Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice by Ann Rule Page A

all she had was a medical license. And if she were deeply involved in drugs, it would affect not only her career but his as well.
    Mike could not bring himself to turn his own wife in. It would have meant the end of her life as a physician; it might even result in her going to prison. So once more, he talked to her about this seemingly insoluble problem.
    “Debora,” he said flatly, “you aren’t just hiding drugs from me, and you aren’t just harming yourself. You are breaking the law. Do you realize that this is a felony? You can lose your license. You can go to jail just like any junkie out there on the street. If you keep doing these things, somebody is going to catch you. And then what’s going to happen to the kids?”
    “I’m not like—” she protested.
    “Yes, you are,” Mike cut in. “In a way, you’re worse. You’re a doctor . You’ve heard what people say about doctors who get hooked on drugs. You’ve got to stop. Turning you in is the last thing in the world I want to do, but I swear I’ll do it if I find one more of your hidden stashes. And you know I’ll find them.”
    Debora looked horrified at the possibility that she might go to jail and be separated from her children. It was as if the thought had never occurred to her before. But Mike left her no place to run and he accepted no excuse. She was going to bring them all down if she didn’t stop taking drugs.
    The warning seemed to be effective. Mike never again found vials of Tylox and other narcotics hidden under piles of underwear or in the back of a closet. As far as he could determine, she stopped her drug use after that.
    But throughout their marriage, Debora had an inordinate number of accidents—the mysterious knee injury; a finger that became infected after she was bitten by a patient; the break in a tiny navicular bone in her wrist—an unusual injury, with subsequent complications. None of her injuries healed quickly and all of them required painkillers. Asked later if he ever suspected that Debora might have been deliberately injuring herself either to get attention or to obtain more painkillers, Mike seemed genuinely surprised at the idea. That his wife might have suffered from Munchausen’s syndrome (self-injury to achieve attention or importance) had not occurred to him.
    But at least her problems with pills had not carried over to other addictions. Debora never drank alcohol to excess. They went to wine-tasting parties, and Mike had his small wine cellar. They enjoyed a glass of wine or a gin-and-tonic at the end of the day—nothing more.

    Debora tried another job, at the Missouri Patient Care Review Foundation. Again, she initially seemed to do very well working in peer review. The position offered regular hours, and Mike felt that she had a real knack for going through medical charts and spotting red flags. Rather than having someone hovering over her work and criticizing, she was now looking for troubling areas in other physicians’ patient care. It was tedious and meticulous work, but it seemed a good fit for a woman who had once longed to be an engineer. There were rules and guidelines and familiar pathways to follow. If some other doctor whom she had never met veered from the guidelines, she took pleasure in spotting his or her failings.
    “It sounded to me as if Debora was very successful,” Mike said. “But she wasn’t. Her reviews were being reviewed because, again, she was having trouble with people in the office. Ultimately, the Missouri Patient Care Review Foundation had to downsize and consolidate their regional offices to one office, down in Jefferson City. Debora told me that they were going to put her in charge of the whole operation there, but that she had turned the job down because my practice was here in Kansas City.”
    Mike would come to wonder if his wife was even offered the job in Jefferson City, but he could never substantiate his doubts. At any rate, Debora went on to do freelance work,