The Bottled Scream

Two Selves

Addiction

This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction, Trauma and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

Chapter 11

In early recovery, it is like you have two selves fighting it out.

I went to my first meeting a couple of days after becoming sober.

I went to my first meeting sober and it was hellish.

I spotted a couple of guys from the first meeting and they said hello. They were glad to see me which was nice. I tried to talk to them for a bit but felt too self conscious and scampered inside. I sat as far away from the Chair as possible.

I was still partly in psychosis, everyone was trying not to stare at me and my jaundice and the green discolouration snaking around my neck.

 I sat beside the most fidgeting man who I was convinced was pulling faces scary faces and making menacing gestures towards me from out of the corner of my eye.

I couldn’t believe how slowly time was passing. Through my gauze-like eyes I was shocked how it always only 5 minutes later than the last time I looked.

It was tough being out in the world without the drink as a crutch.

 It was like I was wearing my nervous sytem inside out.

I was so full of self pity, it threatened to drown me. Thoughts were like poisoned darts piercing my heart with terror, thousands of them, relentlessly.

It was the same format as before. I liked how they read out the solution, the 12 programme of recovery.

It was reassuring this programme had helped all these guys and might me as well. Although it was difficult to see how it would. It did mention being restored to sanity which gave me some hope. Although it said we came to believe we could be restored to sanity and I was some way off that.

I tried to listen to proceedings. It was a bigger meeting than the previous one.

Some people addressed me when they started sharing, saying “welcome to the newcomer” whereby everyone smiled weakly at the jaundiced guy. The most alcoholic guy they had ever seen.

I started to wish they would stop doing it, okay I’m here no need to keep going on about it.

Ther were so many times when I just wanted to get up and get out of there but to where?

There was literally no where to go. To the treatment centre were they paraded me around like a jaundiced freak?

Back to drinking?

The attic?

Where?

Nowhere is where. There was nowhere but here.

I tried to listen but stuggled to at times.

The voice of lies was constantly chirping away in my head. It was saying I didn’t need to be here, with these losers. Stay off the drink for a bit, sure, until the liver got back into shape. Give the booze a rest. Hit those pills for a day or two.

That alcoholism, does it even exist? Do these people know what they are talking about? The book they read from was from the 1930 s and since then nothing?

It is a cult.

Why didn’t the doctor recommend them, nobody did? None of the medical professionals.

Is this the best they can do. Really?

Maybe it wasn’t so bad.

That last lie took some digesting. I noticed my lying voice had no shame whatsoever.

If you let it rant for a while it would often shoot itself in the foot by saying something ludicrous.

Also when I asked it did it want me to drink, it would go quiet?

It never really said wouldn’t you like a nice cool drink, it was more sneaky?

I had been spiked with ecstasy eleven months earlier so maybe that was the reason why I ended up in psychosis, it suggested?

Similar maybe to the way I ended up in psychosis due to too much cocaine. Maybe I was just subsceptible to it?

Maybe it wasn’t the drink at all. Maybe I was tipped into it via being spiked? It had changed something in my chemistry, my nervous system. I wasn’t this mad before the spiking, the last time I gave up drinking?

Just go back to that, get daily exercise, that sort of thing.

But this, what is it? Religious do gooders. Better going to the Pioneers. This lot seem Protestant!?

And middle class?

Is this the right place for you?

Maybe it was the cummulative effect of too many drugs, maybe it wasn’t the drink at all? Lots of people drunk more than you? For much longer.

And these peope in AA talking about being out of control drunks, you weren’t really, like you rarely were fall down drunk, only on special occasions when friends dropped by unexpectedly, you were never arrested or ended up in hospitals. You are not even like these people?

These guys are amateur drinkers they just couldn’t hold their liquor?

And this spiritual malady, that’s just sinning and that solution is just confession and repentance.

Sin doesn’t drive you insane. Spiking does, not knowing the effect it had on your brain?

And on and on.

Look for the similarities they said, but where are they?

Thee are sinners who couldn’t hold their drink.

These are do gooders. Religous zealots.

All these thoughts rumbled on in this first meeting.

Why?

If I wasn’t alcoholic then why was I juandiced from alcohol addiction

I knew one thing for sure, I had become addicted. SO even if I wasn’t alcoholic, whatever that was, I had become addicted. I was an addict at least?

I had also once tried a spiritual solution to my problems years ago, so I did have problems going way back. Over many years, mental health problems. But that solution, the Buddhism, led to psychosis too?

