I was admitted into the hospital (friend drove and I walked in) and my BAC was .41 and it had been 2 hours since my last beer.
Have had an on again off again battle with booze for years.... luckily im highly functional when it has gotten bad.
Naltrexone is a game changer
[quote]uh okay? wrote:
replace alcohol with weed in all of these stories and how do they turn out?[/quote
They turn out worse--unemployed because they can't pass the drug screening to get a job. They end up living off the government. A drain on society. At least in all the other cases they died--tragic-- but they were no longer a drain on society.
One I can’t get out of my mind even after 50 years is I once met the doctor who did an autopsy on a sergeant in my unit who everyone knew was really a bad alcoholic. The doc told me that all he did was touch the mans liver with whatever it was he was using and he said the liver crumbled into pieces... surely he was exaggerating
Man, I met some doozies in AA back in the day. This one guy came to a meeting in West Hollywood that attracted a predominately gay crowd. He came because he wanted to make amends and was the featured speaker. He started out by telling stories of how we used to like to fight when he was drunk and he usually found that gays were easy targets so he'd go to bars in West Hollywood and and try to pick fights with people he felt he could handle and proceed to beat them. Needless to say the crowd was kinda horrified but it got even crazier. Apparently he got super drunk one night and decided to pick a fight with a couple of big black dudes and started calling them racial slurs and they proceeded to really bit the piss out of this guy, broken ribs, nose and some other stuff. Well at one point he starts crying and says I'm sorry I am not racist I am an alcoholic I have a bad problem and apparently the dudes decided to show a little mercy and dropped him off in front of the ER and apparently that led to this guys rock bottom and path to sobriety.
I met folks who had blacked out for weeks and ended up in different states not knowing how they got there.
softie wrote:
I'll go first: One of my former bosses (partner at the firm at which I was working).
He was a brilliant attorney and manager, well-respected and generally well-liked, although known for a temper that would occasionally rear its head at work. Speaking of work, he worked like a madman, easily 80+ hour weeks of real work, like real actual work, not messing around on the internet or taking long lunches.
During my 2nd year, his appearance started to degrade. He would show up to work disheveled, shirt partially tucked in, his hair tossed and unstyled, reeking of scotch. It wasn't until his work product suffered that the firm really had to confront the issue.
The decline was fast. I have no idea how long he hid it, or for how long his alcoholism was just under the "alarming" threshold. He could have been operating at the boundary between functional and trainwreck for years. Some people hide it well.
Within a few months, he gained 50 pounds, his skin broke out with rosacea, his facial skin began to sag. Nobody quite knew how to handle the situation, although I wasn't privvy to the intimate conversations about his conditions. I heard a rumor that the cleaning crew found two empty bottles of scotch one night (that hadn't been there the previous day).
He could no longer function and was forced to leave the firm. I think he went to rehab, but he never returned to the firm.
How terrible. God bless him, hope he gets help.
it wasnt worth it wrote:
I took a job in Denver and lived in Louisville. My drinking habits had always been very moderate up until this point. I had thought beer was bloat and wine & liquor never really my thing. Then I met craft beer and took a liking to deceivingly tasting craft beers with high alcohol contents. I developed a tolerance where I could have 24oz to 30oz of beers with 10-13% alcohol. I dont think from a quantitative stabdpoint that I was as bad as others. But I'd tell myself to stop drinking only to go out that night again. This was becoming a necessity and no longer a choice. My inner monologue always torn. I'd tell myself drinking is stupid and to quit. I was already recognizing this was a problem brewing and knew it wasnt me.
Then I got very sick, no doubt the alcohol playing a role in depleting my immune system. So I stopped cold turkey for nearly 2 years between 2019 and 2021.
I returned to drinking about a handful of times since the end of July. All encounters were social and what I deemed a special occasion, emphasizing my alcohol intake as a very controlled reward system. But now that the holidays have passed I am on the fence again as to whether I should drink anymore. I last drank December 17th. I dont see the purpose really. I guess it will have to be a special occasion if I do.
From the financial standpoint I wasted like $6000-$10,000 in drinking (depending on where the line is defined) from fall 2018 to fall 2019 before I got sick. I could definitely afford it (less than 10% of my income) but I can tell you I wasnt who I wanted to be at that time and that included wasting a chunk of money on booze. There are so many more things your money can go toward that are lasting and healthy. Some of you may not even think up to $10000 in wasted monies isnt indicative of a real problem but it was a real problem for me. I'd rather be the guy who gets up at 5:47am and goes out and runs or does some other physical activity before work. And then get really good at work while putting money toward healthier habits and more enjoyable things.
That's how drinking, for the most part, has ended for me. No issues turning down booze offers. I re-prioritized and stuck to the plan..
I encourage everyone who thinks they have a problem or their mind tells them to stop and they cant, to, plainly, stop. I challenge you to go a straight calendar year without alcohol and reconvene at a later date when the time is right. You'll have a clearer set of lenses into the hourglass of time. Be well.
Thank you for sharing that. If you are unsure whether you should drink, my suggestion would be to not do so. You lose nothing important, and it seems like the safer choice.
uh okay? wrote:
replace alcohol with weed in all of these stories and how do they turn out?
Good question. If someone were smoking marijuana all day every day, at night, sneaking it in during the workday, blowing through money and ignoring responsibilities to acquire the herb, I would say they had a serious problem, even addiction. But it probably wouldn’t lead to their death unless they operated a car while high.
Squidbilly wrote:
If you wanna read some eye-opening stories, head on over to the Crippling Alcoholism subreddit. If you’re worried about your drinking habits, stories over there will dwarf your problems. The sad part is that they wear their issues as a sort of depressing badge of honor. Yikes
I do find a ton of value in the Stop Drinking subreddit though. Anyways…
I’ve spent some hours there. It’s a train wreck you can’t take your eyes off.
