Tuesday, March 2, 2010

First Night, and the days before...

The first night of my self detox was all kinds of rough. Everyone I spoke to, including my sister who is a RN, said I would be stupid to do this on my own and that I had to get myself to a hospital/detox center. They said that coming off alcohol is harder than any other drug and that people can actually die from it. I was worried, but I just couldn't bare the thought of being away from all my responsibility; kids, family, divorce proceedings, job and I didn't want it to appear to the soon to be ex that I was week and trying to make some statement for her attention. Because I could just hear what she'd say. Something along the lines about how I felt so bad about what I had done to bring about the end of our relationship that I was desperate to make some kind of statement for sympathy.

So I chose to stick it out. By this point I still had my sister here with me, and my parents had joined us earlier in the day. I was pretty sure, if something bad went down, I could make it to the ER pretty easily.

My last night of drinking was a major binge. It was only me and my sister here and it was Saturday evening, February 27. Two days after my wife had left me. My usual heavy drinking progressed steadily from the day she left, through Friday and into Saturday. By Saturday, when I turned the drink on, I started with two bottles of expensive German wine I had spent $150 on the Wednesday before. I had planned to drink them with the wife that weekend. I then cracked open an 18 pack of Miller Lite and kept cracking 'em till around 11pm when I downed the 15th from the pack. It was this point when I decided, in my diseased mind, that it was time to stumble to bed and pass out. As I swayed past the kitchen table I fell over, into the the table pushing it three feet across the floor along with two of the chairs. That's about all I remember.

The next morning I awoke around 8 stiff and sore, but not hung over. I was rarely hung over. I walked out into the living room and found my sister crying on the couch. I glanced across the room and saw the devastation in the kitchen. I looked back at my sis and simply said, "I'm sorry to have put you through all that". She wiped her eyes and said, "I was so afraid I wasn't going to be able to get you up off the floor. And then you almost fell again in the bedroom. I didn't know what to do".

That did it for me. I suddenly realized all the reasons why I HAD to get sober. There were so many and in my, probably still drunk mind, I began making bullet points. (If you read my blog long enough you'll find I'm a fan of bullet points...)

  • My kids are my biggest responsibility and I must be sober for them
  • My health, I have to live and be healthy for my kids and myself
  • I do terrible things while drunk and had already ruined my marriage because of it/them
  • I have an excellent job and career and can't afford to lose them
  • My parents have seen so much heartache watching other family members fall into alcoholism, I can't be another
  • My sister and I have an awesome relationship and I can't bare to hurt her any more
  • My friends, many who are like family, care about me and love me
  • And I wanted to learn to like myself and have self confidence again and feel like I just might be wanted by someone else
So yeah, I needed to wake up and smell the sobriety.

But back to my first night of self detox, which is where I started this post before I got side tracked. It was rough, but probably not as bad as it could have been. I had the shakes and shivers. I was freezing one minutes and hot as hell the next. I had massive night sweats, soaking through the sheets, and spent most of my three hours of actual sleep curled up in a fetal position. I lay there from 2am till 5, when I finally got up to start the coffee and imagined all kinds of things. I imagined conversations with the soon to be ex where I begged her to return to me and pleaded for her forgiveness I imagined I held my iPhone while I read emails on it sent to my wife from someone named Wolf. I don't know if these "visions" were actually hallucinations or just plain old dreams, but they were vivid and had me crying into my pillow.

I got out of bed, took a hot shower, dressed in fresh clothes and went and made coffee. And believe it or not, after that night of horrors, I actually had a pretty good day.