Best of luck to you. Remember about AA that it’s just another tool in the toolbox. It works for some and doesn’t for others.
Mark (3 1/2 years sober)
Good luck, FoieGras! Keep thinking of wife and kids when you hit the hard spots - you’re not just doing it for yourself, but for them as well!
Hope to see you back soon, dry & sober!
We’ll be looking for the “ask the guy out of detox” thread.
Good luck!
Oh, you’re a Bengals fan? Me too. Now I understand why you’ve done all that drinking. 
Seriously, good luck.
Take up cake as an addiction replacement. Chocolate cake.
/good luck.
Good luck to you! It can be done. You just have to be ready to do it.
PeacePlease: sober 20+ years; no AA.
I’ll be offering prayers for you during your detox, FoisGras! You will love the person you are, hidden under the alcohol. Don’t be afraid of being ordinary. You’re already extraordinary for taking this step!
Be sure and let us know how you’re doing. We care!
Even if you’re a BENGALS fan, I’ll still wish you good luck. 
Us Bengals fans have to stick together! Ochocinco is awesome! 
I’ll be praying for you: and I’m glad you’re doing it. I wish most of my family had done the same. We’ll see you on the flip side.
Good luck, and thank you for making the attempt.
My dad was a functional alcoholic - but because he was “such a nice, upstanding guy” and never showed a problem with alcohol, nobody seemed to care. I asked him once, for my 16th birthday, if he would go one day without drinking - he wouldn’t; but nobody believed me that he had a problem.
Until he had a heart attack, and while on the table for a quadruble bypass, ALSO went through alcohol withdrawal. Even with the doctor’s explaination of what happened then, my mother STILL refused to admit he had a problem. 2-3 double manhattens and a few beers every night for 40 years…
Thank you for seeking medical help, and for caring enough for yourself and your family that you’d give it the effort.
All-
I just got back about an hour ago. It was (so far) a pretty painless process. Unfortunately I think that the true test lies ahead, now that I have the opportunity to drink if I so choose.
I have a lot of catching up to do family-wise, etc but will most certainly post a lengthy, sober screed about my experience, as it was quite interesting (this facility housed addiction detox and mental patients together…an ugly, vile but strangely compelling blend).
To be continued…
Welcome back, I was just thinking about you and wondering.
Looking forward to your tale…
My sister went through detox and rehab time one in a frou frou private celebrity facility. Its really hard for reality to hit when the guy sitting next to you at lunch has a superbowl ring, someone else is a high end CEO, and the supermodel checked out last week. (The majority of people were well off, or had well off parents, but were not famous). I believe this was a bad experience for her because you can’t see bottom when your safety net is the size of Lindsey Lohan’s in rehab #1 (Lilo’s safety net seems to be getting smaller each trip through rehab though).
The second time she did it she did it outpatient and public in North Dakota. Reality sunk in a little faster.
Ditto, ditto, ditto.
I was allowed to smoke. Four times a day, I was told over the phone upon inquiry. What I failed to realize once I arrived was that it was one cigarette four times a day. I assumed a “smoke 'em if you got em” period of five or ten minutes each where I could just puff until I puked. Not so. They take your smokes and ration them to you one at a time. At 8:15am, 1:30pm, 5:30pm and 8:30pm. Ugh. Well, I wanted to quit those anyway, right?
I’ll forego all the induction processes as they are pretty standard, I assume. Blood drawn, lots of paperwork, the nickle tour, etc. Took forever.
I was struck by the diversity of the addicts. When I got with my group, there were nine of us and I was the only alcoholic initially. There were two heroin addicts, a crazy person, a suicidal person, and the rest were pill junkies, mostly of the narcotic variety. The pillheads were young, mostly. I was initially struck listening to them as they rattled off impossibly long lists of drug names I had never heard of, and listening to their debates of the merits, duration, etc of each type of drug was pretty amusing as well.
One of the heroin addicts was a pretty young woman named Trish whom was 21. She had been there already for over a week so she was pretty much completely over her physical withdrawals, so she was pretty cheery and was the unit veteran.
The other heroin addict was a guy named Matt, a normal-looking 32 year old guy whom came in later in the day than I did. When he arrived, he was completely withdrawn, pale, arms crossed over himself, uncommunicative and eyes downcast.
Matt was my favorite guy because I literally got to watch him get well. He basically slept and was pretty much a recluse the better part of the first couple days, and then yesterday, it was a pretty amazing transformation. The hot food, the meds they were giving him and the unit’s insistence on his group participation really seemed to pull him out of a cocoon, a flower opening. I got to know him, we talked on and off yesterday and part of today before I left. I hope he does well. He told me that he’d never used heroin before and did it because he fell into a depression after he had to close his flooring business due to the economy and had recently lost custody of his daughter. He said he’d only been doing it for three months. I recall thinking that it was unreal that only three months of IV heroin use had reduced him that far. He checked himself in voluntarily.
I have lots more, and I haven’t mentioned myself yet, but I’m trying to organize things as they come. I actually think that this experience could be worthy of a short story or novella, if I could but avoid the invariable “One Flew Over” cliches.
Anyway, one other person of note: Christopher. She was a 54 year old woman with gender identification issues and she was also quite mentally ill. She also was a master of the pill jargon, constantly arguing with the nurses, doctors and anyone else whom would listen which psychoactive drugs were and weren’t helping her, which ones kept her from sleeping, which dosages she felt she should have, etc. She repeated this diatribe often. A couple of the other people there would roll their eyes about her as she went on yet another diatribe, and she did tend to disrupt meetings by prattling on, but mostly I felt really bad for her. I don’t think she could tell you if she was bi-polar, manic schizophrenic, or some other form of schizophrenia from one moment to the next.
Christopher dressed interestingly. She reminded me of Hunter S Thompson in drag. She was often surprisingly lucid, if repetitive. She would wear men’s clothing, a baseball cap, and thick layers of robing. She was constantly complaining of the cold. But she also would share jokes, too. It was cool.
I’m going to stop here for now. I certainly feel a little twitchy and typing this out is helping curve the edges. I’ll post more later. I’m being cursed at by my ungrateful 15 year old stepdaughter right now. Peachy.
Edit: upon review, damn, my memory is so much better for not drinking. Wouldn’t have remembered half these details.
Congrat’s on finishing step one of millions. It gets easier from here.
I didn’t do a detox, but I did do a two week rehab (about 18 months ago). I always wonder what happened to the people in my group, but I have never run into them. One girl gave me her number and we were supposed to go to meeting together, but when I called and left messages, she never called back. She was a meth addict with a husband who wasn’t ready to stop and two daughters. She was about to lose her daughters when she entered rehab. I hope she stayed clean.
The other one I think about often is a 40-ish year old police officer. He was an alcoholic and he used many of the same tricks as me to hide it at home. He was on the verge of divorce and losing his kids, and was on leave from his job after a nasty DUI (while on duty). I think he probably made it.
Anyhow, good luck, you’re well on your way! And if you ever feel like you’re about to slip, the Dope is a great place to come and find people like us to talk to.
So glad to hear you’re back Fois Gras! I’m still rooting for you, and thought twice over the last few days to offer a prayer for you, both times while I was blow-drying my hair. I wonder what that says about me? Probably that I think about the Dope a lot in the mornings when I’m doing mindless make-up chores.
Anyway, give your stepdaughter time. She’s got to get used to the new you. I’ll keep her in my thoughts and prayers as well.
15-year-old girls are generally ungrateful little twits. She’ll realize someday how good she has it, though.
Glad you are doing well. Be strong!
I found it interesting how I the whole mess as something special, tied to destiny, inevitable. I was struck by a strong sense of deja-vu a couple times while there. You know, the usual kind, where while in the midst of engaging in a mundane activity, you experience tunnel-vision, or a sort of attentuation and/or a quasi-slow motion, and you’re reduced to a brief moment of vision/insight that isn’t quite like being high, but leaves you convinced you’ve dreamt this before.
A friend of mine did the same thing. She quit drinking, starting attending non-religious (non AA) recovery groups and started eating a lot of ice cream. Man, she really gained some weight, but she got off the booze.