Saving Us

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There is a quote attributed to Louis L’Amour that says, “There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.”

I keep that quote on my desk, and every morning I read it and say, “Louie, ain’t that the friggin’ truth.”

Sixteen years ago, the world I’d always trusted to be solid and good came crashing down on me. I had been engaged for about five days when I discovered that the man I loved had a substance abuse problem. Well, actually, I didn’t discover he had a substance abuse problem right then, I just learned that something was terribly wrong and making him scared to death.

It took a year of neurotic behavior, obsessive doctor visits, psychotherapy, extreme weight loss, multiple occasions of drug-use discovery and severe panic attacks until we both learned that his addiction was slowly killing our relationship—which by then had become a marriage.

Why did I marry my fiancé just as I was learning he had a substance abuse problem? First, I loved him. Second, I had never met an addict before and had no idea what I was in for. He didn’t seem like any addicts you see on TV: He went to work. He helped around the house. He was brilliant and funny. He was also tortured. And I was absolutely certain that I could love him enough to save him.

When he started to—what’s the clinical term? Oh yeah, freak out because he felt as if he was choking and became convinced that he had throat cancer, we saw the best ENT in Atlanta. He attributed the choking feeling to reflux and prescribed medication. Didn’t help. We saw an orthopedist who specialized in necks. Nothing there. We saw a chiropractor, a massage therapist and a psychiatrist renowned for treating anxiety-induced addiction. We took yoga and behavior-modification; we held hands and cried and went to couples therapy every week.

Pretty soon I realized I had a problem—I wasn’t able to separate myself from my husband. Whatever he was feeling, I was feeling, and soon my throat was closing up on me. Within months I, too, had dropped 10 pounds. I was having panic attacks like the one at Home Depot, huddled on the floor in an aisle while they paged my husband over the PA. This was not like me—responsible, confident, Type-A. I began going to therapy myself.

It was the worst first year of marriage I could imagine. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.