Posted on 09/25/2023 8:53:59 PM PDT by Captain Peter Blood
We all have sad stories to tell occasionally and I have one.
I have a friend I known for well over 40 years and she has always been fun to be around and we have stayed in touch all this time on and off.
Until about a year ago I had no idea she was a committed, hard core, alcoholic. The last two years she had been talking about a decline in her health. She had taken the Covid vaccines and at least one booster and I was fearful this caused her to have some adverse effects.
But the surprise was a year ago when she saw another doctor she had been sent to because her PCP thought she needed to have her Gall Bladder out. In my opinion her PCP is incompetent for not being able to diagnose the fact she had Liver Cancer. The surgeon she saw looked at her test file and saw right away she Stage 4 Liver Cancer and that she needed to get treatment.
It was then she admitted she was a alcoholic to me. Now she had told a few years earlier she had a substance abuse problem and had been addicted to Benadryl and I now think she was drinking during that addiction also.
So she gets help and starts seeing doctors that hopefully can help her. She claimed she had seen the error of her ways and was committed to getting better and hopefully would be able to get on a Liver transplant list.
The thing was she never got any better, in fact she got worse. She could not put any weight on and is now skin and bones at 87 pounds. She claims she has a blood clot on her pancreas and just recently was diagnosed with two ulcer’s and the lining of her stomach has been destroyed by Alcohol abuse.
You see she never quit drinking, even with all she was told she could not do it. Three weeks ago she was in a auto accident, she hit someone from behind and fortunately no one was hurt and only her car had damage.
But the state police were involved because the accident happened on the Interstate. She claimed they did not have a field sobriety test kit, then she refused to take a blood test. Finally she was arrested and compelled to give a urine sample, results of which I don’t know yet.
I have caught her in several lies about the drinking, long story short ,she just never gave up alcohol. She is married and evidently her husband finally found out about it and her attitude was I will go get help at AA.
Sadly I believe we are well past any help from AA or anyone else. I feel she is too far gone and I have no doubt she will go back to drinking, presuming she quits at all.
On top of this I find out she is on Tramadol which is Opiate pain killer. The only reason I can think of for her to be on that is that her body is shutting down slowly and the pain will only get worse.
I frankly can’t see her being able to last for very long in this situation. I give her maybe 6 months, but that may be way too generous. No one knows how these things will go until they happen.
I never tried 90/90 but I think it’s time I did. You know who does that? RFK jr. Every day he attends an AA meeting and has been sober for 40 years. He was on heroin as well!
Great, sensible ideas. Thanks for your realism.
Alcoholics are only weak because they are wrestling with a powerful drug--a real demon.
I've known a lot of addicts and I know a lot of people who have overcome addiction.
People who have overcome addiction are strong people. Much stronger than people who have never fought that demon and won.
Recovery takes REAL courage. Don't ever look down on someone who is in that fight. They need your support and faith.
That said, don't trust them or loan them money.;-)
As an aside, I had a lady at church tell me that alcoholics are trash and that she would never be an alcoholic...she's never even tasted alcohol.
I said, "How does you know you're not an alcoholic if you've never tasted alcohol?" "You might be a raging alcoholic without knowing it."
She hasn't spoken to me since.
I can't speak from personal experience as I've never had addiction problems, thank Heavens. But, if anecdotal evidence will help...
An in-laws relative recently died from a fall. He was a hardcore alcoholic for years. I never meet him but have been told he would go on angry, days long drinking binges. In and out of jail, threw his life away to alcohol. Apparently he was a brilliant (high IQ) person with a promising career. All down the bottle.
A relative of mine was an alcoholic and sometimes drug user. One time he was drunk and fell off the second story balcony of his apartment, landed on concrete. Was in a coma and he has never truly recovered. He seems permanently brain damaged. I don't know if it is from the fall or a combination of years of drinking/drugs and the fall.
Do whatever you need to do to stay sober. Find your inner strength. If you are inclined to meetings, church, whatever it is, go.
Incorrect. I am a recovered addict and I recovered successfully because I am weak.
If I tried to rely on my strength, I'd still be scoring coke, probably even tonight.
You have to surrender to the Program.
Call me. Number is in freepmail.
I just COULD NOT do the 90/90 thing. I did everything else right though.
Admitting you're are weak--even helpless--is, as you know, AA talk. And it works.
That's the same way people come to Christ...by admitting your weakness.
My point is that wrestling with addiction AND WINNING makes a person stronger than they used to be.
No one is stupid enough to say that a person is stronger than their drug.
Fair enough. I just wanted to point my point out, for the addict or alcoholic who still suffers, that might happen across the thread. I wanted to point out that surrender (which is often portrayed as weakness) is the key to success, and that personal strength will get that person nowhere.
Hang tough in your recovery. The longer one is sober, the better and better life gets.
Actually, in a counter-intuitive way, I think it takes a lot of strength and character to surrender. It isn’t easy to admit you’re wrong...and, boy, oh boy, have I been wrong a lot in my life.
PERFECTLY said.
Excellent!
My first/ex husband died at 54, due to alcoholism. He had been to inpatient rehab 2 or 3 times (at very great $$ cost). There were so many issues with this. My kids thought they could do something that would help him, but then felt like they failed him. Among the terrible issues this caused, was that he LIED always, and would lie to his parents, to tell them that the kids wouldn’t see him or spend time with him, when he was the one that cancelled all of their plans, or just didn’t show up, etc. The kids’ grandparents believed HIM, not them (they were very young adults). So for years, the grandparents had wrong info about their amazing grandchildren, due to their inability to see their son as being weak.
He died when his first grandchild was almost 4 months old.
My mother died at 64. She fell, and I think her body just couldn’t take the shock of it, and shut down. It was not a bad fall. She had a hard life in lots of ways, and I don’t think she became addicted to alcohol until maybe in her mid to late 40s, though both of her parents were ALWAYS nursing a bourbon and water, throughout the days we were around them. I think my siblings and I did not really have a clear comprehension of her situation, since we were grown, out of the house, and didn’t see her too often. I do have bad memories of the last time I saw her, which was a couple months before she passed away, and her overall appearance still haunts me to this day. I remember wanting to leave and take my children away (on a visit; we lived 400 miles away), so they wouldn’t see her like that.
Both the ex/first husband and my mother also smoked, and their death certificates showed smoking as a cause of death but not alcohol addiction.
It may be too late to help your friend, other than to try to have some measure of compassion for her, and to acknowledge her suffering as she deteriorates.
Hopefully some of the discussion on this thread will help other FReepers to frame their own relationships and experiences based on some of the insights shared her. For that, thank you for this post/thread.
I *SUSPECT* that a number of people who say they are born alcoholics maybe literally are.
Not necessarily genetically, although I suppose some have a predisposition to it, but I have often wondered if when a woman drinks while pregnant, if the baby isn't more susceptible at that stage and becomes an alcoholic in utero.
So maybe they are literally born an alcoholic and nobody ever knew, and they take that first drink as an adult and are sunk from the get go.
One group I have not yet seen recommended on this thread for alcohol addiction is Teen Challenge.
Teen Challenge is not just for teens and is not only a drug addiction program. My understanding is they deal with all kinds of addictions and because it is through the work of Jesus Christ in their lives, they have a tremendous success rate.
“You are not alcoholic and never will be one. Ever.”
Who knows? If I ever have my first drink, I might become one. I can’t pass on chocolate. That is part of my rational for not trying it.
True words for sure.
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