Worth It: A Collection of Stories from the Frontlines of Addiction Medicine

We have been telling the wrong story about addiction.

We've told it as a story about willpower, about bad choices, about people who used up their chances. Worth It tells a different one — the true one — through the people Dr. Cindy Vuittonet has sat across from for more than a decade of practicing addiction medicine.

Dr. Vuittonet — addiction medicine physician and chief medical officer of a federally qualified health center — has spent her career in the rooms where worth is decided: exam rooms, courtrooms, pharmacy doorways, parking lots during a pandemic. In this collection of true stories, she brings the reader to her side of the exam table to meet the people the system had already written off, and to witness the fragile, easily missed moment when each of them began to wonder whether they might be worth saving.

Inside these stories, you will meet:

• A woman in crisis who was given five minutes she almost didn't take — and became a patient for life
• The well-dressed woman in the cardiac unit whose addiction was hiding in plain sight
• Valentina, who ran to protect her child and came back fighting harder than anyone could see
• James, who quietly filled a shoebox with one day's choice at a time for two years
• A man who survived a diesel truck, HIV, and years of heroin, and finally asked: why am I still alive?

Each chapter ends with something to carry forward — one for the person in addiction, one for the people who love them. Not a prescription. Not a judgment. Just something true that might be useful.

This is not a textbook and not a recovery memoir with a glossy ending. It is a book about worth — what happens when a person stops believing they have any, and what becomes possible when someone refuses to stop looking.