Or did it just unearth it? Was it really there waiting to erupt to the surface?

Maybe that is what I have and drunk to calm it down but couldn’t in the end?

That isn’t a sin disease like this?

This arguing went round and round on in my head relentlessly.

The other way to explain it was that my alcoholism was using my own voice to talk to me. That it wasn’t me but my addiction using my inner voice?

This thought nearly made be ill, I put this insight down to my lingering psychosis…

I stopped briefly to learn my calming heart was still with me, strangely smiling at me, unconcerned about the madness in my head.

The thought came to me, non alcoholics don’t have a constant chirping in their heads about being alcholic or not. I would ask Emma this question later.

Then as if by co-incidence one guy shared about his head telling him lies all the time and he had been in recovery some time. Years.

My attention was pricked. He said that on a very good day his illness talks and he doesn’t Iisten and on a good day the illness talks and he listens and on a very bad day he listens and then talks back until his brain gets completely mangled and he doesn’t know one thing from another!

A few men and women laughed out loud or nodded their heads at this point in recognition.

They related to what he was saying so might have had the same problem too?

This guy was talking of something more than a sin disease, to my mind anyway, however reliable that was!?

He was talking about a mental health problem which was similar to mine. This mental health problem, this thinking disorder, made me drink, and drink and…

I listened for my illness to retort and it was quiet. For the first time I acknowledged a possibility that honest answers seemed to be an antidote to this lying voice. This would prove to be the case in Treatment also in the weeks and months to come.

If possible I would try to ignore it all together.

So for the first time this pithy adage gave me my first insight into this illness. It was my first experience of “hearing what you needed to hear” in an AA meeting.

It was a great way of putting it. I felt this guy was like me and me, him. I had real identification with another AA.

What he said didn’t come from the Big Book, however, it came from Treatment. Where there new things to learn there? Did they look at things differently ?

It was more an experiential wisdom, the cumulative knowledge gained from recovery, from the rooms of AA over the seventy years since the BB was written. It was from the lived in experience of AA members rather than from a book that seemed to be, in part, “frozen in time”.

I found this intriguing. It spoke my language.

I shared that I was glad to be there and was glad to get some response.

After the meeting people were friendly to me and all had an inner glow about them. They all told me to keep coming back.

It left nice to hear, to be asked to come back as if they wanted me too.

I had so little self esteem and l felt so worthless that any human kindness was welcomed. I felt like a freak, a monstrosity.

Any human kindenss melted that image a little.

I was so glad to see Emma when she arrived to take me home in what seemed like days later.

I would wait a few days before going back to AA

Maybe when I was less jaundiced and less crazy. ,

In my next meeting I called out during someone’s share “what do you mean by a spiritual awakening?” and was told he would tell me after the meeting. So much for less crazy?

He didn’t.

Probably took one look at me and thought it wasn’t worth the effort. I’d be gone soon enough.

I was none the wiser about this spirtual malady that was at heart of all my troubles and somehow made me this mentally ill.

People looked at me half in sympathy, half in pity, another half incongruity. How the hell do you get to be that alcoholic? Was it a World record?

I was the Steppenwolf of the AA meeting.

I have never seen any one in the rooms who looked as bad as me since?

I have never heard of anyome have alcoholic pyschosis for more than a few weeks and that was a tiny tiny percentage of alcoholics, less than .05%

They usually die before then.

At least, the early AA founders were like me. Maybe I wouldn’t have looked out of place then?

I asked someone to sponsor me, a guy I thought I could push around but who I later learnt had been inside twice for two separate attempted murders!

He didn’t look or act like a potential killer now, so he must be doing something right.

He must have had some sort of psychic change to go from that to the cuddly office worker he looked now!

He asked me how I got to meetings and I said Emma drove me.

He said get a bus to meetings from now on.

Maybe he wasn’t the right choice?

I did too, for the next meeting where I met a guy called Tony who offered to drive me there in future.

Although 5 days sober, the illness, the alcoholism, vocally active in my mind, somehow remained. It had somehow been embedded in my brain and still talked to me.

I was still troubled by these thoughts and more so, by the fact they wouldn’t go away. I had stopped drinking so why hadn’t my mind quietened down around thoughts of drinking?

Why was it still chirping way, day in day out? Although not always about drinking. Sometimes it just put me down, character assassinated me.

When I had stopped smoking, after twenty years of smoking, I didn’t have this incessant inner dialogue.

Or when I ceased my twenty year and daily cannibus use.

Why was the internal dialogue was incessant?

