Day two of my journey in rehabilitation and (hopefully at least) recovery began much like Day One….but worse. A knock on the door, waking me from a fitful sleep, telling me that we would depart for “the meeting” in 20 minutes.

Disoriented, sweaty, and still uncertain of exactly where the hell I was, I stumbled out of bed and threw on the same clothes I had worn the day before. It just did not seem to matter to me what I wore at the time, I had worn the same booze-soaked clothes for days on end before, so why change now?

I was still on a medication regime of Librium and whatever other pills they gave me to take. My body was starting to really break down by day two – the tremors, the dizziness, the beginning of my central nervous system realizing it was no longer getting what it was addicted to – in short, the actual delirium tremens were trying to break through despite the pharmaceutical assistance I was getting.

I’d been through physical withdrawal and detox before, but normally I was medicated to a greater degree. Every time I was in the hospital, they would dope me up with Librium but also had healthy doses of narcotics and sedatives. Maybe not the best choice for an addict to be given, but hospitals are focused on preventing physical or mental breakdowns due to withdrawal. And they successfully got me through that – more than once.

But here, in this rehab facility, they were focused on first preventing my body  and/or mind from shattering but they were just as focused on getting me on a path of recovery. So, no dialudin, morphine, oxycodone or the like this time. Damn the luck.

In the morning A.A. meeting, I still was not feeling up to sharing, but I was starting to feel a connection to some of the people there and what they were sharing. Plus there was lots of coffee at the meeting, which was quickly becoming my substitute addiction in lieu of vodka.

After the morning meeting we returned to Detox Mansion, where I promptly collapsed back into bed. Around lunchtime came another knock on the door, but this knock was from the person in charge of the facility. He asked if he could come in and talk with me for a bit. I obligingly said yes, and he came in and sat in one of the chairs provided in my room.

He talked with me about his background, his life, and his experiences. He told me he had never personally suffered from any addictions but that he had worked with addicts for over 25 years. As it turned out, it was his wife who had conducted my intake interview the night I arrived and who had (correctly) surmised that, as she delicately put it, “we might have a detox situation on our hands.”

She could not have been more correct. And so ends my memory of that miserable day two, feeling as though I were plunging into the depths of detox and delirium once more, but this time remembering…remembering and feeling every single minute of it.

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We are up to 23 clients in the rehab facility now. The staff is struggling to keep up. This is the most clients they have ever had at one time. Two of the clients are only in for seven days – they had the choice of seven days in jail or seven days in rehab in a cushy rehab place. Go figure, they picked the luxury spot instead of jail. Those of us who are here for “longer” detest the seven-dayers.

We’re @ outpatient programming right now. We go to outpatient four times a week for two and one-half hours per sessions (10AM to lunch break @ 12:30). On Thursdays such as today, the first hour is structured as an AA meeting (though it is the worst AA meeting I have ever attended).

The morning AA meeting was awesome! Lots of great sharing. One of the “old-timers” approached me afterward and told me he had been through some of the same experiences as me (such as driving our vehicles into ditches on the “way home” at something like 60 or 70 miles per hour and being fucking lucky we didn’t smash into a power pole before righting our vehicles back onto the roadway…good times).

I’m eternally grateful that I never hit anything…or anyone…while driving drunk. It’s a miracle, one of many. I could not live with myself if I had hurt or killed someone in an “accident” – to be honest, I would rather have died myself than hit someone else. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suicidal, I just couldn’t bear the guilt of damaging someone else’s life that way.

Yesterday I received pictures and a lovely letter from my significant other. I also talked on the phone last night with them for awhile. Things are going well in their life (all things considered) and I am very happy about that. The pictures sent were from their visit during “family visit” day last weekend and they came out great. I am so blessed to have this person in my life, especially after all I have done. I still feel a lot of guilt and shame for hurting them so badly with my drinking and the behavior I exhibited while drinking.

