Author Archives:

Reality TV Comes to The Recovery Book

Posted on by

~ by Howard Eisenberg ~

Well, not exactly. That’s just a teaser headline to get you to read the next few paragraphs.

There’ll be no TV, but plenty of sobriety reality in The Recovery Book revise we’re working on, as readers of the first book become contributors to the second. How will that work? Here’s a for-instance.

Jennifer B., fresh out of recovery at Willingway and a long stay at its women’s halfway house, needed surgery on both hips and her spine. What she – and Dr. Al – feared most was that an anesthesiologist (or hospital RNs) unfamiliar with addiction recovery would inadvertently throw her into relapse by administering the very drugs that had addicted her in the first place.

As Dr. Al tells people in recovery, “No matter how far along in recovery you are, having surgery means you are back in the Red Zone, and that means … Read more...

How The Recovery Book (1st ed.) Was Born

Posted on by

~ by Howard Eisenberg ~

It could be said (so I’ll say it) that in 1991 when my late (and amazing) wife Arlene and I visited Willingway Hospital in Statesboro, Georgia, for the first time that The Recovery Book was an accident waiting to happen. But at the time, we sure didn’t expect it to happen.

We were there to write a magazine piece about Dr. John Mooney, one of those rare MDs who was willing to admit that he was an addict and an alcoholic. Not that he drank or drugged anymore. Yes, he’d been locked up for a couple of years in Lexington Prison when the government figured out he’d been writing an army’s worth of drug Rx’s for his personal use. But that had been a dozen years earlier, and even when he was drinking, patients said they’d rather be operated on by Dr. John than any … Read more...