Oh, Those Doctors I Lied To
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Oh, Those Doctors I Lied To

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doctors I lied toIf there’s one thing active addicts know, it’s to always lie to doctors.

The first time I learned this highly valuable lesson, I was a sophomore in college. I am the daughter of a hypochondriac, which is to say that my dad has a specialist for pretty much every part of the body and mind, even when he has no real problem with that part of his body or mind. And so, during my sophomore year of college, I decided I was concerned with the fact that so much of my hair was falling out. I was new to the aspect of womanhood, or long hair hood, which involved being horrified by how much hair comes out when you’re in the shower and because I’m an alarmist, I decided to get alarmed. I knew my dad would probably have a specialist for this sort of problem so I asked him for a referral.

I don’t remember what kind of a specialist he was—for all I know he was a hair doctor, if such a thing exists—but I do remember that I didn’t like him from the get go, primarily because he seemed terribly unconcerned with my hair hysteria. “How many hairs a day do you lose?” he asked me when I first told him my concern.

I eyed him. Was this an answerable question? Who counts hairs? “A lot,” I responded.

“Yeah, but how many? More than 100 a day?”

I just eyed him again. “Oh, I’m sure—yes,” I said. “Or maybe. I’ve never counted.”

“Well that’s the first step. Count the number you lose. If it’s more than 100, then come back.”

I nodded, pretending, to both him and me, that I was actually going to do this, deciding that he had me pegged, quite accurately, as a self-obsessed college student looking for things to be anxious about. But that was better than what came next, when he took my health history.

“So do you drink?” he asked, taking out my chart.

I nodded. I was in college, I remember thinking, what a ridiculous question!

“How much?”

I thought about it. “Six, maybe seven?” I guessed.

He raised an eyebrow. “Six or seven drinks a week?” he asked.

I wondered if he was joking. I knew he had been out of college for some time but Jesus. “A night,” I responded.

He put down his pen and gazed at me. “You drink six or seven drinks a night?” he asked, like I’d just told him I killed six or seven people a night.

“No, not every night!” I objected, which was true. “Only on weekends.” I didn’t tell him that in my definition, weekends started on Tuesdays and ended on Saturdays (they didn’t sell alcohol in Connecticut on Sundays and Mondays—well, Mondays couldn’t be defined as a weekend by any stretch…but Tuesdays were practically Wednesdays, which was hump day and I think we can all agree that by Thursday you’re fully in the weekend). I didn’t explain any of this to him but he still looked alarmed.

“That’s quite a lot,” he said and I decided two things simultaneously: 1) that he was a judgmental ass and 2) that I would never tell a doctor the truth again.

I was pretty good at sticking by that decision for the years that followed, happily shrugging whenever one asked me in future appointments if I drank and casually answering that I had a few drinks a week when I was asked how much (I was telling the truth; I was having a few. I was just following those few with more than a few). It became so natural for me to lie in these situations, to shake my head no when they asked if I did drugs and to only cop to about 10% of my drinking habits, that I actually forgot I was lying. Doctors were narcs and you were supposed to lie to narcs, I’d have told myself if I thought about this, which I didn’t.

Then I tripped up and I’m still not entirely sure why. It was many years later, when I was an active coke addict, and sitting in the office of a psychiatrist that the therapist who ran the group therapy I was in sent her patients to. When this man, who wore a pinky ring and permanent sneer on his face, asked me if I did drugs, for some reason I can’t explain, I said yes, I did cocaine and when he asked me how often I told him most nights.

Immediately, I realized the error of my ways when he told me that I had to tell my group or, he threatened, he would. And so the following week, during group, I told the other women that I’d been doing a lot of coke and then just lied and claimed I had stopped. One of them nodded, another picked at her fingernail and we moved on. The next week, when I went to see my psychiatrist, he ended my $300 20-minute session by telling me he couldn’t see me anymore and he figured “I knew why.” No mention of rehab. No suggestion that I go to a meeting. Just a straight up cut off. I should mention that this doctor has now established himself as an addiction expert.

