The Rooms



Excerpt from Chapter 6 

My introduction to “the rooms,” as those in the Fellowship call them, happened well before my bottom, the day I refer to as Implosion Day. About a year prior to my stint in rehab, when it became clear to me I was a serious alcoholic, I decided to quit drinking—again—and give Alcoholics Anonymous a try. On some level, I realized that stopping on my own was impossible, completely beyond my capacity. I attempted all the usual maneuvers—tapering my consumption, switching from vodka to wine, substituting Valium for vodka, and even going for longer and increasingly intense runs to achieve a more prolonged runner’s high.
Inevitably—which usually meant by lunchtime—the palpitations, shakes, and racing thoughts intensified, eventually overwhelming my ability to resist...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Intubating Alcoholics

Image
In the past week I have put three alcoholics on life support. The first one was 39 years old. He arrived to the emergency department by EMS unconscious with almost no blood pressure. I placed my ultrasound probe on his heart and saw it was beating alright,  just very little blood was entering his ventricles. This is because he was bleeding to death. When I intubated him I saw pooled blood in the back of his throat. His liver was so far gone, so cirrhotic, that blood could not easily pass through it, and the backup and created high vein pressures on sensitive areas like his esophagus and stomach, whose linings themselves were eroded from the caustic effects of constant boozing. He was literally hemorrhaging internally, and it took many units of blood to even get a pressure back. He made it to the ICU, and later that night, died. We later learned from family that he had moved back to town "to get sober." Case two was  a 53 year old chronic alcoholic who came to me con...
Read more

Whiskey on the Walls

Image
Alcoholics in long-term recovery maintain a keen awareness  of any booze in our immediate vicinity. Whether sober a week or twenty years, we keep a heightened sensitivity to its presence in a room. So when my hospital chose to line the hallways with it, needless to say the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. These days hand sanitizer has become as ubiquitous as cellphones, face masks, and Bradley Cooper; you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a dispenser. Companies simply cannot keep up with the demand. This being the case, a local valley distillery came up with the brilliant idea to temporarily convert its operations from whiskey to full-time sanitizer production, and began to supply local medical facilities. My hospital has been buying the stuff in bulk, restocking its depleted stores,  and filling all its dispensers with it. Here's the problem. Distilleries using equipment which had been continuously producing hard liquor for years can't magically c...
Read more

Baby Soul

Image
It’s  Baby Soul Day! In my younger teen years, I worshipped the iconic band Rush. At age 14 I was small, nerdy, intellectual, and afraid of my own shadow. Geddy Lee's voice, Alex Lifeson's guitar, and Neal Peart's lyrics encapsulated perfectly how I felt growing up in 1980s suburban North Jersey surrounded by big studly Italian boys and athletic Irish kids.  Neither the albums  Moving Pictures nor  Signals left my turntable *ever* unless I was simply swapping out one for the other. I hid in my room, pretending how I was going to somehow be cool, be accepted, break out. 30 years later, as I felt myself inevitably sinking in alcoholic quicksand, I read Neal Peart's memoir  Ghost Rider . Having lost his daughter to a car crash and wife to cancer within the same year, the legendary drummer one morning mounted his motorcycle and embarked on a two-year tour of the Americas, riding wherever the wind (his HP?) took him. While journaling his geographic advent...
Read more