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Part One
The Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, just south of Palm Springs,
was established for the rehabilitation of chemically dependent
people in 1982 by the wife of the 38th President of the United
States and is situated behind the huge Eisenhower Hospital. The
program is an outgrowth of Long Beach, California, Navy
Hospital’s program and the famous Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota.
But no two patients ever take the same treatment or react the
same. It can be rough.
It is technically a center, not a clinic, although the buildings
were constructed to hospital specifications. When I was
there, there were four outbuildings behind the central administration
building. The Cork Pavilion for abused children is right
behind the center. Joan Kroc of McDonald’s hamburger
fame, ran the center at the time with Barbara Sinatra, now the
widow of the famed singer. Betty Ford was a
frequent visitor and lecturer, lovely and welcoming to all
of us. Those who worked there, so far as I could determine,
had sought help for problems with addictive substances in the
past and, therefore, were very knowledgeable about our conditions.
The counseling staff was professional; many had numerous degrees
in the field.
The drive into the center is not a straight one; the road is crossed
by speed bumps and has two 90 degree turns. There is no sign
in front to guide the casually curious visitor. Security
is enormously tight and effective. In its few years it has become
the best known and among the most successful institutions of its
kind in the world.
At the time of my admission, patient fees were $155.00
per day plus the admitting fee, $150; the therapeutic reading
material, based solely on Alcoholics Anonymous, $65; a psychological
assessment, $110; medical fee for physical examination, $240;
and some lab testing and x-rays, $215. My charges totaled
a little over $5,000 when I left; now the inpatient cost is at
approximately $13,200.
The philosophy at the Center is to treat patients without
chemicals or drugs. Within 24 hours, all of us could
have killed for an aspirin and there was a very active black market
promulgated by doting visitors and parents for these relatively
harmless painkillers, brought in under very creative disguises.
My living assignment was to Fisher Hall, room 406, the newest
of the dormitories at that time. Each hall housed 20 people,
men in some, women in others. That first day was one of
confusion as, sick in heart and body, I asked to go to my room
for a lie-down and an attempt to reorient myself. Things
were happening very swiftly and if there’s one thing a drinker
can’t stand, it’s change. In the past I had made my existence
fairly comfortable by never altering anything. Around four-thirty
in the afternoon, I joined the rest of the women in the
coffee room, where we introduced ourselves.
Life at the Center is regimented: it has to be to
control all these people coming out of drugs and alcohol and a
self-proscribed way of life. Dinner was at five-thirty and
the choice that night was a roast beef sandwich on a kaiser roll
or pork chops, along with what became a favorite, papaya slush.
I drank gallons of it. Each hall is assigned certain times
and you’re allowed a half-hour to eat, after which you tidy up
your space and take your tray to the clean-up area. A lecture
by Dr. James West was scheduled for that evening on alcohol's
effects on brain, kidneys and liver accompanied by rather disturbing
slides of actual organs. I hoped that my insides weren’t in that
bad a shape. Returning to the hall, I settled in by
playing many games of Gin with B.J., soon to become a close friend.
At nine-thirty, I went back to my room (I hadn’t yet been
assigned a roommate) and was terrified that I wouldn’t be able
to sleep. But I did. Very well. And awoke at
five, ready to see what the day brought.
I was to report to the nursing station where my vitals and
blood were taken along with X-rays and an EKG, then waited for
a physical exam, which afforded me an unhurried look at my surroundings.
The staff was mostly women, beautifully dressed and groomed.
The patients’ ages are from 18, the minimum age for admission,
to 70. The rooms are light, airy and nicely appointed.
Mrs. Ford did get stung on the beds, however, as they were rock
hard and small, even for twins. That night, tired
from all the activity and poking and prodding, I slept well yet
again.
The days evolved into a routine of hall meetings, AA (Alcoholics
Anonymous) meetings, lectures and personal and group meetings
with my assigned counselor. We were assigned chores around
the hall, vacuuming, cleaning up the coffee area and setting tables.
Morning lecture was at nine and at ten you met with eight others
for a group session. These turned out to be the most painful,
for every nuance of your life was thoroughly examined, motives
discounted, rationales thrown out and slowly, surely, you
were reduced to a child-like person, cleansed and ready to begin
again. Alcoholic Anonymous pamphlets were everywhere to
be read and I was encouraged to write frequently and candidly
in my ever-present notebook. Every evening I was to write
how and what I was feeling and that was to be turned in each morning
by eight to my counselor.
These writings were mainly about feelings: happiness, loneliness,
anger, hate, anxiety, resentment, love. I was to write about
what I felt emotionally, not what I thought intellectually, for
the simple reason that after all those years of burying my emotions
under the weight of alcohol I had to get used to living with them
again, healthily. BFC has been a proponent of AA’s
Twelve Step Program which they believe is a discipline found
to work with the alcoholic and addict. “Twelve Steps and
Twelve Traditions” was our theme, our anthem and for the next
four weeks I applied myself to those twelve steps. But there
were no sermons for us at BFC, no proselytizing.
After all these years of happy sobriety one happening still stands
out like lightning. While in group one day, about two weeks
into the program, I heard a woman say, “But I thought I was the
only one who felt that way!” All of us would say that.
We had so isolated ourselves in our drinking that it never occurred
to us that someone else could be feeling the same self-pity and
self-loathing, the same thoughts of suicide, a total lack of self-worth,
accepting a husband’s beatings because we weren’t worth anything
else, accepting a parent’s wrath because we deserved it.
I was proud of the wall I had built around me, for that kept away
all those who wished me harm. I soon was to learn that that
wall also kept me in.
On January 23, 1987, I accepted a chip, a little round piece of
black plastic, and worth more to me than anything else, for it
proclaimed to all that I had been clean and sober for eighteen
days. Everyone got something that evening, a special combined
meeting for all the halls, held by AA groups from the surrounding
communities who would often come by and speak to us about their
successes. So I accepted mine, on my fiftieth birthday,
honestly crying for the first time in many, many years.
At the end of my twenty-eight days, I again cried as I received
the little round brass token with the Betty Ford Center at Eisenhower
engraved on one side and the Serenity Prayer on the other:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot
change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
