Impaired: A Nurse's Story of Addiction and Recovery Book

On June 28, 1996, Patricia Holloran’s life changed forever when Drug Control confronted her for the theft of narcotics from the hospital where she worked. So begins a journey that will change everything about what she knows about herself and the world of addiction.

As a nurse in a labor and delivery unit, Holloran was working full time on the night shift and taking care of her three children, her husband, and her severely disabled father. She started to take Stadol, a narcotic ten times stronger than morphine, to help her sleep. She kept taking it because she could not stop.

Putting a face on addiction and recovery, and the taboo subject of healthcare worker abuse, Impaired takes readers on Holloran’s journey to fight for her sobriety, her nursing license, her marriage, and ultimately, to help other nurses and healthcare workers who suffer from addiction.

Publishers Weekly

Though Holloran's memoir may read familiar for anyone with an addiction memoir under his belt, what makes her story unique is her insider's view of the health care and recovery fields. A nurse suffering an addiction to Stadol, a little known painkiller, Holloran kept her addiction a secret from everyone-even from her husband-while stealing from the hospital where she worked, moving on to abuse prescription nasal spray, and later to shooting illicit drugs. Confronted by the Health Department's Drug Control agents, Holloran buckled, joined rehab and a support group called Nurses for Nurses, and began the arduous process of fighting to hold her life and career together. A poignant rendition of the addiction-recovery narrative, Holloran's most important work exposes the failure of the U.S. health care system to protect even its own. Though little here will surprise (as addiction behavior goes, hers was fairly tame), readers will respond to Holloran's honest, personal, unexpectedly complex tour of the U.S. health and rehab industries.
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