Two years ago, at the two-year mark...


It's been almost two years since I have been two years sober. An excerpt from Chapter 5, "Five Minutes Before the Miracle," details what I was thinking in a meeting, just before receiving my chip:


“My sober network, my sponsors, and God could now assist me in life’s decisions for this day because I was letting them in. I was no longer sacrificing my here moments to panicky, egoic future thinking, frantically chasing after decisions that did not yet need to be made because they were the product of some imagined future. I finally began to allow God and people to inspire me to calmly make only the decisions that needed my attention in the moment. This was an epic shift in thinking for me. I was now strolling and breathing instead of sprinting and gasping through life. It was an imperfect miracle, if such things exist.

I had not yet completely rid myself of the self-pity or ego character defects. Hannah, Robert, and Toby’s estrangement from me continued to weigh heavily, to pull me away from total inner peace. Until I could finally “let go, let God” with them, I could never be completely happy, joyous, and free. Even so, I had made real inroads toward serenity, and I was able to count my blessings. At the two-year mark, sitting there in the club, I mentally conjured the all-important gratitude list as espoused by the treatment center’s counselor Nathaniel.

I am alive.

I am physically healthy.

I am sober.

I am gainfully employed in a profession I love.

I have a nice house and a sweet dog.

I love people.

People love me.

My children are healthy and secure.”


And that, my friends, was that day's Serenity Now.

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