Timothy's Law
That opened a discussion of Timothy's Law, insurance parity legislation that has been consitently blocked in New York state by the Republican-controlled Senate leadership despite widespread support in the Democrat-controlled state Assembly. Timothy O'Clair was a 12-year-old boy suffering from mental illness whose parents were forced to place him into the state's foster care system because their insurance coverage was inadequate to pay for appropriate care for his Depression, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and Oppositional Defiance Disorder. He hung himself in his bedroom closet on a visit home a few weeks before his thirteenth birthday. Deirdre had recently testified on behalf of passage of the law in Albany.
We touched on how recovery, as with any disease, often takes repeated treatments. When Amber first went into rehab in the early Eighties, she said, no one knew how to address an addiction to "powdered drugs." She was loaded up with pills, booze and methadone.
"They had me so high because they didn't know. They gave me too much methadone, then they gave me valiums, they gave me something to sleep at night. So it doesn't go; you get addicted to something else. And when you're dually addicted, you may kick one thing and seem fine but a week later, goombatz okay, the pills or something kicks in and you're right back where you started from and you don't know why you used again."
She mentioned one drug rehab she was in where patients earned drinking privileges after a certain period of clean time "until they realized you might just as well smoke crack."
Anne and Amber started discussing the stigma that family members of alcoholics and addicts feel.
"This is the part that gets me mad," Amber said. "It has nothing to do with the person who is trying to get better. It has to do with the other people because they're embarrassed. They're embarrassed because someone may say, 'Well, you raised them.' It goes back genetically."
They agreed that a person didn't have to be a "falling-down drunk" to be an alcoholic, and that there's a widespread misperception that people who just drink beer aren't alcoholics.
"It's not what you drink, it's how you drink," Amber said. "There are weekend alcoholics who have two cans of beer but the guy will crush the can on his wife's head when he's done with it. Alcoholics are people who can't have a couple of drinks and put it down. When they drink, they drink to get blasted."
We discussed how difficult it was, sometimes, to stay away from having "just one" beer.
"[Amber] said when grandma, my mother, died, 'You think I didn't want to have a beer with the guys?' " Anne said. "And then when dad, Bob, died ..."
"You know, to get over the grief and this and that," Amber said. "Once you pick up, kiss it goodby because it's all over."
Amber stopped drinking in 1986, and doing drugs in 1988.
"I don't take an aspirin now. I get a headache, I lay on the couch with a rag over my face or, like the old Italians do, with a potato on my head. It has something to do with the postassium, or the folic acid."
Teo was ready to leave; they wanted to beat the holiday traffic back to Connecticut. I asked Amber if we could talk some more. Sure, she said, she came down every Saturday. As she walked to their car, Anne called out instructions to do this and that, and to rest, when she got home.