“Are you hiding them?” John asked.

Lara immediately felt guilty. Had she hidden them? She didn’t remember handling them, but she was still slightly loopy. This doesn’t look very good, she thought. They’re magically not there after I said I got them?

“Maybe your brother took them,” John said. “Maybe they fell out of the car.”

As she argued with her ex-husband, Lara remembered the strange crunching sound outside of the pharmacy. Oh no, she thought. No way.

She drove back to the parking lot and found the crushed bag. “No! No, no, no!” she shouted. Lara’s surgery site was now hurting so badly that she legitimately needed the Percocet. She scooped up the bag. The pills were pulverized, crushed into the shattered plastic they’d come in. I can’t believe I ran over my pain medicine.

Back in her car, Lara leaned her head on the steering wheel. It figured. The one time that she truly needed legally prescribed Percocet, she had accidentally destroyed the pills. She took a picture of the pills for evidence. Then she reconsidered. There is no way in hell I’m going to call the doctor’s office and tell them a) I was driving and b) I ran over my medicine and I need more, she thought. Later, she explained, “People come up with the most ridiculous stories to get pills. So I had to deal with having no pain medicine because I was too embarrassed to call the doctor and have them thinking I was drug-seeking.”

At home, Lara struggled through the agony and fought the urge to hunt down narcotics. Without her two major outlets—work and exercise, both of which were forbidden—she was lost. It rained every day. When the kids were home, she focused intently on taking care of them. When they were in school, she rested or watched TV, trying to ignore the pain in her stomach and the battle in her mind.

A few days into one of the hardest weeks of her life, Lara was sitting alone, tears streaming down her face because of the sharp pains. She couldn’t take the hurt any longer. I can send the doctor the picture to show that I’m not making this up, she thought. She picked up the phone to call his office. “Oh my God, you’re going to look like you’re crazy because you took the picture in the first place,” she told herself. “Forget it.” But the pills will take you out of this funk, a little voice nagged. She started to dial. “The pills aren’t going to take you out of the funk. You’ll get a little buzz, you’ll enjoy it, and then you’ll be going at it again.” She hung up the phone. How am I going to get through this?

For the next week, Lara refused to allow herself to think beyond the present moment. Forget day by day. Lara asked herself only, “What am I going to do right now?” Embarrassed and determined “not to be a drama queen,” she didn’t tell most of her friends about her predicament. But the people she did tell rushed to her aid. Angie, her former coworker and roommate, checked in with her regularly. Molly and Juliette brought her meals. Another nurse friend helped get the children through their nightly homework and bath routine. Friends from NA drove her to meetings every night; one even found a meeting site with no stairs so that Lara would strain her abdomen as little as possible. The South General ER nurses, who knew nothing about Lara’s addiction, sent a get-well basket with flowers and candy. Rose, Holly, and Brianne had tucked in personal notes.

Four weeks later, Lara was back in the gym. She was profoundly proud that she had recovered without being seduced by narcotics. She believed she could get through anything now: overwhelmingly busy days, single motherhood, maybe even dating. She would not be presumptuous enough to assume she had beaten her demons; NA meetings were a reminder that the disease was waiting for her, that just one slip-up would send her back into its arms. So she accepted what she called “a healthy fear,” which she would live with, always, because of the mistakes she’d made in the past.

Why did Lara return to ER nursing, the worst possible job for her addiction—tempting her with narcotics to administer, to throw out, to watch other nurses steal? “Because being a nurse is my passion,” she said. “When all my struggles were going on, my biggest fear was that nursing would be taken away from me. It truly makes me happy.”

For Lara, being a good nurse also made her feel like a good mother. “As a nurse, I feel strong, like I can protect my children. Because of my medical knowledge, I know when something’s not right with them,” she said. “Every parent wants to feel like they’re keeping their kids as safe as possible. As a nurse I can make sure my kids are safe. And nursing pays pretty well, so my kids and I will be okay. It’s not easy supporting the family by myself, but I will make this happen.”

Lara wanted other nurses to know there is hope, help, and life after addiction. “You can get help and you don’t have to feel like this ever again, like you’re never going to laugh again, never going to feel good,” she said. “It does get better and you can do this clean. You can do anything clean.”

She had proven that to herself repeatedly over the past year. But now she finally believed it.

MOLLY

  August

Two weeks after Molly’s IVF, she decided to take a home pregnancy test, even though she had read that because of the hormones in the ovulation trigger shot, urine pregnancy tests could result in a false positive. She tried to wait for Trey, who was finishing a night shift, but the test instructions said to use her first morning urine, and Molly couldn’t hold it any longer.

She stared at the stick as she waited for the three minutes to pass. The test line slowly began to develop, like an old Polaroid picture sharpening into focus. And—was she imagining it or was a second line forming, too? She tried not to get her hopes up, but she allowed a tiny string of excitement to loop around her heart.

The next day, after Molly’s official blood draw at the clinic, her nurse, Jennifer, called her at home. “Molly! Molly, Molly, Molly!”

“Jennifer! Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer!”

“Sorry! I was so excited I couldn’t get it out. It’s just so great to say this nurse to nurse. I have great news for you! You’re pregnant!”

“Hooray!” Molly whooped. She wanted to shout from the rooftop. She was ecstatic that something she had wanted so strongly for so many years would finally come to pass. Her mother had been such a fabulous mom. Molly’s best memories of her had nothing to do with “fancy activities,” she said, but centered on simply being together, much like her mother’s nurse coworkers had written to Molly about how dearly they cherished simply being with her. Molly got choked up thinking about how she would now be able to build on those memories with her own son or daughter.

She was going to be a mom. This changed everything.

Worldview Hospital

The agency sent Molly to a new hospital that bordered the city and the suburbs. Worldview was known for what healthcare workers colloquially called “concierge medicine”: The hospital took care of people with money and high expectations for customer service. Molly arrived early to take five written tests on medication administration, safe transfer/lifting, EKG interpretation, fire safety, and patient privacy. She scored 100 percent on all of them. Afterward, the staffing office representative walked Molly to the ER and introduced her to the charge nurse. Molly was impressed; at other hospitals, busy staff had pointed her in the general direction of the ER and left her to navigate her way alone. The charge nurse gave Molly a tour of the department and assigned her to a zone.

The Worldview staff was amicable, the ER manager was ever-present and interactive, and all of the doctors introduced themselves by first name. Molly couldn’t believe the contrast between Worldview and her other hospitals. The staff was happy because they were not overworked. She had only three patients at a time because two float nurses and several techs picked up some of the workload. Because the ER was relatively slow, Molly had enough time to spend with each of her patients, which made her feel like a good nurse.