I miss them so much. But as they have said (more than once), I’m where I need to be right now. And as they said as I was packing my bags for rehab, and I noted how far they had come in making some needed changes in their life, “It’s your turn now.”

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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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When I walked in the door of the inpatient treatment facility, I was drunk off my ass. I mean happy as a clam, reeking of booze, swaying and slurring my words drunk.

I walked in “under my own power” though – that’s called acquired tolerance, kiddies. You build it up over time, and it allows you to do things like walk into a hospital on your own, tell them you’ve had “two drinks” that day, and then find out your blood alcohol content is .42 (that’s a tad high, FYI).

Later I learned that it’s quite common for people to enter rehab higher than kites. One person I befriended in rehab had been through the dreaded intervention with their family. At the end of the intervention he agreed to go to rehab on one condition: he could drink as much as he wanted that night and the next morning before departing for Detox Mansion, and no-one would say a word to him about how much he drank.

Another fellow traveler came in under the influence of booze (I think she clocked in at .27) as well as weed and painkillers. Booze and pills don’t mix well, boys and girls. She spent most of her first night running to the toilet to puke some of it up.

And one poor soul came in, went though the intake interview, and was evaluated as needing to physically detox in a hospital before even beginning the mental and spiritual parts of rehab. They came back after a week in hospital, and six days later had a seizure from the after-shock of withdrawal. That’s how much of a Game of Life we’re talking about here.

But back to my little tale (at least the parts of it I can remember or was told about later). A friend drove me to rehab, and in my memory it was dark as midnight when we got there (I learned later it was about 4 p.m.). We were to meet the manager of the facility at 5, so I had some time to kill. Naturally, as any stage 4 drunk would do, I camped out on a curb in the parking lot, sipping from my bottle of “7-Up”, and drunk-dialed people on my cell phone.

I still don’t know for sure who I called or what I said. I’ve asked a few friends since, and learnt that I had a few “interesting” conversations with people. And that “pop” sure did taste good.

When it was time to go in, I cleverly hid the bottle behind a curb. After all, it had a bit of vodka left in it…I could go retrieve it later. Brilliant!

So I staggered into the facility and announced that I had arrived. I met quite a few of the staff that night, though for the next week or so I found myself often saying:

Have we met? Were you here when I arrived?

They took it in good humour. As I mentioned, a lot of people check in under the influence.

My first night I went through an intake interview that I really don’t remember at all. Apparently, and to their credit, the staff realised that I required physical detoxification first and foremost. So, every six hours, I was given Librium and a sedative to keep my central nervous system from going into shock.

After getting a basic tour of the facility, I “fell asleep” (passed out) on the bed in my room. Around 3 or 4 AM I was given my dose of detox meds and promptly fell back to “sleep”.

And so began my little trip down rehab lane.

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It is an interesting fact about alcoholics that we do not particularly care for being told what to do. Someone tells us we “have to do” something and we are automatically, viscerally turned against the proposed thing.

Someone says that the “best way” to do something is x, and we immediately access y in our memory banks while another part of our brain concurrently begins a search for z, the “optimal” solution. And people say we are killing thousands of brain cells with our drinking. Ha!

I have not seen any official studies supporting these theories, but we alcoholics tend to be sceptical of such studies anyway.

From the research, reading, and studying I have done, I have to recognise the fact that in some cases forceful, hard-hitting interventions are necessary. Such an event would be the prime time to tell an addict exactly what they need to do – but that direction must be preceded by explaining to them the effects on others and themselves of what they are currently doing.

Prior to reaching the point of an intervention, one of the worst paths of action you can possibly undertake with an alcoholic is to tell them what they “must” do.

We are clever (but stupid enough to wreck our lives with drink). We are stubborn and generally control freaks (but so weak that we become prisoners of booze). We have become accustomed to a life of subterfuge, resourcefulness, and independence (we have become masters of our destinies by becoming slaves to alcohol; we can acquire it by hook or by crook on our own, we don’t need anyone or anything….other than that liquid medication we find in each bottle).