Life was too difficult without such questions to torture me. The illness centres in the mind as the Big Book says. Could we trust our own thoughts even. There was a lot more to this alcoholism, addiction than met the eye.

Anyway, I had my other voice, the one that was even harder to believe in, coming like a warm smile across my troubled heart with warm tidings that all will be well.

Day by day this voice coaxed me out into the world and guided my through it, however gingerly.

The doctor had said I needed to be outside in the sun light to reduce the jaundice. I went for more blood tests at the local hospital Pathology lab and people stopped to point at me and laugh.

It was fairly humiliating but fortunately I have experienced worse so put it into my “it’s all relative” filing system in my mind.

What if I’d had liver cancer!?

Ignorant people are never in short supply.

It struck me that much of early recovery was about memory and different memory systems in the brain.

My addiction would arise at times implicity from habit memory and almost compell me to do certain things, sometimes it would use explicit memories to provide an imagenery scene about drinking and sometimes my brain would just freeze and I couldn’t shake it off. It was a locked in attention to drinking that happened again without my volition.

Was there anyway I could change these realities? The only way was to change my memories somehow?

To look back at these memories and reappraise them. I had started doing this already with my sponsor. He told be Step one work in Treatment would be looking at this for a few months.

We would discuss something and reappraise the past to show how it was really. It illustrated my memories were unreliable and gave false readouts on the past.

My memory couldn’t be relied on either it seemed. My thoughts and emotions and memories and sometimes even my perception of things all seemed a bit faulty.

He assured me the memory problem would be fixed via the steps 1 then 4 and 5 especially. Other problems could be ironed via sponsorship. I was to ring him whenever I needed to. It was surprising how often this was as I kept getting the wrong end of the stick over so many things in life. I didn’t seem to have a clue about living life on life’s terms. It was as if I would have to learn again from stratch. I could see why they call newcomers “babies” in US AA.

Another route, via memory, by which this illness trapped me was via my very negative self schema, which is a collection of memories and conditoning from the past which added to a condensed summary of how we feel about ourselves.

My self schema was very poor, full of shame and self loathing.

My illness fed on this, saying I wasn’t worthy of recovery.

This would have to be worked on too.

A possible clue to a solution was via an AA’s share, at this meeting, when he said his shame at being an alcoholic was relieved day by day by being proud of being an alcoholic in recovery, gradually through time, his shame lessened and his pride of being in recovery increased. His sense of self and his self schema and his esteem increased. He became more worth it. His self schema gradually changed and the illness had less to feed on.

It was a message of hope to think that changing how we felt about ourselves would help with recovery, that our twisted view of our past could be ironed out and that the habitual nature of addictive behaviour could be met with the habitual nature of recovery.

He was down the line from me, a beacon of how I could become, of how recovery could work for me too .

If I could only stay in recovery?

None of this was explicitly stated it the BB but it is there implicity in AA recovery and by product of it, if nothing else.

I would start working on my memories, they are what make us how we are, starting with my self schema with myself as an alcholic in recovery.

Chapter 8 Don’t They Know Who I Am?

This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

Addiction & Treatment

I didn’t like the people in the treatment centre much. Well the first people I had met there anyway. I went there and spoke to two women, one who was in recovery, a heroin addict and the other a normie, non addict, earthling. It showed. They were so impressed with my jaundice that they insisted on looking at it outside in the daylight, parading me, like some freak, around in the front of the treatment centre. It was humiliating. Not as humiliating as when the posse of Chinese students starting shouting and gesturing towards me on the way home. Just as they had done when I went to the Pathology lab in the University Hospital to get my blood tested and my fatty liver checked out.

Luckily I had already been given the gift of desperation and had no choice but to suck these things up. They hurt and upset me but they were the least of my problems. I took to walking down the back lanes to avoid any more such scenes. Three weeks I walked these furtive furroughs, until my jaundice started fading. It was under doctor orders that I did, he suggested the daylight would help lighten my skin. He seemed unconcerned that this was difficult while still suffering from psychosis.

I was to start treatment the following week. It was called pretreatment. I would be interviewed by a counsellor and would have a few weeks in pre group treatment before joining ten other peope in group therapy. I was fast tracked into the treatment program as I had shown commitment by going to AA meetings and plus I was an emergency case. Although, I am not too sure this emergency case would have gotten me into treatment if I hadn’t gone to AA first of all. This showed commitment to recovery supposedly. I am not sure the severity of my addiction would have gotten me in and I may have died then. But that was a parallel route that I was not forced to take.

