Low life
In a pickle
Jeffrey Bernard
Iread that a member of the General Medical Council has called on his col- leagues for quicker identification and treat- 'neat for alcoholic doctors. The article, in the r; %Ines, was headed 'Alcoholic Doctor 0.,-.,8 "ow He Fought Back'. There are two '"Lnp that interest me here: firstly the se business of identifying an alcoholic and eondly the matter of fighting back. How . fon, earth they can have trouble in not identi- Yiing an alcoholic immediately, heaven alone knows. I can spot one a mile away. But Could they spot my friend Keith I wonder? They must be blind as bats. AnYay, Keith woke up one day sitting in Wwhit darkness. He groped around for a fille and realised slowly that he was in a '
critherna. Further groping got him to an exit dor and he eventually got out on to the street. He didn't know what town he was in but made his way to a pub where, with great embarrassment, he asked the barman where he was. 'Dover', he was told. Then it all came back to him. 'Christ Almighty,' he said. 'I got married' yesterday.' I can put the General Medical Council in touch with several Keiths, but I suppose only the 3,000 out of 81,000 alcoholic doctors in this coun- try would be able to identify them quickly.
But we must help the medical profession and give them some cluse. A man 1 know once went to a literary booze-up and walk- ed over to a glass fronted bookcase to see what sort of stuff his host had to read. To his amazement there were no books in the case, only John Raymond standing there in a stupor. I myself once woke up in Cowes of all places and I have even woken up in a drawer at the bottom of a wardrobe. That was fairly frightening. Try opening a drawer from the inside. It's quite tricky. Then we have our hero on the Mirror. I've mentioned him before but, for the benefit of doctors, he is worth recalling. He-broke into a pickle factory one night with his girlfriend with the purpose of laying her and fell into a vat of chutney. Then we have the doctors themselves. There were two of them, patients like myself in 1972 in Max Glatt's ward in St Bernard's Hospital. One of them was addicted to barbiturates. He didn't interest me, no drug addicts do, but I asked the alcoholic doctor how did he first know he was an alcoholic and he told me, 'When I sprayed vaginal deodorant on a man's face.'
But the business of the doctor telling how he 'fought back' gets me. I fought back too. I fought back from two and a half years of the most boring, depressing desola- tion of sobriety you can imagine. I wouldn't, go on the wagon again for all the tea in China. For two and a half years I felt apart from the human race. The day 1 cracked in 1976 I caned round to my friend Eva and we cracked a bottle of scotch. Then we went round to the Dover Castle always full of doctors — and we met up eventually with Frank Norman and drank more scotch. After all those years a bottle of the stuff is damn nigh a killer. Of course it is poison. Frank took me to the Con- naught for breakfast the next day and I thought I was going to die. The fact that I'm here now and that Eva and Frank are dead seems unfair.
To go back to the doctors: they apparent- ly consider heavy drinking to be more than four pints of beer a day, or four doubles or a bottle of wine a day. I should have thought that to be the national average lunchtime consumption. But just listen to this. 'I do not remember ever making a have a feeling of déjà mange.' mistake, but one of the worst aspects of alcoholism is that you black out. One day I had to ring up the surgery to make sure I had done one of my visits the night before.'
Well, surprise, surprise. What I want to know is, if he blacked out how the hell does he know he never ever made a mistake? The wrong leg off? I know I've had the wrong leg over because I too have had to ring up the surgery to find out where and if I had done one of my visits the night before. 1 just don't understand how doctors can be so naive. Well, I do. It's the old business of all that time,at school and then in hospital and not seeing anything much of life itself. The Middlesex ought to send their students along to the Coach. They'd find ample op- portunity' to practise spotting and identify- ing alcoholics. They're the ones smiling.
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