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No part of our society escapes
alcoholism. One former First Lady of the United States
came out publicly and announced “Intervention works.” In
The times of my Life the First Lady Betty Ford wrote:
For some reason, I can tell you
where every single person in the room was sitting; the
floor plan is burned in my brain. Besides Jerry, and the
boys and Susan and Gayle, Captain Joe Pursch, the Navy
Doctor who’s head of the Alcohol and Drug Rehabilitation
Service in Long Beach, was there, and so was a Navy
Nurse...They’d met together, and with the Captain
Pursch’s guidance, he family had prepared what they were
going to say. I can’t remember the words. I was in
shock. I’ve been told that Susan harked back to the days
before I’d stopped drinking the first time, and said
she’d had to turn to Clara when I wasn’t available, and
Mike and Gayle spoke of wanting children, and wanting
those children’s grandmother to be healthy and in charge
of her own life, and Jerry mentioned times when I had
fallen asleep in the chair at night, and times when my
speech had slurred, and Steve brought up a recent
weekend when he and a girlfriend had cooked dinner for
me and I wouldn’t come to the table on time. “You just
sat in front of the TV,” Steve said, “and you had on
drink, two drinks, three drinks. You hurt me.”
Well, he hurt me back. All of them hurt me. I collapsed
into tears. But I still had enough sense to realize they
hadn’t come around just to make me cry; they were there
because they loved me and wanted to help me....
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