Making the most of a third chance

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This article was published 04/11/2019 (2200 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Henriette Ivanans was 42 when her life was saved for the second time, but not for the last time.

She was diagnosed with glomerulonephritis, a chronic inflammation of the kidneys, as a 13-year-old in Toronto, and the kidney she received from her mother at the age of 19 was failing.

Incredibly, her husband, Kevin McIntyre, was a live-donor match. They were young, in love, and living in Los Angeles, chasing the Hollywood dream (you may remember her as Maggie O’Halloran on Star Trek: Voyager). A new kidney meant a fresh start.

But kidney disease wasn’t the only one Ivanans was battling.

“By then, I was so addicted to drugs and alcohol,” says Ivanans, now 51, over tea at an Exchange District café (she and her husband live in Winnipeg). “The night before the transplant, we had a bit of champagne, I had a beer, I took my Xanax and Tylenol One with codeine. Like, that’s what I did the night before my transplant.”

As for the night after? “I cracked a Corona to have a beer with a Percocet and Dilaudid,” she says. “That, to me, made total sense in my mind. I was celebrating.”

Now almost seven years sober and healthy, Ivanans has turned her story into a sparkling memoir, In Pillness and in Health. Honest, vulnerable, insightful and witty, the book — which launches in Winnipeg tonight at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers at Grant Park shopping centre — is about addiction, but it’s also about a marriage put to the test.

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They say you always remember your first, and Ivanans remembers hers. Fiorinal, prescribed for chronic migraines.

“It was a love affair from the start,” she says. “The way addiction works is its very progressive. Some people will be exposed to drugs and alcohol and very quickly they’ll cross that line and lose the power of choice. For me, I was a periodic dabbler.”

The fear of her body rejecting the kidney she received from her mother turned, as she puts it, “her part-time narcotic trysts into a full-blown pharmaceutical affair.” After the transplant from McIntyre, she continued to abuse drugs and alcohol.

“One night I was drinking, the kidney was working well for the most part, but I existed to find another doctor to give me prescription medication,” she recalls. “I didn’t know I had a problem. My entire life was about medication, since I was 14 years old.”

That night, she ran out of vodka and ended up drinking rubbing alcohol.

“I tell that story all the time and share about it in (Alcoholics Anonymous) meetings because for me, in that moment, I had found a solution to my problem.”

It was an overdose, her second, on more than 100 pills that finally landed her in rehab. She spent 60 days there and, in the two-hour space of downtime after group and individual therapy, yoga and meditation, and began writing in a blog her husband set up for her.. “It was this complete release,” Ivanans says. “It was a way to get a hold of what I was feeling. It just sparked something in me. Stories are how we make sense of the world.”

Writing helped Ivanans reconcile her need for medication as a person living with chronic illness and being an addict. It helped her understand her father, who died from complications from alcoholism when she was just 10. People began reaching out to her privately after reading her blog, telling her that they, too, had been where she was.

Ivanans began taking writing courses at UCLA (where she won the Allegra Johnson Prize in Memoir Writing), and turned her story into a book that she hopes will offer insight into addiction and how it intersects with chronic pain.

“It gave me some of the greatest joy I had ever experienced in my life to have the idea to write this story down,” she says. “I read a lot of addiction memoirs in that time, but they weren’t satisfying to me in how honest I wanted them to be about how brutal this condition is. It is an utter condition of selfishness and self-centredness.”

She also hadn’t read an addiction memoir about a marriage that came out the other side. And so, she wrote one.

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Ivanans’ story is about “falling out of love with pills and falling in love with myself, so I could figure out how to properly love my husband again.” And AA was her path to sobriety.

“It’s changed everything for me,” she says. Addiction is a disease she treats every day, just as she manages her transplanted kidney every day. She’s clear-eyed and open about what she’s been through, and is “choosing to show up differently,” not just for her husband, but for herself.

“For me, it’s how to do I stay sober, and how do I treat people in my life today with the respect they’ve always deserved, that I couldn’t because I was held hostage by this thing. Do I have regret? Of course I have regret. I have gut-wrenching regret sometimes when I look at my sweet husband and he’s laughing at a TV show, and it’ll come up for me.”

They will be married for 25 years in May.

“I’m not exactly sure how I got so lucky,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. “There’s really endless examples of how much he loves me and how much I love him.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti