Riveting Doctor Drama Spiraling: Myra Mabry’s Journey Through Truth and Transformation

Okay Nightmare Success lifters, we are back, and man am I excited about this guest. When I talked with Myra Mabry, she told me something that stopped me cold. One day she was on a European trip, came back, and in one phone call had to tell her parents she’d been indicted, she’s bisexual, and she’s an addict. All at once. All in one conversation.

From Farm Girl to Chief of Department

Myra grew up on a farm in upstate New York. “I didn’t know that grocery stores existed until fourth grade when I broke my arm,” she told me. Everything came from the land or was canned and frozen. That farm life taught her work ethic, but it also set up something else. When her parents went through a brutal five-year divorce starting in sixth grade, Myra found out her dad wasn’t her biological father. “He looked right at me and he says, I’m not your father,” she remembered. “He said that mom had an affair. My mom said she was raped. And they’re both gone now. And I never found out the truth.”

That revelation shaped everything that followed. Myra became what she calls “the hero child,” overachieving in everything. She wasn’t just in sports, she was team captain. She wasn’t just in marching band, she was drum major. That pattern of perfectionism carried her through college, where she got a full tuition scholarship, then into teaching, where she wrote a 700-page variance to change how biology was taught in New York state.

But teaching wasn’t enough. After surviving cancer in college, Myra felt like “the cancer beat me.” So she went back to medical school while keeping her teaching job as backup. “I had never studied a day in my life,” she said. “When I first went to med school, I had to study and I didn’t know how to study.” She failed her first class ever. Of course, being Myra, she also did an MBA simultaneously with medical school because tests were on Mondays, so she took MBA classes Monday nights.

She became an OB-GYN and rose to the top fast. Chief of department. Medical director of family planning. The face of her hospital on billboards everywhere.

When the Prescription Pad Became the Problem

The nightmare started during medical school with severe migraines. “I was prescribed opioids,” Myra explained. “And then when I started residency, first year is you run labor and delivery…if I had a migraine, they would literally send me to the emergency room. I would get IV morphine, Valium and Reglin, sleep for an hour and go straight back to the bar.” She’d get prescriptions for 120 Vicodin at a time.

As a doctor, she thought she could handle it. “I think this is part of the arrogance of medicine,” she said. “Well, I can handle it because I’m a doctor, right? Like, I know the risks. I know the side effects. I can handle it.” But during one weekend at their vacation house in the Poconos, she forgot to bring her pills and went through withdrawal. That’s when she knew.

The spiral accelerated when Myra had five surgeries in five years, including total hip reconstruction. When she developed a blood clot that traveled to her lungs, her own hospital didn’t believe her. “They said I was just anxious and gave me Benzos,” she recalled. The next morning they found the pulmonary embolism and rushed her to ICU. That’s when she started writing herself prescriptions.

“I started writing prescriptions to myself and that started. I would write one for my nurse and then she’d give them to me and then she would write one and then we started playing back and forth.” The nurse was also her affair partner, creating a toxic web of manipulation and threats.

The Kingpin Who Never Sold a Pill

Meanwhile, Myra was living a double life. Her husband was military, deployed most of their 30-year marriage. “We were married 30 years. We spent seven of that together. The rest of it, he was deployed,” she said. Nobody knew about the drugs. Nobody knew about the affair with a woman. Her life looked perfect from the outside.

“My life was Instagram, the best dinner, the best vacation, the best outing,” she admitted. “I had no problems, no struggles.” She was holding her breath constantly, adding mask upon mask, telling herself she could handle everything.

The federal investigation began when her nurse got caught writing prescriptions using Myra’s passwords. When they finally calculated the total, it came to 603 kilograms worth of opioid prescriptions. “They basically thought I was a kingpin drug dealer,” Myra said. “It was a very long, ugly investigation because they didn’t think that anyone would have prescribed that many opioids and taken them themselves.”

In the federal system’s point calculation, Myra got 30 points. Kingpin status. She got extra points for being in a position of authority, for having no children (“which was very heart-rending because I wanted children, couldn’t have them”), and for her degrees. “All the things in my life that I was proud of actually hurt me in the prison system,” she reflected.

When Everything Collapsed at Once

The end came at work. “It was a sit down at work,” Myra said. “Where are all these coming from? And I made up a great big huge lie. And then in walk the DEA agents.” Her first instinct was to lie again. She’d been lying about the drugs, the affair, and other parts of her life for so long that “I started to believe my own lies.” That got her an obstruction of justice charge on top of everything else.

Then came that phone call to her parents. After returning from a European trip, she had to tell them everything in one conversation. The indictment. The addiction. The affair with a woman. “Everyone found out in one day,” she said.

Her husband, deployed for most of their marriage, learned about his wife’s secret life along with everyone else. The perfect Instagram existence crumbled in a single day. The woman who had spent her life achieving everything, proving she was worthy of love and acceptance, faced the reality that all her masks had finally fallen away.