Hope Lost (Requiem 18)

One of the biggest things that recovery has to offer to the alcoholic is hope. Hope that one day life won't be like it is when we got here. In meetings, we are told to share our 'experience, strength, and hope' when we speak to newcomers. Without hope that things will get better, why would we come back? Every time I went back to drinking, I lost a little more hope that one day I would learn to stay sober. When I left the recovery house, I made a decision that I was not going to try to get sober any more. I was sick of failing. Then things got serious with Katie and I decided that I would keep trying not to drink. After my father in law died and I stole his pills, I felt awful. Finding out I couldn't have kids so soon afterwards was a knockout punch of sorts. I didn't make a decision that I wouldn't try to stay sober like before, but I had lost hope that things would get better and gave into that self pity. I gave up trying at that point. I had been sober for about 2 months when our trip to Washington D.C. came around. Not because I wanted to stay sober as much as because I didn't want to cause any more disruption to an already chaotic and painful first year of marriage.

A lot of my family is from Minnesota, so for the first 25 years of my life I was a Vikings fan. One of the unspoken stipulations to my joining my wife's family was that I support the Washington Redskins. I hadn't followed football for years by this point, so it was an easy transition. This trip was, in part, to prove my allegiance to the right team. The season opener that year was the Vikings versus the Redskins. We managed to get some great seats in the first 10 rows or so at about the 40 yard line. To the non football fans, we were close to the action in the middle of the rectangle shaped field. After the first quarter I starting really wanting a drink. My brothers-in-law both knew that I was an alcoholic, so if I was going to have a drink, I was going to have to sneak away to buy a beer and chug it. All without raising suspicions. Throughout the game I kept disappearing to 'go to the bathroom'. At one point, I grabbed my camera and asked the guy across the aisle from me to take a picture of us. So here we are:














My brothers behind me enjoying the game, I pretending like I was enjoying the game more than I was. The truth is that I was focused on getting the maximum number of drinks in me while raising the minimum level of suspicion. On the bus ride back to our car, a guy had a bottle of whiskey and was filling up the cups of anyone who wanted a drink. I found a used cup and had him fill it up. I chugged the drink without regard to where the cup may have been. The next day we were due to fly back. I had booked my flight later than my brothers in law, so I was on a different flight. When we got to the airport we separated. And then it was on. I had 3 hours to kill, so I parked myself at the bar in the sports bar and set about killing that time. By the time I got off the plane that night, my wife could see that I was drunk from 20 yards away in the airport. She was furious with me. I tried to play it off and act as though I had nothing wrong, but she wasn't buying it. She had been watching me for a year and knew there was no reason to justify me drinking.

Now that she knew I was drinking, I figured there was no reason to try to hide it. For the next few days I drank openly around Katie. She was absolutely unhappy about it, but was as powerless as me to stop it. After a few days of drinking, I knew I was getting worse and fast.

* * *

People say that alcoholism is a progressive disease. What they mean is that over any substantial period of time, it will always get worse. Even though I had only been drinking for a few days, I was quickly in as bad of shape as I'd been in right before going to detox before we were married. The first night I had 2 or 3 glasses of beer and half a glass of whiskey. The next day I had drink after drink in the bar. Within 3 or 4 days, I was buying a bottle of vodka and drinking it in 2 or 3 days. So within a week I would go from sober to drinking all night or until I blacked out. It would only be a matter of time before I lost my job and started drinking during the day.

I didn't drink as much as some people. I had friends who could power down 2 fifths of Jack Daniels a day. That doesn't change the fact that I could completely lose myself to chasing the drink within a week of drinking. And once I had been sober for a little while, I couldn't lie to myself any more. I knew that it could only go downhill from there. In a moment of clarity, I decided that I needed to go somewhere to be away from the booze. I needed to get the heat off of me long enough to figure out what I was going to do next. That was how I ended up going to detox at the same facility I had been to four previous times. This time there would be no rock stars. This was going to be my last shot at any type of a detox or a rehab. I was only at my new job for a couple of months. I think the only reason I wasn't let go then and there was that my brother in law was a part owner.

When I was in the hospital, I spent about two weeks with them putting me on large doses of some of the same types of pills I had been on before. After two weeks they let me out. I went back to work and started getting violently sick. I had to have my brother in law take me to an emergency room one day. I went back to the detox ward for another couple weeks for them to adjust the doses on my medication. I got out about a week before our first wedding anniversary. I had put on about 35 pounds in the 4 weeks due to the meds they had me on. I started drinking again right away. I had learned nothing in the 3 or 4 weeks in the hospital. Katie demanded that I stay sober through our anniversary, so I spent that day sober. The next day, though, I came home drunk. Katie was done with me. She'd had enough. She threw me out. I packed up a bag of stuff and headed off to live with my mother and grandmother.