Another Brilliant Mind Lost to Addiction
A friend of the Wife died on Friday. He was a young doctor with a sharp mind, handsome and athletic, married to another doctor with a child on the way. During his residency he had become hooked on drugs but over the past year had gotten clean with the help of his wife and his boss. On Friday he appeared to be sick but nothing out of the ordinary. His wife went to work and when she came home nine hours later she found him dead in their home.
Had he relapsed? Tests will determine that. In all likelihood what killed him can be traced back to his addiction whether he had relapsed or not. Perhaps it was a blood vessel in his brain that had thinned prematurely over the course of his drug-taking; or perhaps his immune system had been so weakened from addiction that he wasn’t able to fight off an infection.
I met him a couple of times over the years. I didn’t know him well, but his death has saddened me regardless. All of the effort put into raising him, the hard work of high school, college and medical school. The investment he had put into himself as well as the investments of his family and most especially by his wife. All wasted.
Some deaths are merciful; others justifiable, but his death? A complete and utter waste.
ligneus:
Damn stupid drugs. I remember what Richard Feynman said about having never tried drugs. ‘My brain is my most precious possession and I wouldn’t do anything that would risk damaging it’. Then again, Barbra Streisand when asked if she’d ever contemplated plastic surgery on her nose, [I wonder what brave soul had the nerve to ask her that!] said she was afraid it might affect her voice. But in both cases they had their priorities right.
5 April 2009, 8:33 pm