It’s truly amazing how much some people can drink and somewhat function.
The end is rarely pretty for them, unfortunately.
I have a mild existential crisis every time I read one of these alcohol threads, but I can't stop myself.
One patient of mine had liver cancer, jaundiced, ascites, encephalopathy, teeth decaying. We were talking about his drinking history and he told me he was a salesman for a beer distributor and they had a lot of freebies with the job (parties, entertainment suites, etc.). He liked to drink a lot of hard liquor and didn't like to stop and still craved it daily, even after his health was so terribly dissipated . The really sad thing was he was a great father and his wife and kids really looked up to him but he was gone by his early 50's. Too much booze is never good for you but it really seems to me that the hard liquor is really poison in comparison to beer.
I swear to drunk I am not God !
Henry Rono FTW
2:18 at the casino (SLU grad) wrote:
I swear to drunk I am not God !
Only I can be drunk and also God.
comedyre|;3f wrote:
uh okay? wrote:
replace alcohol with weed in all of these stories and how do they turn out?
About the same. I know plenty of people that smoked a lot of weed that ended up killing themselves. It's kind of a gray area of whether or not people that smoke weed even reduce their consumption of alcohol. College students who smoke weed are more likely to drink than their peers who do not smoke weed, so it is not like people that smoke weed magically don't drink. People that smoke and drink are twice as likely to have a DUI. In general, people in these stories are people who started using drugs (like alcohol and weed) at a young age (which is why they became addicted). It all boils down to establishing messed up brain chemistry at a young age and normalizing addictive behavior.
do you know what the word "replace" means?
I used to drink a lot. Not as bad as some of these stories, but had at least two 4-5 day benders in the past few years where I was drinking while working from home. Waking up in the middle of the night to have a couple drinks to put me back to sleep. Hiding drinks from my wife. I thought the first bender was a fluke, so I thought I could keep up the occasional heavy drinking. I was always puffy and would get swollen ankles often. After the second one, I knew it was a real problem.
Haven’t touched alcohol since, going on 9 months. It was very hard the first few weeks, especially the first couple of days.
Down 15 lbs and running better than I have in the past 10 years. I’m lucky to not lose my job or family, and have drastically improved my quality of life. Will never touch it again.
4:59 wrote:
They turn out worse--unemployed because they can't pass the drug screening to get a job. They end up living off the government. A drain on society. At least in all the other cases they died--tragic-- but they were no longer a drain on society.
sounds like something my grandfather would say, and I'm 51 yrs old. You do realize cannabis is legal or decriminalized in the majority of states now, don't you?
cappyhappypappy wrote:
I was admitted into the hospital (friend drove and I walked in) and my BAC was .41 and it had been 2 hours since my last beer.
Have had an on again off again battle with booze for years.... luckily im highly functional when it has gotten bad.
Naltrexone is a game changer
Naltrexone works for me. Not sure I could've stopped drinking and remained sober without it. Also, it's thankfully nothing like Antabuse.
Mikeh33 wrote:
uh okay? wrote:
replace alcohol with weed in all of these stories and how do they turn out?
Good question. If someone were smoking marijuana all day every day, at night, sneaking it in during the workday, blowing through money and ignoring responsibilities to acquire the herb, I would say they had a serious problem, even addiction. But it probably wouldn’t lead to their death unless they operated a car while high.
Operating a car was a big factor in why I quit getting high. It never seemed worth the bother to find workarounds.
I do think it could be good for me to get wasted now and then, never seems to be the right time. I would feel like I was keeping a lie from my kids because I prefer they don't smoke. Other than that, pot is better than drinking. I have not seen that extreme cannabis users have been doing better at life than a lot of drunks.
It's only a problem if you can't afford it.
comedyre|;3f wrote:
uh okay? wrote:
replace alcohol with weed in all of these stories and how do they turn out?
About the same. I know plenty of people that smoked a lot of weed that ended up killing themselves. It's kind of a gray area of whether or not people that smoke weed even reduce their consumption of alcohol. College students who smoke weed are more likely to drink than their peers who do not smoke weed, so it is not like people that smoke weed magically don't drink. People that smoke and drink are twice as likely to have a DUI. In general, people in these stories are people who started using drugs (like alcohol and weed) at a young age (which is why they became addicted). It all boils down to establishing messed up brain chemistry at a young age and normalizing addictive behavior.
Sad. I've known people that had similar stories but not to the extent of some of what's been posted here.
As far as the bolded part of the quote above - That sounds like me.
I started drinking heavily, smoking pot, taking whatever pills we could scrounge daily when I was about 15 and continued until about 19. Had a DWI (that's what they called it in Texas) on my 17th birthday. My fellow druggie/alcoholic friends took me out in the desert and we proceeded to drink beer and take Quaaludes. We ran through the beer and decided to get more at 7-11 - only thing is nobody had any money. That's called 'beer run'. Of course, I was the fool driving, one of my buddies went in and ran out with a case of beer. I took off with my foot on the floor and drove right across a highway and got tboned by a police van, of all things. There were 5 of us drunks in the car and none of us so much as had a scratch, it was some kind of big Chrysler from the 70's (buddy's car, totaled). I'm lucky I didn't kill myself, my friends or the driver of that van. That didn't stop me from driving drunk though. Had lots of close calls with trees and such in the next couple years. I don't know what saved me but when I went to college I was majoring in EE at the Univ of Texas and I pretty much just STOPPED. Full on. Funny, how so many go to college and go downhill big time but for me it was the exact opposite. Nowadays (60 years old) I'll drink a beer once in while but that's mostly it. Like another poster said if someone told me I couldn't drink any alcohol at all for 6 months I wouldn't bat an eye.