Читать книгу Young & Sober - Группа авторов - Страница 11

June 1997

My drinking career may seem short to some. It lasted about twelve years, starting when I was fourteen. I could buy anything, anywhere because I was six feet four inches tall and weighed 200 pounds. I was every father’s nightmare of his daughter’s date.

I can’t tell you what I was like at the end. I have no memory of it. A year of my life has been completely wiped out. I can only tell you what it did to me. When I came out of intensive care, I weighed only 130 pounds. I was in a wheelchair. It wasn’t a car accident that put me there; I had crawled into a bottle and almost killed myself. From what I’ve been able to find out, the doctors think I drank for about two months, day and night.

The alcohol level in my body was toxic enough to cause me to quit breathing four or five times. My internal organs (liver, etc.) had shut down. My body wasn’t functioning. That and the alcohol poisoning are what put me in the wheelchair. My vocal cords were paralyzed, my voice only a whisper. My memory was shot to hell.

After a year in the wheelchair, I was able to start using forearm crutches. I used them for four months before I could walk on my own. My voice is back and I’m able to shout with the best of them. The memory is still bad but I deal with it. I have used the stubbornness that kept me drinking to aid in my recovery. I have a lot of tangible things that I can look at and say, “Things are better.”

I’m not going to say that it is all better. Even with everything I’ve been through, it will cross my mind to drink again. I’m not sure that this desire will ever leave me. I call it a gut reaction. The old-timers that I’ve met at the meetings are split over whether it will ever go away. Right now I work on realizing that what I can control is my reaction to that thought. I also look at meetings as getting together with friends; that way it isn’t a chore. It is something that I want to do. I don’t know if I can risk a relapse; I came very close to death with my last drink. Now there are people around me who will help me, and maybe I’ve helped them.

Bad things will still happen; that is life. But I get to live it. That’s something I took for granted at one time and almost lost. In November I had my two-year anniversary. It doesn’t sound like much but at the beginning I didn’t think it was possible. I did it a day at a time as it was suggested. It has worked so far so I don’t plan on changing it.

RICK A.

EL PASO, TEXAS