I was first interviewed by one of the Treatment centre’s counsellors to get some background information. He was late for the appointment. I remember damning him in my mind for being late! For me! Didn’t he know who I was! A jaundiced, half blind, half dead, pscyhotic alcoholic! I couldn’t bear it, him being late. How dare he!? I had things to do! Although I can’t recall now what these things were. My impatience, intolerance and ignorance of the reasons he was late were extreme. I wondered if I had always been this emotionally immature. This emotionally overreactive, surely not? Was I like this as a young man? I didn’t think so. It was bad enough being constantly on the verge of relapse and death without having to contend with the fact I had gone strangely mad?

I consoled myself it was the legacy of the psychosis, the thought of which made me fell like vomiting. The liquid swimming around my brain had subsided somewhat but hadn’t retreated completely. I still felt a lot worse than dead. Looking back on the past I had held a number of responsible jobs and had lots of friends. I had been very different to this! Once upon a time, I had been very different to this. What the hell had happened to me? Without my express permission too. It must have worsened over the years and decades of drinking and taking drugs and I hadn’t noticed? Maybe they had gotten worse as the result of decades of taking drugs and drinking?

I did have many mental health problems in that time and perhaps these had been stage posts on the road to this complete decline. I also felt like a freak – I was so jaundiced I looked like an ad for Ready Break! I was very conspicious and every minute waiting heightened this distress. I was full of self pity and self loathing, shame ate into my soul. What was the point of this, I would be dead soon enough, wouldn’t I? What were the chances of someone like me, this far gone, ever having any length of sobriety? The longest I ever managed was when I was in mid twenties and that 6 months was supported by an addiction to Buddhist meditation. The only other period was 14 months earlier when I managed two weeks of stark raving sober. Walking miles and miles everyday to stay sober. Coming to think of it, I was really mad then too. Not this mad, however. I had never been this mad! How was I going stay sober while really mental?

The counsellor eventually  arrived. He said he was sorry for the wait. I muttered to myself that he better be. Didn’t he know who I was? Given he had just met me, no. He had no doubt heard of me. That really jaundiced, mad guy! I had no doubt been the talk of the recovery world. You know, the half blind, half dead guy! Him! My paranoia was still on the ceiling even after a week or so of sobriety. Maybe the paranoia had progressed alongside my general madness over the decades. This was alarming as I had always been paranoid even when relatively sane. I had always thought it was better to be paranoid just in case. Especially growing up in Northern Ireland.

I was led up to his office. I felt like the Elephant man. I felt like the elephant in the room too. The guy who was about to die but no one mentioned it. It was obvious wasn’t it? They could hardly turn me away, I was another statistic on their books. Another client seen. Ticked on the list. Maybe they had to take the odd no hoper, last gasper. I wasn’t going to make it, I knew that and he probably realised that too. “Sorry again”, he said, “I was dealing with a potential suicide”. Whatever!

After finally getting is act together he sat down opposite me. He didn’t really look at me, the first time he did, he said, “You probably don’t have another recovery in you Shay” he said, conforming my suspicions, for once my paranoia was spot on. Shay was my name in Dublin, when it wasn’t Seamas or Seamie in Belfast, or Seamus to my parents and people of Derry. Seamus is Irish for James, pronounced Shimmus in Derry, which I was rarely ever known as given people in Britian struggled with pronuncing it properly so Shay was easier all round. James, however, is written on my birth certificate. I liked he knew what was my my preferred name. I felt he was addressing me now.

Like most alcoholics I have been a chameleon all my life, shapeshifting to fit in to any situation or group of people, guard against being rejected. It helped in a Protestant area when a Catholic. I liked Shay as it reminded me of good times as a 16 year old courting a lass from Dublin. It was me away from the troubles and Derry and the North of Ireland and my family. It was me without that baggage, the new me. The counsellor puntuated this reverie.

“Okay?”

I nodded tersely. It was as bad as my crazy head had thought, and that wasn’t good. He told me that I wasn’t alcoholic. My my eyes lit up in a mixture of hope and surprise, inwardly applauding myself for my diagnosis of simply drinking on a tough childhood!

“Really?”

“No, you are a chronic alcoholic!”

 I deflated at this and felt very embarrassed at falling for line again, this twice in a week. I was way beyond alcoholic he insisted. Alcoholic was barely visible now in the rear view mirror, it was so long ago.

“Only dead alcoholic people are more alcoholic than you!”

