Rehab Diary: Day 1

I woke up alone and disoriented. And sweaty. I couldn’t quote the song at the time, I was so out of it, but looking back on the cloudy memories, I was definitely what The Band sung of as “feeling ’bout half past dead.”

Rising from my stupor, my body feeling like I’d gone 12 rounds with Mike Tyson and my head fogged with only at best a vague memory of the day before, was nothing new to me by this point. That didn’t make it any less confusing or painful though.

“Where the hell am I?” I wondered to myself. I had been awoken by a knock on the door a few minutes earlier. 6:45 in the damned morning?!? Who had knocked, and why? As I glanced around the room assessing a scene of mild chaos in a place I simply did not recognize, I heard another knock on the door.

Wake up, we’re going to the meeting in 15 minutes!

Meeting? WTF!?! Wait a minute….the thoughts and memories slowly streamed through my liquor-addled mind…let’s see, there’s the clothes I was wearing last night…and my gym bag, with its contents strewn across the floor….I’m in what appears to be some sort of guest room…perhaps a hospital? That wouldn’t be anything new, I’d been hospitalised before after binges…and then it hit me….

Aw shit, I checked into rehab last night.

I threw on the previous day’s clothes, those booze-soaked rags I had been wearing when I walked into…wherever I had walked into, whatever Detox Mansion I had managed to find. Opened the door, took a deep breath, and nearly passed out.

One of the “aides” appeared out of nowhere, catching me before I hit the floor. I could barely hold my head up, and sort of hung on her arms, my head lolling back and forth like I was a fish out of water – except in my case I was a drunk out of vodka.

I had to be more careful getting up so quickly, the aide told me. Even in the condition I was in at the time, I still did not like people telling me what I “had to do.”

Despite my aversion to being told what to do, I was grateful she had kept me from cracking my head on the floor. Once, while in hospital going through delirium tremens, I had woken in the middle of the night with the need to “drain the main vein” (go the toilet, for those who don’t know the vernacular). I was pretty wobbly and sedated, and I stepped out of my hospital bed and right into the puke bucket laying on the floor, slipped backward, cracked my head on the concrete floor, and gave myself another concussion and a few more bruises.

So at least this time I hadn’t stepped in my own puke, or cracked my head on the ground. Baby steps, right?

I learned weeks later that the rehab staff kept an eye on us “newbies” while we were detoxing to make sure we didn’t have any accidents or suffer too much during seizures. The thing that is most interesting about that is that they did their jobs so well, we never noticed them or felt like they were hovering over us. But whenever one of us fell, tripped, convulsed or puked, a residential aide would immediately be there to assist us.

And so began the first day of rehabilitation. It had been months since I’d not had a drink first thing in the morning to calm the shakes, the bitter hellish symphony of my central nervous system breaking down due to deprivation of drink for a few hours.

The librium and sedatives I was being fed every six hours helped some – from what I understand, the primary goal of that particular chemical cocktail is to keep the body from going into shock, resulting in a seizure or, in cases like mine, possible death.

Even with the meds, my body still knew it was missing something. I was dizzy, weak, and very shaky. I was led to THE VAN – a white van, everything looked white that morning in a weird way – and soon after was in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I didn’t share much. In fact I don’t know if I said anything at all.

The rest of the day I spent either sleeping or staring off into space.  At some point I tried turning on the television in my room. It only got three over-the-air channels. And each of the channels was laden with static. That could have been exacerbated by the withdrawal I was going through.

Damn, no cable in my room…what kind of shithole rehab facility had I picked?

The staff encouraged me to come out of my room when I felt up to it, primarily so they could attempt to get plenty of liquids into my system. Surprisingly, only water, fruit juices, and soda pop were offered – no gin? Not even a glass of wine? Again I found myself wondering what the hell kind of gulag I was in. And then I remembered….

The “7-Up” bottle I had left in the parking lot. Ah-ha! I thought at that moment that I was likely the smartest guy in the history of rehab treatment programs.

Sadly, I was too weak to journey out to the parking lot that day. And, as I laid in my bed, sweating and shaking and trying to work out where exactly I actually was geographically, my mind continued to rationalize.

Just wait until tomorrow…they will be less likely to notice you go to the parking lot then…

I don’t remember a lot of other details of Day 1, though then again there are periods of whole weeks prior to entering residential rehab that I can’t recall at all. And there is one thing about Day 1 that I will never forget.

I had gone through physical withdrawal and detoxification before – at least five times, but very likely actually twice that many if not more. Sometimes I had done it “on my own,” weaning myself to the point of having seizures that woke me in the middle of the night, and substituting pills for booze. Other times I detoxed under medical supervision, under heavy sedation along with Librium or Ativan.

This detox wasn’t like any previous drying out. This one was different. Between the sedative meds (be they “self-prescribed” or doctor-approved) and the fact that I normally had gone straight back to the bottle after each previous detox, every single previous detox was, to me, simply a horrific hallucination. This time I was in deep.

And this time, on that first day, as I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t recognize my own face.

Once I puzzled through who this distorted image in the mirror was, it looked to me like I was dying, but I could not understand why it was taking so long.

I stumbled back to the bed, laid down, and waited.

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