Getting Through Tough Economic Times, US Department of Health and Human Services

I am a 51 year old disabled California attorney. I have not worked since the night of April 13, 1994, following a day-long retreat with my Sonoma County law firm partners. I had just booked a record-earning calendar end year for my business, tax, real estate and creditor bankruptcy practice. Outwardly, I was the epitome of a successful lawyer. I had joined the largest law firm in bucolic Sonoma County in 1982, almost immediately after graduating magna cum laude from Santa Clara University, with a concomitant MBA degree through the school’s joint JD/MBA program. That firm dissolved almost immediately after I arrived, but I landed firmly on my feet as an associate with the premiere business and estate planning firm formed by the most respected and influential partners of the original firm. I was a 6’3”, 185 pound, youthful looking 26 year-old kid with a flair for dressing well, having spent 4 of my college years selling suits at the Emporium in San Jose. It was there that I met my wife. We were married during the summer of the third year of my four year graduate program by the Santa Clara County Superior Court judge I had spent nearly a year working for as one of the original recruits in Santa Clara County’s nascent “court attendant” program.

Over the following twelve years I had served as a director, and eventually in 1990 as President, of the Sonoma County Bar Association. I taught Federal Taxation and Business Organizations for many years at the local unaccredited law school, and served several times as a Small Claims judge and a volunteer arbitrator in Sonoma County’s mandatory settlement conference program. I had also served on the board of the local chapter of the National Association of Accountants and been published in its trade magazine as expert in creditor bankruptcy practice. Although I had by 1994 packed 40 more pounds on my frame, I was training regularly at a local karate studio in an effort to work off some of the excess weight.

At the partners’ retreat I must have outwardly appeared to be the same determined, capable, outspoken and jovial person my partners had come to know over the past twelve years. But I was secretly a desperate, frightened man. Toward the end of the retreat I blurted out to my partners that I suffered a life-long history of depression, was taking an anti-depressant drug, and that I was under the care of a psychiatrist and a psychologist. What I could not bring myself to tell my partners was that I was also a binge-drinking alcoholic. Although I never drank at work, I would often go home and drink myself into a stupor, mostly on weekends, but for several years I had been drinking heavily even on weeknights. The half-truth I told my partners must have felt to me like a terrible lie of omission. Ironically, my partners and I toasted the end of the retreat and the prospect of a successful new business year with a glass of champagne.

At approximately 9:00 that evening my wife placed a desperate 911 call from our home. In the roughly three hours since the end of the partners’ retreat I had drunk myself into an alcoholic blackout state, had placed the barrel of a rifle under my chin, and had discharged a .44 magnum hollow point bullet through my own head. The force of the bullet tore off the front portion of my lower and upper jaw leaving just 4 ½ molars in place. The end of my tongue, my upper lip, my sinuses and my nose were utterly obliterated. One of the Sheriff’s Deputies who responded did find the end of my nose and part of my upper lip, with part of my scraggly mustache still attached. This tissue was placed in a plastic baggie, but was disposed of as useless at the hospital. My eyes were relocated to the sides of what was left of my head. A blood alcohol sample taken at the hospital approximately two hours after the shooting registered .020.

I will never know what I was thinking at the time of the shooting. The easiest answer is that a brain so inundated in alcohol is not really capable of complex thought.  But I often have flashbacks to the gut-chilling signals that my body was sending to my semi-conscious brain when I was drowning in my own blood and when the paramedics were fighting to keep me alive. To this day, if someone says “David?” to me with an inquisitive intonation, I have a panic attack.  Apparently the paramedics kept calling my name in an effort to keep me awake and focused. Incredibly, when the paramedics first responded to the scene of the shooting, I was sitting up, trying desperately to get air into my blood-filled lungs.

After I was air-lifted to the local hospital, my wife was told by several doctors that I probably would not survive the night. Even if I lived, I would probably be completely blind and/or experience extensive brain damage due to swelling from the concussive impact of the gunshot. When I stubbornly refused to die, I was transferred to U.C. San Francisco Hospital, where I was kept in a drug-induced coma for 7 1/2 weeks because of the horrible “things” that would be done to me as part of my treatment. My scalp was cut from ear to ear, and what was left of my face was lifted off. A new foundation for my face was crafted with plates, screws, wire, the pulverized remaining bits of my skull, and chunks of bone and flesh harvested from the rest of my body. The entire process involved more than 40 surgeries over the next seven years, and only ceased at my urging when the anxiety brought on my hospitalizations became as powerfully negative as the traumatic-stress episodes related to my initial injuries. And then there was, and is, the pain.