And so I turned to my regular internist for the opiates and sedatives I was by then entirely dependent on. I was careful not to ever ask for too much and he had no idea that I was addicted because I’d never made the idiotic mistake of being honest with him.

When I got into recovery, this man was still my doctor and the first time I went to see him after getting sober, when I was still in that newcomer flush of “tell everyone about your sobriety all the time,” I mentioned that I was newly sober and told him that I was sorry that I’d lied to him to get Ambien and other pills. He was very cool about it and began to ask me about sobriety. He asked a lot of questions, which was fine, because I like to give a lot of answers, but it was far more than the typical “how long are you sober” and “are you going to meetings” questioning you’d think a doctor would ask.

A month or so later, when I was leaving a meeting, I saw a guy who looked a lot like him. It couldn’t be him, I thought, it was just his doppelganger. I forgot about it—until my very-inappropriate-with-boundaries friend, a gay guy I’d gone to rehab with who would go to men’s meetings and call me afterwards and tell me if any of the guys there had shared about me, told me one day about the doctor in his men’s meeting who’d shared about taking pain pills between patients and then flirting with the hot pharmaceutical reps that came in. When my friend told me the guy’s name, I couldn’t believe it: it was my doctor. So I hadn’t imagined it was him in the meeting! No wonder he’d been so curious about sobriety! This was a crazy development; I was used to the concept of lying to doctors but hadn’t considered the fact that they could also be lying to me.

Roughly a year later, I had—and this is by far the most embarrassing part of the story—IBS. For the first time in my life, my stomach was a mess. After a few weeks, I went to see this doctor to see if there was something really wrong with me, pretending I didn’t know what my friend had told me about him, or that I’d seen him in a meeting, as he did a battery of tests. He told me he’d call me the next day with the results.

The call I got was not the one I expected. “Congratulations!” he exclaimed. “You’re pregnant!”

Whaaa? I dropped the phone and started crying. Whaa?

“Yes,” he explained. “I was running so many tests on you, I threw a pregnancy one in there, too.”

I was dumbfounded. Though I hadn’t had sex in months, I had recently started dating someone and if you need me to get very specific, and you do if this story is going to make sense, we had done some things that involved ejaculation. And so, as I cried on the phone to my doctor, I sputtered, “Is it possible to get pregnant just by being in the same room as semen?”

“Don’t be upset,” he responded. “Just come in to the office.”

When I got there, I collapsed in his arms. “I can’t be pregnant!” I wailed, wondering how I had to part of the surely .00000001 percent minority of women to get knocked up this way.

“It’s okay,” he said as he hugged me. “Everything’s going to be okay.” He handed me a pregnancy test and I went in the bathroom to pee on the stick.

And here’s what happened: I wasn’t pregnant. I had gotten, the doctor explained, a false positive the first time. It can happen, he said. I nodded, left and called my friend who’d told me what my doctor had confessed in his men’s meeting, asking if he thought this doctor tells women they’re pregnant when they’re not so he can hold and comfort them.

“Yes,” he responded.

I still don’t know what the deal was. I’m probably flattering myself—I mean, I’m not that great to hug so surely this very busy man wouldn’t go to the trouble of creating a lie just so he could hold me, right?

I should explain that this guy is no longer my doctor—not because I got creeped out and found a new one but because I switched insurance and he wasn’t under the new plan. I have no idea if he got or stayed sober, if he’s still flirting with pharmaceutical reps while high, if his female clients are still having false positives or if women can actually get pregnant from a guy ejaculating in the same room as them. But I do know that I haven’t lied to a doctor in over a decade-and-a-half.

As for whether or not any have been lying to me—well, jury’s still out.

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About Author

Anna David is the founder and former CEO/Editor-in-Chief of After Party. She hosts the Light Hustler podcast, formerly known as the AfterPartyPod. She's also the New York Times-bestselling author of the novels Party Girl and Bought and the non-fiction books Reality Matters, Falling For Me, By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There and True Tales of Lust and Love. She's written for numerous magazines, including Playboy, Cosmo and Details, and appeared repeatedly on the TV shows Attack of the Show, The Today Show and The Talk, among many others.