It does more than takes the edge off. It prevents seizures. The type of seizures you can have during alcohol withdrawal can be deadly. They are the reason people die sometimes when trying to quit without help.
The “scare stories are BS” and “if you hate it enough, you will be able to leave it” are, exactly HOW wrong?
Stating that I can still have etoh without ending up drunk is hardly advising an alcoholic to “drink up”.
It is telling him to ignore the scare stories and keep going.
I also take two opiates for pain as well as a hypnotic for sleep. Maybe I’m a special case, but I don’t think I’m all that different.
A gentle suggestion. Post in threads where your advice is not likely to kill someone if they follow it.
Death due to detoxing is not a scare story. Death due to alcoholism is not a scare story. You may be a special case where you were so addicted to alcohol that you had to take benzos to avoid death while detoxing and can drink now. However most people would consider the attitude of ‘Well, alcoholism almost killed me but a beer won’t hurt’ a rather foolish attitude over something so trivial. And drinking is trivial unless you are an alkie.
I never understood the attitude you are displaying. If someone has a problem with alcohol why would it upset you if abstinence is recommended?
Smapti, glad to hear you are going to your doc.
Slee
I had been on benzos for 8 years before deciding to NOT do the AMA thing and check out of a hospital. That stay turned into “in-patient detox”.
I was off Ativan for a week or two before going to PCP and asking for more. Hardly addicted.
And: my drinking profile was pretty much that of the OP.
And: for being addicted to benzos: I have gone 4 days without them. Then I wanted to sleep. I am “addicted” to benzos to the extent that I am “addicted” to sleep.
Repeat above, using “opioids” and “free of pain”.
I do not object to “being advised to avoid”.
I DO have a problem with the incessant “Go to AA” and “If you EVER have another drink, you will die”.
I do not mind offering myself as an example of BOTH of those noises being not only wrong, but OFFENSIVELY wrong.
p.s. - for those who object to the use of opioids for non-malignant pain:
- I have very high tolerance for CNS depressants. The NSAID dosages I needed to relieve minor pain may have contributed to:
- Kidney failure. NSAIDS strongly contraindicated.
A relative of mine almost died because she went cold turkey without detoxing. Another DID die after catching an infection that her body was unable to fight off due to years of alcohol abuse. (She had been sober for several months, but she still hadn’t recovered physically enough)
Don’t tell me those “scare stories are BS”. AA might not be for everyone, but it’s not the only program out there.
Good luck Smapti. I hope it all works out for you.
You haven’t left it, though.
In-patient detox sounds like a very good plan, Smapti. It isn’t much fun, and you’ll most likely be treated like an idiot (restrictions on movement, bed checks, etc.) but you’ll survive it, which is most certainly not guaranteed if you stop on your own. That’s an impressive amount of alcohol you’re downing every night.
You may well find yourself pressured to go to in-house 12-step meetings. If so, I’d recommend going just to hear what other patients have to say. Some of them will be there for their umpteenth detox, and you may as well learn what NOT to do. Their most common mistake will be to have decided they could drink one beer.
Good luck. I wish you well.
Good luck, Smapti. I’m sure your doctor will be delighted to help you in this. You’ve made a truly positive step for your future, here.
Because even if you are telling the whole truth about your recovery (which I kinda doubt) then you are such an anomaly that your “advice” should have a thousand asterisks behind it saying “these results are not typical”.
Congratulations (I guess?) for being the rare exception to the recovery rule, but to ignore mounds of researched evidence that states alcohol recovery requires total abstinence and a pretty big behavioral change is just asinine.
As for the statements being “offensively wrong”, offensive to you maybe because you’re the special snowflake of the recovery world, but for the millions of people who are successfully recovered (including many on this board) these statements are the only way complete recovery happens.
What is it that makes it difficult to have 1 drink and stop there? When an alcoholic has the first drink, what tends to follow from both a subjective and objective POV? I am not doubting that it is difficult, I figure that someone more acquainted with that problem than I could explain it.
