A Doctor Considers The Opioid Epidemic Through Fiction and In Real Life

 by Lee Whitesides

In 2018 I was asked by my professional society, Georgia Dental Association, to put together a one hour lecture on the Opioid Epidemic and Dentistry. Being an Oral & Maxillofacial for 20 years and former Physician Assistant in anesthesia I thought I could prepare a suitable lecture to both inform and educate my piers after a few hours of research on the topic. I could not have been more naive or incorrect.

I began my research into the opioid epidemic with a slew of Google searches which plunged me down a rabbit hole from which I did not emerge for 8 weeks. I bought a host of books on Amazon to dive deeper into the topic. The more I read the more I realized the opioid epidemic was more than a few bad doctors at pill mills writing unnecessary prescriptions for addicts. The opioid epidemic was affecting the lives of all types of Americans regardless of socioeconomic status, race, or ethnicity. Soccer moms, professionals, blue collar workers, and yes homeless addicts were falling prey to the deadly disease of addiction to opioids.

Being a man with a curious mind I focused my research on the etiology of the opioid epidemic. Nobody wants to become addicted to opioids, yet thousands were dying each year from opioid related overdoses. This had to start somewhere.

My research forced me to examine my professional career as I never anticipated. I learned dentist are in the top three prescribers of opioids and dentist typically are the first to prescribe opioids to a patient. Why? I looked at my schedule for that Friday and I had my answer: wisdom teeth. The bread and butter of my practice for two decades was young men and women 15 to 25 undergoing wisdom teeth extraction. I, like the vast majority of Oral & Maxillofacial surgeons, typically prescribed oxycodone or hydrocodone with acetaminophen for post-surgical pain management. Had I been an unknowing participant in fueling the opioid epidemic?

In my continued research of the opioid epidemic I began to see the ruined lives behind the staggering numbers of opioid related overdose deaths. Books like Beth Macy’s Dopesick and Charlotte Bismuth’s Bad Medicine help me see the people behind the statistics. Books like Dreamland by Sam Quinones and Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe educated me on the role of big business in the opioid epidemic. It was in these stories I saw the beginning of the plot that was to become my book, Painful: One doctor’s fight against the Opioid Epidemic and Big Pharma.

I decided to tell a story which closely resembled the story of the opioid epidemic and its major players: Big Pharma, corrupt doctors, and the individuals whose lives they ruin. My protagonist would be a naïve and flawed doctor who was desperate to rid himself of his massive student loan debt and provide for his family. Big Pharma and a greedy doctor would be the villains. Drawing on my experience as an expert and son of a trial lawyer, I used the platform of a malpractice trial to bring the protagonist and villain together. It would be a medical and legal thriller all in one!

In preparing my lecture to my dental piers and in writing Painful: One doctor’s fight against the Opioid Epidemic and Big Pharma I learned a great deal about the opioid epidemic. The stats are staggering and available for anyone to find, but behind the numbers are ruin lives of fathers, brothers, sisters, children, and friends.

Professionally, I have been forced to critically examine how I approach pain management for my patients and as a result I believe I am a better doctor. In bringing my characters to life I was forced to explore empathy and compassion for those who are struggling with addiction and frankness with those in the healthcare profession who ignore the potentially harmful aspects of opioids and prescribe without concern to patients just to keep them happy.

If you are in need of a suspenseful thriller with a medical/legal platform full of compelling characters I hope you consider reading my book.

Mac Whitesides DMD, MMSc was born and raised in North Carolina. Obtained a BS from Davidson College in 1984, Masters in Medical Science & Anesthesia from Emory in 1986, DMD from Medical College of Georgia School of DEntistry 1992, and completed training for Oral & Maxillofacial surgery in 1997 at University of Maryland Medical Systems in Baltimore. Painful: One doctor’s fight against the Opioid Epidemic and Big Pharma is his first book.

Douglas Green on the Unique Stories of Dogs

by Douglas Green

No less a storyteller than Leo Tolstoy famously wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  As a family therapist, I generally agree, but only because I’ve never once met a fully happy family – and the happiest and least happy I’ve known have all been deeply unique.

