Heavenly Music

I went to an AA meeting with my doctor last night. Well, it wasn’t exactly my doctor, but a doctor—a first-year resident, to be specific, and it was part of a volunteer program called the Physician Alcoholism and Addiction Training Program in which sober alcoholics act as temporary “buddies” to primary care resident physicians in an effort to help the doctors understand the disease of alcoholism by talking about their experience and recovery.

It is a program that has been in place for a number of years in the New York area and puts doctors and recovering alcoholics together in a unique collaboration aimed at helping primary care internal medicine physicians diagnose, treat, and case manage alcoholic and other addicted patients.

Doctors, it seems, don’t know much about alcoholism—beyond the limited number of hours spent on it in medical school and the often negative associations about alcoholism that can develop as a result of having to treat alcoholics (a notoriously difficult patient group, as a rule, who generally don’t listen, rarely actually want to stop drinking, and especially don’t want any damned advice, thank you very much).

“Those participating are first-year residents, rather than the third-year residents that used to participate. This is preferable,” says Dr. Nicholas Pace, who is the program’s director, an associate professor of medicine at New York University’s School of Medicine and a former chairman of the New York State Governor’s Advisory Committee on Alcoholism. “Young doctors are the easiest to train, especially when they see people with long-term recovery in AA. 

“What we hope to put across to the doctors,” says Dr. Pace, “is that people can recover from this treatable disease, that the doctor can make a difference, that they can treat more than the liver or the body.”

So, as I sat in the meeting with my newfound “buddy”—the very same meeting I had walked into drunk one night over 31 years ago—I thought about what I might say that could put the whole thing in context, could make clear the process of recovery that I, and many others around the room, had undertaken.

I decided that the best thing I could do would be just to shut up and let the program speak for itself. The meeting was an open meeting, one designed specifically to accommodate people of all descriptions, not just alcoholics—from the curious to the academic, such as our doctors—a meeting which is, essentially, “open” to the general public.

Three recovering alcoholics had volunteered to share their experience, strength, and hope with the assembled crowd, and as they told their individual stories with alcohol and recovery, I could sense that the attention of my buddy had been captured—not necessarily from any particular medical viewpoint but rather through the simple humanity of hearing a first-hand account of a life broken down by alcoholism that was being rebuilt through the loving community of alcoholics, as represented by those of us sitting in the room that night.

In particular, as one of the speakers related with evident emotion how he came in contact with AA and learned about recovery, the ethereal tones of the church choir that practiced in a room just above the church undercroft where our meetings were held seemed to rise to an accompanying crescendo from afar.

Quietly, I leaned in to my buddy and whispered, “That’s not really part of the program,” nodding upwards toward the source of the music. She looked over and smiled.

Who knows what she’ll remember as a part of her meeting experience, but if nothing else, I know she’s aware that not all of the answers to alcoholism are medical ones. Sometimes they really do come from above.