Also, I’ve read that psychedelics can help with alcoholism. Can anyone give an account of that?
He decides that the first drink didn’t hurt him. So he has another.
Or he uses opiates and benzos. And tells others, sometimes, “don’t worry about dying from the DTs - it didn’t happen to me, so you won’t either.”
Regards,
Shodan
Not a solution, but has interesting information:
usetobe, the medical dangers of detox from alcohol are well documented and posters are right to caution the OP about them. Not being the OP’s doctor, you are not in a position to tell the OP he absolutely has nothing worry about, so you need to stop that line of advice.
As this thread is seeking medical advice, I’m moving to IMHO.
You might check a recent story in the the Atlantic about detox and how in the US its apparently poorly regulated and often based on 12 step, w/very little evidence to support its efficacy & mentions a drug called Naltrexon that seems to show some promise. Sorry, don’t know how to do the link thing, but easy enough to Google. I think it was called “The Irrationality of AA” Please don’t misunderstand me, I have friends and family members who swear by AA and feel it saved their lives, so I don’t mean to criticize it if it works for you, but if not, there may be other approaches worth exploring. Good luck with it.
Beware claims of miracle drugs which cure addiction. Lately, gabapentin, naltrexone, buprenorphine, and a host of others are having such claims made for them. I prescribe all those drugs, and guess what? They are not a miracle cure.
Just like in the past, heroin turned out to NOT be a safe, non-addictive alternative to morphine (as it was originally advertised). Nor is methadone such a cure for heroin, nor buprenorphine for oxycodone, nor antabuse or gabapentin for alcohol or cocaine, etc. etc. etc.
Addictions are way more complicated than that; they will not be cured by a miracle drug the way penicillin cures syphilis.
Some of these meds may be useful adjuncts to treating addictive diseases, but only as a part of the whole treatment program, which will include psychological and behavioral along with psychiatric and medical treatment.
And as for the OP, alcohol withdrawal is a potentially fatal process, and needs close medical supervision, so I certainly strongly support detox.
Now excuse me while I go attend to an opioid-addicted pregnant woman. <<sigh>>
Well, I can only speak from my experience but here goes.
There are two parts. First is the pre-drinking urge. The best I can explain it is like this: Have you ever gone swimming and went down deep, maybe a little too deep. And you start coming up to the surface and your brain starts going “Hey, I need to breathe. Really, I Need to breathe. You DON’T UNDERSTAND, I need to BREATHE! HOLY FUCK I NEED TO BREATHE NOW OR I AM GOING TO DIE!”
Insert drink for breathe and that is what it was like when I was jonesing for a drink.
Then there is after the first drink. You know the Lay’s potato chip commercial “Bet you can’t only eat just one!”. Ever experienced that? Where you eat something and the rational part of your brain is saying “Hey, I really shouldn’t eat that” while the craving part of your brain is saying “Damn, that is some good shit, I GOTTA HAVE MORE OF THAT” and the craving part of your brain wins? That is kinda what it was like for me, except way, WAY more intense.
It is hard to explain but that is the best I can do.
Slee
[quote=“Sir_T-Cups, post:7, topic:747704”]
Your Inpatient facility should help you that in their therapies. They should be using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) which will focus on changing your behaviors surrounding, and how you perceive, alcohol. Once you know the process of changing your views on alcohol you can implement it at work.
I second the CBT. My story is complex, but at 58 I’ve been drinking since I was 18 or so. Most of those years was every day. I was a high-functioning alcoholic and I knew I had a problem but I kept drinking.
As I got older and my bingeing got worse—at one point I lived in Japan for five years, was in a band and under a lot of stress with a lot of exposure to alcohol and the problem became very serious. It culminated in one instance in which I went cold turkey from a daily intake of more than 1.1L 17% sake per day (plus whatever else I could lay my hands on) and I had a grand mal seizure. Then I had another the moment I got back from the hospital. That was definitely a wake up call, but I kept drinking for another 20 years.
