The Penance Of Doc O

LOU ORTENZIO WAS A TRUSTED WEST VIRGINIA DOCTOR WHO GOT HIS PATIENTS—AND HIMSELF—HOOKED ON OPIOIDS. NOW HE’S TRYING TO RESCUE HIS COMMUNITY FROM AN EPIDEMIC HE HELPED START.

- Sam Quinones

WELL PAST SEVEN one evening in 1988, after the nurses and the office manager had gone home, as he prepared to see the last of his patients and return some phone calls, Dr. Lou Ortenzio stopped by the cupboard where the drug samples were kept.

Ortenzio, a 35-year-old family practitioner in Clarksburg, West Virginia, reached for a box of extra-strength Vicodin. The box contained 20 pills, wrapped in foil. Each pill combined 750 milligrams of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, with 7.5 milligrams of hydrocodone, an opioid painkiller.

Ortenzio routinely saw patients long after normal office hours ended. Attempting to keep up with the workload on this day, he had grown weary and was suffering from a tension headache; he needed something to keep him going. He unwrapped a pill, a sample left by a drug-company sales rep, certain that no one would ever know he’d taken it. Ortenzio popped the pill in his mouth.

“It was a feeling like I’d never felt before,” he told me recently. “I’m tense and nervous, and that anxiety is crippling.” The pill took the anxiety away. The sense of well-being lasted for four hours, carrying him through the rest of the night’s work.

Back then, Ortenzio was one of Clarksburg’s most beloved physicians, the kind of doctor other doctors sent their own families to see. His patients called him “Doc O.” He made time to listen to them as they poured out the details of their lives. “To me, he wasn’t like a doctor; he was more like a big brother, somebody I could talk to when I couldn’t talk to anybody else,” says Phyllis Mills, whose family was among Ortenzio’s first patients. When Mills’s son was born with a viral brain infection and transferred to a hospital in Morgantown, 40 miles away, Ortenzio called often to check on the infant. Mills never forgot that.