety, the regret, it was gone, I felt loved, I felt like God was holding me.  So I was never, ever, ever going to live a life without it.  I didn’t want a life, I didn’t want a job, I didn’t want love because I had heroin, like why do I need anything else.

 

Gwen:             So did you lose jobs, did you lose friends, did you lose places to live, was your health going downhill?

 

Joe:                 Yes, every horrible addict thing you can think of happened.  I lost friends from heroin.  It’s weird, it’s not a party drug, you know so it wasn’t like the ‘70’s that I hear about, I wasn’t there but you know where there were 10 people shooting dope in a room, it was very lonely.  It was either me and one other person or just me.  But I really did look…I was skinny, I had track marks.  I managed to keep jobs; I got very lucky in life where people would see the innocence in me, I look very young for my age, I always have.  And I do look like the boy from next door, very honest, and I used that, this was a huge manipulation for me because were like, ‘Joe, no, he’s not an addict, look at him!’  And I was very kind.  So I managed to keep jobs but I definitely had to manipulate.

 

                        Eventually I started working at “The New York Times”, which is incredible I know, incredible because of someone like me basically.  And again, I did have some moments of intelligence; I had some moments of being normal.  I always like to tell people, addicts don’t commit to a lifestyle of crime on purpose; we are always trying to better ourselves.  I would have moments where I would like, ‘Get it together, you’re going to use four times a day, you’re going to take your medicine, but you can’t look high, you have to go to work, you’re going to achieve something, you can fix this’. 

 

Gwen:             Despite all of this and what you were doing to your body, you ended up being in a show at the Metropolitan Opera, on Broadway and this whole time you’re still shooting up, is that right?

 

Joe:                 Right, yes.  It was extremely difficult, but I believe all my training in gymnastics sort of guided me on this unusual path.  Because I was so good at using the body mechanics, it was like second nature that no matter how high I was I was able to go out there on stage and perform and nobody knew.  And I was able to handle the withdrawal because it was just like doing gymnastics; that injury, that sickness, that kind of really difficult athletic pain.  It just seemed so familiar, so it was like wow this is just another level of gymnastics. 

 

And it was very sad because I didn’t even know as a gymnast you could perform and I left “The New York Times”, they actually sent me to rehab, which was wonderful.  I got a little bit of sobriety and I started doing gymnastics and being a performer and I did end up on Broadway.  I had two years clean and this Broadway job was righting that wrong that regret, that Olympic failure.  It was kind of second best and the show was closing, it was a Bob Dylan show and I was bad, I didn’t have coping skills.  I remember shooting up in the Broadway theatre bathroom to, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.”

 

Gwen:             Kind of ironic!

 

Joe:                 Everyone once and awhile our life has perfect synchronicity to the music around us and that was that moment where it was like, wow.

 

(Break)

 

Gwen:             When we broke a few minutes ago, Joe was talking about the day or the night that he was shooting up in the bathroom of a Broadway theatre after he had learned that the show was closing.  Obviously, since Joe has written a book, he’s talking with me today, he’s gotten clean, his life is a whole lot better.  And as I mentioned at the top of the show he was actually a featured performer in Cirque du Soleil. 

 

                        Joe, would you take a few minutes to tell us how you turned your life around and a little bit about what life is like for you today?

 

Joe:                 Yes, that time I did get high at the Broadway job, it lasted about a week and that was the last time I used.  I had two years clean before that so I knew what sobriety was like I just didn’t have really good coping skills.  And the obsession never left me; I was going to 12-step meetings every day.  And everyone was telling me that the obsession will leave you, but it hadn’t. 

 

So when I did relapse, I realized something important that I actually liked being sober better because well A. I felt better because heroin made me sick all of the time and B. I started to get things back in my life that I really admired and appreciated.  So I went back to 12-step meetings and I did what so many people who relapsed have to do, it is courageous, so if you’re out there still struggling and I completely understand. 

 

And as I said, I have one day clean and I got back on the horse and worked so hard at staying clean.  I made it my focus, I went to meetings, I did my step work.  And life did get better again, not wonderful, but better.  And I continued to perform.  It was really incredible because I got to work with Cirque du Soleil and as you were saying, I was, ‘The Crystal Man’, it was a character I got to develop with the Director, Robert Lapage. 

 

It was really wonderful because the show is about evolution and we did tie my sobriety into it as this spark of light, this change that comes down as spiritual evolution.  So every night I got to wear this costume of 5,000 glass mirrors and I got to think of my sobriety.  And to offer that kind of hope that those of us in recovery, or those of us that have been touched by addicts or changed by them try to inspire others to never give up, to keep going.  Because that is really what my character embodied. 

 

So it was really wonderful and I did that show for 3 ½ years; unfortunately I did get injured pretty badly, which I have had two shoulder surgeries on.  And coming up actually soon on CNN with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, we are doing a show on sobriety and surgery because I’m a heroin addict and I can’t take pain killers.  And I know many people in recovery can and they do take them and they’re okay, but for someone like me, if you read my book you’ll see if I have one opiate, that obsession that I spoke about before, it does return for me and I’m powerless.  And the obsession for myself is gone. 

 

It’s been very interesting, I did write my book, “Accrobadicct” while I was on tour with Cirque du Soleil and had been able to talk about heroin addiction and recovery.  I’ve been very lucky with it because I got to do Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay and a lot of really extraordinary things to kind of give that message out to recovering addicts, that it’s possible.  Because I know when you’re in that addiction it feels hopeless, absolutely hopeless. 

 

So my message is seriously, don’t give up, no matter how many times you fail, keep trying!

 

Gwen:             Because you tried and failed and tried and failed and tried and failed, I mean this went on.  The heroin addiction was how many years?

 

Joe:                 About 10 years, about 10 years give or take.

 

Gwen:             So you made a lot of attempts and the fact that you continued trying says something about your will to live.  But I also find it interesting and you just mentioned it a minute ago about the obsession does get better.  If you could elaborate just a little bit on that for people because that I would think would give people hope, that I’m not always going to feel this compelled.

 

Joe:                 Yes, it’s very interesting, if you’re in active addiction there’s much like there’s a demon inside of you, which I do describe in my book.  It’s like you’re being possessed and you cannot see any other way out because it’s inside of you.  But over time your brain mechanics will rewire themselves, you’ll have different pleasure, but that takes time in order to do that.  It’s like muscle memory.  So over time you will forget what that felt like and the obsession will get lifted. 

 

Unfortunately, it does take a long time, but it does happen, so you have to allow it.  And just imagine what your life will feel like when you’re free from that demon.  It’s definitely extraordinary.  And it doesn’t mean that life is going to be roses, life is always going to be life, but you are free from that obsession, which is really astounding.

 

Gwen:             And I think you also mentioned a few minutes ago about that pretty bad shoulder injury.  Is your career in gymnastics over because of that and if so, what’s ahead for you?

 

Joe:                 Sadly we just found out last week from the surgeon, it is over; I won’t be able to go back to athletics like I was.  Like I just said, life isn’t always roses; we have to deal with upsets and stuff, so I’m going to go back to school to be a PA, a physician’s assistant.  And I still am going to perform, just not acrobatically.  And I am writing a second book, which is not recovery related, it is more of a fiction.

 

                        So things still happen, you know life will still go on.  And I know many people who are performers who do get injured that can go on.  It is heartbreaking for me on a sober aspect because gymnastics is kind of what saved me in a way. But I have enough recovery now that if it’s taken away from me, I have enough tools that I will be able to stay sober without it.

 

Gwen:             Joe, we’re coming to the end of our show, can you tell listeners quickly how they can get a copy of your book, “Accrobadicct”?

 

Joe:                 Yes, you can get it on Amazon, through eBook Kindle, or hard copy you can get it at Barnes & Noble and I believe any local bookstore should have it in the addiction section.  If you just Google it online or even go in and ask for it.

 

 

 

Gwen:             And people are going to find out when they read your book what an amazing writer you are too and I know you wrote that book yourself.