Not saying you would get seizures, but hard liquor is obviously the worst kind of alcohol to be addicted to because after a while you can drink it like water. Wine or beer takes much, much longer to drink.
All that said, however, there IS a way you can quit without medical supervision. I’ve done it many, many times. But you must be extremely careful and not depart from the schedule; you must have discipline.
Obviously, it involves tapering. You start with your maximum intake—whatever it is you’ve been regularly imbibing daily—and simply start reducing the quantity, perhaps over a two/three-week period, and calculate the quantities carefully beforehand.
And you can’t mess up. Theoretically, if you reduce your intake until you’re at 1/10 of what you were drinking at your maximum—do the math—you can then start phasing alcohol out completely without fear of massive withdrawal symptoms. But this must be done SLOWLY. I might even counsel a month of tapering, just to be 100% safe.
However, as I said, it requires iron discipline and you cannot fuck up even once.
I’ve now been off the juice for five months . . . no program, no nothing—except CBT.
As an atheist/skeptic/cynic, I didn’t want to go to group-ANYTHING, and I made the decision to do it on my own, but I did go to CBT after a good friend recommended it. I can safely say that it was the best thing that happened to me—it reduced my anxiety levels to acceptable and gave me the tools to quit drinking, this time, hopefully permanently.
You sound like my type of thinker, so I think CBT would be good for you, too. I introduced it to a friend who is a pediatric nurse who was suffering from PTSD and drowning his sorrows, and it’s been working for him as well—I can’t recommend it enough.
Good luck. As a lifelong alky, I can tell you that you CAN live without drinking. You just have to do it to start with, to show yourself that there is a life without alcohol. As time passes it gets easier.
And don’t worry about being around alcohol; accept it. In this society. it’s all around us and we can’t avoid it. Just, be intelligent and try not to go to bars with your friends; you know, be smart.
But I am living proof that even after 35-odd long years of drinking every day, it CAN BE DONE.
I used to have a stop-drinking blog with a couple of other people until they quit quitting for various reasons, but I highly recommend starting a blog to document your struggles. It’s very cathartic.
And if you can’t trust yourself, get medical help. I’m just saying that stopping on my own worked for me—it may not work for you.
Good luck. If you feel like it you can track me down if you need any more support, or hear more of my story. Always happy to help out a fellow traveller!
Here’s my suggestion: First, get sober. Worry about staying sober later.
Go for a short-term medically supervised detox facility. See what happens when you get home. It’s possible you’ll be just fine; you just won’t be drunk. If you struggle and/or relapse, then you can start looking for a next step.
You’ll have a lot time on your hands that used to be spent drinking, so you’ll need to find something else to do. That’s one of the benefits of going to meetings of some sort; the meetings fill the time and you get to hear from a lot of people who are going through what you are going through and how they are dealing with it.
I am a total atheist and have been since childhood. I did go to AA meetings for a year or so after I first detoxed. I could go on a very long rant about the bad parts of AA, but I also have fond memories of many of the meetings and the people I knew there. The pressure to “get religion” is very mild in the beginning; only after maybe six months or so do the hard-core believers start to really apply the pressure to get with the program and get god.
If there had been some other sort of meetings available then, I probably would have tried them, more for the social aspect than anything else; hanging out sober with the same sort of people you used to fall off bar stools with is fun.
Eventually, the urge to drink did go away completely. For many years now, I have had no desire whatever to drink. I never did care to have “a” drink; I drank to get drunk.
Sober since September 21, 1981.
(I forgot to add that it might be a good idea to have some benzodiazepines on hand in case you slip up. The allosteric receptor sites in your brain that bind to ethanol can also be satisfied with diazepines and avert withdrawals, but the science is complex and I am not a doctor. But having a few Lorazepams on hand couldn’t hurt).