We live in a state of denial, but I do not mean to say that “denial” means we are “liars” about that state. I heard a wonderful explanation of the concept of denial once. A therapist explained that she did not believe that “denial” equated to “lying”; rather, she espoused that someone who is severely addicted has reached a point where their brain is so constantly “fogged” that they actually no longer can comprehend much less acknowledge the state they are in. So all you Oprah fans can keep saying “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt” and snapping your fingers. But know that the alcoholic who you consider to be lying is likely at least somewhat unaware of their true state of physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

Alcoholism is a somewhat unique addiction when compared to addiction to illicit drugs (and before anyone takes offence at that statement, I recognise that alcohol is a drug, but it is legal, and that’s the key point I’m trying to make here). An alcoholic can go to a convenience store, a bar, a liquor store, a shoppe, or any number of other places and get their stash on. A user of illicit drugs must make connections and contacts with other people to find and acquire their chemicals.

My point here is dead simple. Alcoholism is a very isolating disease – and I believe a key reason for that is we don’t need anyone or anything to easily acquire what we crave. “Druggies” have to network to score street drugs. “Drunks” can just wander down to the nearest Kwikee Mart and buy a bottle.

And so we become more alone and isolated. More convinced that we don’t need anyone to tell us “You have to do…”

It is a lonely road we walk, where we are convinced we are the “worst person in the world, the most miserable drunk ever, who else could possibly be so fucked up that they have a nice, stiff drink first thing after waking to make my hands stop shaking?”

So, for those of you who suffer from the disease I have, I say simply this: You are not alone. I guarantee that you will hear stories much like your own in AA meetings and in talking with others afflicted with the disease. We are each unique, but we also each have much in common

And for those of you with loved ones in your lives who are slowly but surely killing themselves with drink, I say simply this: Resist the temptation to tell them what to do, or to believe that you can “make them stop.” You can’t. Just be there for them, ready to help them find help when they are ready or able, and know that you are doing everything you can….and sometimes there is nothing you can do at the time.

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Hi my name is Jack and I am a stage 4 alcoholic.

I don’t want to focus too much in this article on the different stages of alcoholism – not because I think information about the other stages is unimportant, but because the fourth stage is so unique among drug usage that there are some critical factors I want to discuss for anyone in need of help or knowing of someone who might need help.

Stage four alcoholism’s primary indicator is a physical addiction to alcohol. Put another way, a person at stage four actually has to do one of two things – drink or detoxify under medical supervision – or they run a serious risk of death.

When I say they must drink, I do not mean the psychological craving many indicate by saying or thinking “I could really use a drink” or “I NEED a drink.” I mean that their body’s central nervous system will begin to break down during withdrawal, causing high risks of:

• seizures
• hallucinations
• profuse sweating and dehydration
• severe shaking or tremors
• alcoholic psychosis
• decrease in tolerance to alcohol
• further and severe loss of motor control skills

If you believe you may be physically addicted to alcohol, do not attempt to “quit cold turkey” or to otherwise do it on your own. You would be needlessly risking your life.

If you know someone who may be physically addicted, do not attempt to be the sole or primary facilitator of a physical withdrawal. It will be tempting to try to help your friend or loved one - especially for people who like to help “fix things for other people.”  But in reality, there is little you can directly do for a stage four alcoholic until they have completed a medically-supervised physical detoxification.

Alcohol is the only drug where withdrawal from it can kill you. Someone I know who has worked in substance abuse recovery for decades once said:

Alcohol is the worst when it comes to hardcore addictions. I’ve worked with heroin junkies while they went cold turkey, and they wished they were fuckin’ dead but they didn’t die. I’ve seen stage four drunks in withdrawal have seizures and not make it out.”

I know first-hand what stage four alcoholism feels like. I reached a point while I was drinking where I literally was drinking to avoid a withdrawal that I knew was very likely to be permanently physically and mentally damaging if not directly fatal.