And some of them weren’t? This was it, no more goes. A once in a lifetime opportunity. Get this recovery thing right or I would either be dead or in a mental health institution with permanent brain damage. I was close to this already. He knew that too. Most people did.

I was booked into pregroup which would last for a couple of weeks until a place in group therapy came up. I attended pre group the next day and the week after. It was assessing our motivation to change. I still tried to convince anyone who would listen that I drank because of my tough childhood in Northern Ireland. Most nodded in some sympathy. One person said he had once heard a guy for Belfast say that growing up in Northern Ireland didn’t cause his alcoholism, it just didn’t help it any. I thought about this and disagreed with him and the other guy from Belfast. Northern Ireland caused my drinking I was convinced. The Counsellor looked at me again. “So what about all the people you grew up, are they all alcoholic too?”

“Not all”, I said back.

“See!”, he replied, happy to have scored a point. Made a breakthrough!

“Nah, the rest are drug addicts!”

Chapter 2 – “Things Can Only Get Better”

This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

Addiction

Chapter 2

Things can Ony get Better

It was only when my wife withdrew from me after she had exhausted all possibilities to try and help me—taking me to mental health professionals but with no success—that I asked her for the first time for help. It was the first time I had directly asked for help. Well sort of asked for help. I was in the bathroom under the pretext of having a bath, something I had not done in many months (I had also developed an actual phobia of water, not uncommon in alcoholics). I stood there in front of her, half naked and asked her if she thought I was a bit jaundiced, in an unusual moment of understatement.

Her face retracted with shock, she hadn’t seen me in many weeks as I lived as a crazy recluse in the attic and we rarely saw each other –  other than talking through doors and written reminders to buy wine and lots of it!  She could hear me clicking bottled wine glass and tins of beer against my teeth as I tried to drink and this had added to her general sense of revulsion and despairing helplessness. Workaholism and fitness addiction had kept her petrified mind together these last months. Most days she would retrun from work wondering if this was the day, the day in which I had finaly killed myself? What unbearable and intolerable strain she must have lived under?

“Jesus, you’re…!” she exclaimed…

“I thought so” I replied. I looked like Homer Simpson with a heavy suntan! With a massive green discoloration snaking around my neck. I already knew I was jaundiced three months earlier when the local shop owner couldn’t contain himself and shouted “look at you, are you ill man!” which is partly why I didn’t go out, the excruciating shame of that and it’s probable repeat and the increasing psychosis, of course. Plus I could barely walk anymore. I knew I was jaundiced  I just wanted Emma to know how bad it was and in realising how bad it was, offer to somehow help in a way that had yet to show itself. Or in a direction we had yet to exhaust. We had already tried various therapists to no avail. I was pretty desperate by this stage. Beyond desperation.

Plus, I also couldn’t rely on my half working eyes anymore and anyway,  I needed absolute verification. God damn it, I needed help! Needed it months ago! Things were very much worse than I thought. Which, somehow, by this stage, seemed impossible. Emma seemed spurred into action and suggested going to the GP tomorrow. The GP? I was still in psychosis and wondered if he could do a home visit?He couldn’t and the next day in the late afternoon we would drive over the surgery. Getting out of the house had become impossible I lived in fear of someone coming to our home and kept a hammer and monkey wrenches by every door and window, proclaiming to my future imaginery intruders that I was ready for them. Paranoid psychosis isn’t a lot of fun. But it is thorough and leaves you well prepared. Emma had even tried to get me sectioned, put into a mental health institution but they only accepted after suicide attempts or attempted murder and given my current weak physical state, these two scenarios seemed remote. Plus all medicines had long since been stored away by Emma, for obvious reasons.

The GP did, however, make allowance for my deteriorating mental health by suggesting I turn up after practice hours and sneak in through the back doors? This was a blessed relief not having to face the public and their horrified looks. I drank two bottles of wine and slurped down a couple of tins of the strong and disgusting German lager in the car, trying not to throw up, as we waited to be sneaked in to the surgery via the tradesman’s entrance. Emma helped me walk to and in through the back of the surgery where the GP met us.

He listened in some incongruity to us explaining how my drinking had got out of hand, probably spurred on by my tough childhood, my mental health problems and so on. He seemed defensive, his arms across his chest. He was resisting our prognosis. He listened but didn’t seem convinced by our reasons for my drinking so much and bluttered out quite brutally.

“You are an alcoholic man! “Plain and simple, and if you keep drinking like this, you will be dead in a few months!”