But what would old Leo have said about dogs?  We have the image of the ‘bouncy, floppy-eared pup,’ cheerful and loyal, with a tongue hanging out in perpetual dumb grin.  And maybe such pooches have lived a continuously happy and secure life, never impounded or abandoned or threatened or injured or terrified or beaten. 

However, as with families, I have never met this dog.

The most secure dog I ever knew was a three-month-old I found in a pound.  One of hundreds in an overcrowded room for only four days, she had already developed a reputation and a nickname, “Knucklehead.”  She was confident, playful, and overwhelmingly loving, and would take charge of and change my life forever (and become the basis of my book The Teachings of Shirelle).  But even so, her traumas showed.  Any time water lit onto her, from a slight rain or shower head, she’d shrink down at the sensation.  I guessed this came from being sprayed off in the pound.  And then there was her terror of being left in any institution – from the most luxurious doggy day-cares to the kindest veterinary offices.  Early imprisonment, it seemed, had left a permanent mark.

Another pup I adopted didn’t appear to have enough brains to remember bad experiences, but spent his 18-year life terrified of being put inside cars.  The fact that young Ygor had been found alone in rural Kansas (and that he was quite a homely mutt) made it easy to determine that someone, unhappy at his birth, had tossed him out their passenger window somewhere outside the Wyandotte county limits.

The truth is that all dogs have brains not that much smaller than ours, and absorb experience, good and bad, in much the same ways we do.  And what the brains sort those experiences into is what we call stories.  While we surpass them in our abilities to interpret – and misinterpret – those experiences, every dog’s life, like ours, becomes a collection of tales of triumph and failure, love and betrayal, beauty and horror.

The great dog novels tell such yarns.  Lassie’s journey is no less harrowing or heroic than Jason’s.  And Buck’s trek to his wild call is as epic as those of the Joads or Bagginses.  Of course canine epics cover less time, given dogs 1/7 lifespan.  But because we share their feelings and cares, their tales ring powerfully in us.

 We psychotherapists work with our clients to figure out what stories they tell to themselves (“I’m a failure,” “No one can ever love me,” etc.) and hopefully to help rewrite them (“My few successes could lead me to triumph,” “I can find the love I’ve never known”).  But we have the advantage of these humans verbally relating their histories.  Dogs can only give us evidence (as with my dogs’ fears of water and cars).  Or can they?

 A few years ago, I adopted an adult rescue dog.  Instantly, she started revealing her past to me.  A story I’d known included abandonment, but which developed into much more. 

While Aria craved contact, she would sit yards away from me, as someone must have taught her to (along with her perfect housetraining).  She wasn’t big or particularly fast, but proved the best hunter I’ve known, from her streetwise ability to lie still for hours awaiting prey.  She cowered from people, but would bark at any dog on sight – apparently not intending to create a fight, but out of fear, to prevent one. 

And then, the first time we took a leashed walk, she lunged at another dog.  And the second she realized I was displeased, hit the ground on her back, pulling in all four paws, blinking quickly, begging me not to kick or whip her. 

No storyteller ever wove a clearer tale. 

For the next year I worked to fill in the missing chapters. Her mixture of fear and love, her trust in only certain strangers, her constant desire for security, even her goofy joy in  yowling along with humans – these were her truth, her essence. 

Doing so accomplished two things.  First, it brought us closer together. As any good therapist can tell you, curiosity about someone builds their trust and openness. The dog felt my interest, my empathy, my fascination about her.  Qualities she wasn’t used to.  

And secondly, this work resulted in the plot of my second book, A Dog of Many Names.  A sort of 21st-Century Jack London novel, about Aria’s earlier life and adventures.

But how exactly did this process occur? Dogs have stories. But when we translate them from the dog, are we just imaging what might have happened? Or has that pooch actually told us, intentionally, what they wanted us to know?

Or, in other words, did I write this book, or did she?

Returning to the master, Tolstoy once recommended to a beginning writer, “You should only write when you feel within you some completely new and important content, clear to you but unintelligible to others, and when the need to express this content gives you no peace.”

Well, okay, that describes my experience.  But was that urgent need my own hunger to write, or was it…? 