Fast-forward to February 2007. Miraculously, I retain the sight in both my eyes, although my eye muscles were badly damaged, and I have significant peripheral double vision. A chunk of flesh carved from my forehead occupies space in the middle of my “face” as a rough approximation of a nose, but I have no nostrils or sense of smell. I have only two remaining teeth, and these are destined for extraction (being a mouth-breather is apparently quite bad for dental health). Although my transplanted jaws were fitted with many implants to anchor dentures, the bones proved too fragile to endure the bite pressure associated with chewing, and the custom made dentures sit unused in a drawer

Despite my injuries, and persistent pain, I feel blessed to be alive. I have been sober since the shooting, and have been careful to choose pain medications that do not possess euphoric qualities, and thus are less likely candidates for substance abuse. My greatest blessing by far is my wife, who endured all my years of self-destructive drinking and my many years of recovery, my stepchildren, and the rest of my extended family. I have no contact with my former partners and associates, partly because such contact was a trigger for my anxiety attacks, and partly because I represent an embarrassing reminder of a subject most attorneys prefer to ignore.

So why am I writing this long-winded letter to the California State Bar Association? I voluntarily resigned my license in 1996, when it became abundantly clear that I would never practice law again. In part, I am writing out of frustration with my local bar association, and the double standards exhibited by the legal community in general. For the last four or five years I have received a letter personally inviting me, “as a distinguished Past President of the Sonoma County Bar Association” to participate in the annual “St. Patrick’s Day Mixer and Past Presidents’ Celebration”. As usual, this year’s celebration will feature an “open bar”.

In years past I have written letters to the association protesting the serving of alcohol, especially by means of an “open bar”, in celebration of a day that has become a perennial national excuse for inebriation. The first year I enclosed a copy of a Canadian Bar Association report that used statistical and anecdotal evidence to conclude that at least 25% of lawyers and judges were problem drinkers or outright alcoholics. I received no response to my letter, and a virtually identical invitation the next year. Even though I am not comfortable appearing in public, especially where I might meet former colleagues, I stopped by the Bar offices the next year to personally express my objections to the Association’s executive director, and to ask what the Association was doing to help its members overcome substance abuse problems. The Executive Director told me that TheOtherBar.org was handling that sort of thing. I found a site that was essentially a glorified bulletin board for substance abuse meetings.

The Sonoma County Bar has a long history of winking sideways at alcohol abuse. I remember many lunches at which former members were eulogized or otherwise remembered for their capacity to consume alcohol. One of my former colleagues only stopped drinking after his marriage had failed and he crashed his car into a telephone pole. Another former colleague was reputed to have run over a woman in a sidewalk after celebrating a court victory. In recent history a retired Sonoma County lawyer killed a bicyclist and severely disabled another while driving drunk. For God’s sake, even one of my former associates, a Sonoma County Superior Court judge, crashed her car twice and was finally arrested for drunk driving, after telling the arresting officers that there were three occupants in her two seat coupe.  I sympathize with these former colleagues as few people can.

I have decided not to waste my time trying to talk sense to my former colleagues. Sonoma County is, after all, “wine country”, and when I was in practice I received plenty of billable dollars from wineries and distillers of spirits. It was not until 1990, when I decided that as President of the Bar Association I should remain sober during the annual “Bar Bash” that I first started to worry about my own drinking. Watching so many other respected lawyers top off a night of full-on drinking with tequila and raw egg shots, and then drive away, I first began to see myself as my wife saw me, helpless to stop my own self-destructive behavior. After unsuccessfully trying on my own to curb my own drinking, I asked my family physician, who had himself lost a drug-abusing partner to suicide, to prescribe antabuse. I started seeing mental health professionals. None of it helped to stop my downward spiral.

Not long after I returned home from the hospital for the first time, I saw a letter written to the State Bar magazine from another Sonoma County lawyer protesting what he saw as lenient sentencing in an attorney discipline case. The disciplined lawyer claimed that his history of depression and substance abuse should be considered in his sentencing. My former colleague complained that a person with a history of depression and alcohol abuse had no business being a lawyer. I wrote a response directly to “Mr. Sensitivity’s” office admitting that I apparently shared his conviction the night I shot myself.

Despite my failure to persuade my former colleagues to even concede that guests at the St. Patrick’s Day Mixer should pay for their own booze, I want to think that I can help at least a few lawyers escape the cycle of drug abuse. I have trouble speaking intelligibly, and I still have problems with being seen in public. I can communicate by e-mail, however, and if there is a way that my story or my participation in your program can help, it would help me feel that I still have something to contribute to my former profession.

Dave Nommay