Emma and I looked at each other. Of course, he was right. It seems so obvious now but at the time it was an epiphany. Of course I was a bloody alcoholic. I was physically addicted to alcohol, for some that would have been a bit of a giveaway but strangely not me, or, even more strangely, not Emma? A strange fog had settled on her thinking too. The panic attacks and the physosis and muddied the water. How come we hadn’t worked this out ourselves? It was now so obvious.

I wondered why the Drug and Alcohol Centre hadn’t released this too? I had turned up to the noon meeting having drunk two bottles of wine? Some would have seen this as a clue to potential alcoholism? More important than those underlying conditions, they kept talking about. Or the two therapists I had seen over the last three years. One who had seen me for two years and then when I returned subsequently for therapy, told me I didn’t have enough brain left to continue therapy (and how later would say me in recovery if I had suddenly decided to be a good boy when she learnt of my recovery!) and another who insisted I listen to white noise around the clock to treat the trauma that was obviously leading to my excess drinking. Obviously, it increased my drinking. Didn’t people know anything about alcoholism or addiction? How could the therapeutic world be so ignorant. Almost willfully ignorant!

Another terrible irony of this whole scenario, is that the GP I saw was only filling in for my usual local GP, who had failed in seven years to realise I was alcoholic, choosing instead to treat me with anti depressants for my depression and anxiety! If he had been there that day, I wouldn’t be here today. That is the terrible truth! He would not have said what this GP had just said, that I was an alcoholic! He probably would have tried to give me more medication. In the months that followed, he would try to dissuade me going to a local 12 step facilitated treatment centre because he thought it was too draconian. Not as draconian as chronic alcoholism though!? He, like most of the so-called professionals I saw, would treat me for something other than alcoholism, wondering if my drinking was linked to some other mental health issue.

They all failed to see that the mental health issue that I was suffering from, and that was going to kill me quicker than any other possible disorder, was my chronic alcoholism, my chronic addiction. I wouldn’t have any chance of treating any other mental health issue unless I dealt first with my addiction to alcohol. I still contend today that those individuals with addiction do not get any less addicted when they have treated other co-occurring conditions. The severity and complexity of their addiction may alter but they will remain addicted people in recovery.

As I show later treating these other conditions helps tremendously with recovery form addiction. I hope to explain, one condition feeds into another and they all have to be treated in the whole. Starting with addiction first! Start with the condition most like to kill you, and work backwards from there!  

Chapter 1 “Rock Bottom”

This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

Addiction

Chapter 1

Rock Bottom

My alcoholism almost killed me. I had spent the last nine months in alcoholic psychosis, the so-called DTs (delirium tremems) hallucinating, drinking and vomiting, repeat.

I could hardly get the drink to my mouth with my violently shaking hands. Tin and glass, cracking against my teeth. I was so jaundiced my neck had turned a dark sickly shade of copper green! My eyesight deteriorated to such an extent, that it was about like straining to see through scratched plastic glass. Eyesight is linked to liver and my fatty liver had reduced by eyesight by half.  

I was so weak from drinking, not eating, a 8 and half stone weakling, who had to stop on the stairs, every three steps, to rest and start again. Sleep had been replaced by twenty minute snoozes, awoken by terror and the dripping sweats. How the hell had it come to this?

I had planned none of it. I thought of death and of suicide. There was a place worse than dying and I had somehow ended up there. All plans on killing myself foundered on my angrily held assertion to myself that I hadn’t asked for any of this. None of this was my fault! That indignation was as close as I could get to hope, which had recently left home. I drank because of my bloody tough upbringing, didn’t I, and that wasn’t my fault either? Many had had similar upbringing and they weren’t slipping down the plughole along with my stomach-heated up wine? Why me? Why the hell was I in this hellish hole of despair and utter defeat?

Worse still the drink had stopped working, only staving off the full horror of the hallucination and preventing me from having the alcoholic fit that would kill me.My wife would travel to the shops, reluctantly buy grates full of cheap Spanish wine and almost undrinkabe German lager that tasted like liquid Gorgonzola, unwittingly keep me alive. We were both ignorant of the reality that any prolonged period without drink could have killed me. That a diversion from the straight road home, after shopping , or a car accident,  or some other unavoidable occurrence that slowed the delivery of my alcohol, could have killed me via an alcoholic seizure.

My wife hated spending all that money on drink that rarely stayed long in my stomach. People would shout over to her as she waited at the till “Having another party!?” Little did they ever know how far they were from the truth.

Read more about Rock Bottom in my earlier Blog Post from 2016 “Do we Really have to Hit Rock Bottom to Recover?” here