I almost died a week ago… or so they told me. I was traveling with friends in a foreign country. I made two previous efforts to quit drinking in the past three months; the first lasted a bit over a week, while the most recent one lasted (with two one-night interruptions) for almost four weeks. But I lost something really important during my travels to that strange and tragic land, and was distraught enough about it to polish off most of a bottle of rum from the mini-bar in my room once I discovered my loss. Thus began a cascade into a week of twilight.
I remember listening to the opening lecture to my travel group, head in hands, completely unglued at my loss. We broke after the lecture… most people went to freshen up, but I headed over to the bar to lubricate my distress with more rum. I should note that I almost never drink anything harder than wine because I've never had good experiences with hard liquor, nor can I find anything good about it outside of the liquor ads. But that night, I made an exception.
I vaguely remember taking our tour bus a few miles to the restaurant, set in a gritty quarter known to be the town's most dangerous. But the bus would carry us back, so I was fine, right? Not me… the cascade to blackout was past the point of no return, as I barely remember anything else after I ordered yet another rum once I got off the bus. My next recollection was the knock at the door much later that night, and then the distressed faces of my three friends, wondering if I had made it back alive.
Apparently I had walked out of the dinner, still muttering about my loss, and headed for home from a place I'd never been before. I walked, out of my mind, across several unknown miles of the city's most dangerous areas, somehow managing to find my way back alive. Several colleagues were convinced I'd never return. When I showed up for breakfast the next morning, one said that "you must have had an angel on your shoulder."
That should have been lesson enough, but as anyone knows who has experienced such a cascade, one thing leads to another… and so I spent the entire week in various stages of consciousness (and danger), never quite realizing how bad off I was. We returned on a Saturday; on Monday, my two business partners (who were on the trip) called my wife to attempt a phone intervention. It succeeded. I'd been researching Alcoholics Anonymous during my previous attempt to overcome my dependency, and knew where to find them and when they met. Fortunately, a session had just started so I hung up the phone and headed straight for the meeting. I'll miss today as I'm traveling and will be occupied by my client until bedtime but except for today I've been doing one meeting per day from the phone call until now.