Some key indicators that someone may be physically include:

• very shaky hands after waking up in the morning
• needing at least one drink first thing in the morning to calm those shakes
• waking up two or three times during the night to get a drink
• profuse sweating and/or disorientation after a few hours without a drink
• extremely blurry vision, very bloodshot and/or watery eyes

When attempting to diagnose physical addiction, it is important to also remember a few myths or misconceptions.

A stage four alcoholic may still be somewhat functional. Their acquired tolerance to alcohol will, for a time, remain quite high. The stage four will not always appear drunk at first glance. Many stage four alcoholics begin to lose their tolerance in the latter part of stage four, and at this point their ability to conceal their drinking will diminish correspondingly.

The good news is that there are effective protocols and treatments to physically detox a stage four alcoholic. Librium and Ativan are two of the primary medications used to keep the body from seizing up during the process.

Stage four is the terminal point of the progressive disease of alcoholism. Once a person has reached stage four, they must choose between a certain and premature death or a comprehensive treatment program that begins with physical detox.

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Hi, my name is Ted, and I am an alcoholic.

It’s very hard to know where to start writing in this blog. The subject matter is intensely personal and will at times be very painful for both authors and readers.

In reality, it was even difficult to decide on a name for the blog itself. The current name (LearnAboutRehab.com) makes the site matter sound much more narrow in focus than the reality of what we write about here.

Another complicating set of factors in writing here is our intense need for our own – and our respect for others’ – anonymity. Many bottles of ink have been spilled and many heated discussions have occurred regarding this topic. The founders and charter members of Alcoholics Anonymous considered it so vital that they named the group accordingly; each A.A. meeting begins with reminders of the importance of respecting the anonymity of the group and the individuals in it; and each meeting is closed with another reminder about leaving what is said and who see in the room.

My own need to maintain my anonymity and to respect that of others’ is not borne simply from “respecting the Elders” of A.A. It is also driven by my own experiences of small-town living, of having heard how others felt when their privacy was violated, and my own feelings when well-intentioned people did not maintain my own anonymity and took it upon themselves to share information about my situation with others.

I do not doubt the motives of the people who did that – I sincerely believe them to have been well-intentioned at the time. That, however, does not erase the feelings it engendered in me:

• a sense of loss of control in a situation where so many other aspects of my life had spiralled out of control
• feelings of betrayal or “being used” as some sort of example (again, with good intentions; but there is a certain road that is paved with good intentions)
• self-isolation out of concern for further betrayals of confidences

The final, and perhaps the greatest challenge to writing this, is the intense swirl of emotions, the complicated inter-personal relationships between those involved, and the simple fact that I was a “blackout drunk” for quite some time.

The feelings and the relationships between the people writing here will obviously colour some of what is discussed. That is human nature.

But put quite simply, I could not construct any sort of cohesive history of what happened. I do not remember parts of it, and other memories are distorted. A frequent exercise in rehab programs is to ask the person how much they drank per day, week or month; or, worse yet, how much they spent on booze in a given time frame.

There is simply no way I could answer the first question – I had no idea. Near the end I drank enough to prevent myself from going into physical withdrawal. And the amount of money spent? I guess I’d sum that one up by saying two things:

• It doesn’t matter if you’re drinking Mad Dog 20/20, “just beer”, or Dom Perignon and Remy Martin – you can develop a problem with any of these
• In my experience, I slowly moved down the “food chain”, progressively buying cheaper brands to maximise quantity purchased

The term “blackout” is actually quite misleading. Blackout drunks aren’t just passed out. Those periods of actual loss of consciousness are the ones that are relatively easy to figure out; the person is passed out, “asleep” in a place they normally might not sleep. For example, a dumpster.

But the blackout drunks’ more natural state is to appear largely functional. They may slur their words a bit (or maybe not). They may sweat profusely, but they will always have an excuse as to why. The blackout drunk can (as I have done) have a Blood Alcohol Content of .30, .40, or higher, and still be largely functional. That’s just one glimpse into the fun world of being a blackout drunk.

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