Dogs have stories. Maybe more interesting than we even surmise.

Douglas Green has turned his talents to many areas — he directed the 2000 film “The Hiding Place,” wrote the fan-favorite inspirational memoir “The Teachings of Shirelle: Life Lessons from a Divine Knucklehead” in 2015, and spends his days working with teens and children as a psychotherapist in LA. Doug’s latest project, inspired by his dog, Aria, is A Dog of Many Names., a courageous story of survival about an abandoned dog forced to fend for herself in the California wilderness.

(Don’t Always) Write What You Know

by Jessica Vitalis

Virtually every writer has heard the sage advice, “Write what you know.” But what does that mean, really? 

Sure, I could probably spin a yarn or two about raising teenage girls, or my lifelong fear of mice, or the time I was an exchange student in Germany, but honestly, I don’t see the market banging down my door for these stories.

 That explains why, when I set out to become a published author more than 14 years ago, I decided to begin with a memoir. Titled Bank Robbers, Spirit Guides, and a Little Slice of Heaven, my query got a fair number of requests from agents, but it didn’t go anywhere. And no wonder — I had no idea how to write a novel, much less a memoir! 

Undaunted, I began studying craft and turned my attention to writing something else I knew: book two was set in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where my mother had opened a gift shop. Once again, the story didn’t quite work. But I wasn’t ready to give up. 

My third manuscript featured a child who traveled the country on a renovated school bus and it was –– you guessed it –– inspired by a portion of my own childhood. It won’t surprise you to know that my fourth and fifth manuscripts were also inspired by real-life events.

But something interesting happened while writing my fifth story: Not only had my writing improved dramatically, but I also allowed myself to explore the fantasy genre for the first time. While the story was still inspired by a real trip I’d taken, I finally let myself depart from the contemporary, realistic stories that made up the fabric of life as I’d always known it. And guess what? This story worked. Or very nearly, anyway.

 By the time I started my sixth manuscript (another fantasy), I realized that I’d found my stride — my voice as an author, as a storyteller. And it wasn’t because I wrote what I knew. In truth, my debut novel, The Wolf’s Curse , was inspired by the narrator Markus Zusack’s The Book Thief. It could be argued that my debut novel is the exact opposite of anything I know: I’ve never lived in renaissance France; I’ve never been a carpenter (or a wolf); and I’ve certainly never met the Grim Reaper.

 And yet, The Wolf’s Curse is probably more quintessentially me than anything else I’ve ever written. Because I let myself play with language in a way that I’d always been too scared to do. Because I let myself play with voice in a way that was more fun than I’d ever had. Because I wrote about themes that I care about deeply –– about loss and grief, about belonging and traditions, about socio-economic injustices, about hope.

 That’s not to say that writers shouldn’t use inspiration from their own lives. Author AJ Sass wrote a wonderful novel about ice skating based on their own passion for the sport. Rajani LaRocca penned a novel in verse that harks back to her childhood in the 1980’s, and the calls for #ownvoices stories are stronger than ever. 

But hopefully my (very long) journey can serve as a reminder that writing “what you know” doesn’t always have to be literal. It’s a missive to bring to your writing your own world view, your own way of thinking, your own fears and passions, and to write the story that only you can tell –– exploring familiar themes based on everything you know, and maybe a little you don’t.

Jessica Vitalis is a Columbia MBA-wielding writer. After leaving home at 16, Vitalis explored several careers before turning her talents to middle grade literature. She brings her experience growing up in a nontraditional childhood to her stories, exploring themes such as death and grief, domestic violence, and socio-economic disparities. With a mission to write thought-provoking and entertaining literature, she often includes magic and fantastical settings. As an active volunteer in the kidlit community, she’s also passionate about using her privilege to lift up other voices. In addition to volunteering with We Need Diverse Books and Pitch Wars, she founded Magic in the Middle, a series of free monthly recorded book talks, to help educators introduce young readers to new stories. An American expat, she now lives in Canada with her husband and two precocious daughters. She loves traveling, sailing and scuba diving, but when she’s at home, she can usually be found reading a book or changing the batteries in her heated socks.