The Sinhala and Tamil New Year has just passed on the 13th and 14th of April and I will post something about the dawn of the new year in due course. But today it is about the 16th of the year both 2010 and 2011 that my mind is occupied with. It is exactly one year since that day last year after another cycle of my fascination with Alcohol went on high gear once again that I was in admitted to hospital for my 3rd stint at rehab and mind you my record was improving as this was my 3rd instance between July 2008 and May 2010!
What is fascinating about the run up to this madness was I had returned home in December 2009 and by February I was back in full flow. My early morning drinking had commenced with a vengeance and the withdrawals had begun in earnest. I needed a hefty slug of hard liquor by four AM daily. In mid-March the situation had deteriorated to such an extent even I started to get very concerned! So I had one of my brain waves. Since my resume has under experience a paragraph on rehab I decided to do a do-it-yourself rehab. I hired a private nurse and got all the paraphernalia required for a drip and got it administered twice a day for one week and at the end of it all I had weaned myself off hard liquor and had got down to only on two small cans of beer a day. I had done it. I was now the only do-it-yourself converted alcoholic to social drinker!!! But it lasted only for a week! By the beginning of the 2nd week of May I was back at it in earnest. On the 16th of May 2010 I collapsed after drinking 10 cans of potent beer in the morning and was in my usual room in the hospital by afternoon!
I have tried over the last year to figure out this self-destructive nature I seem to be blessed with and I have still to come to any rational explanation that I can comprehend let alone convince anyone else for any rational for this or for that matter make any sense of this behavior. But let me try now to set the backdrop to this with some historical and undisputed facts.
It was as early as 1996 that a team of Doctors was assembled to handle my case. It had my GP and personal physician, a psychiatrist and a team of other specialist consultants. At that time as was revealed to me by my wife subsequently Bi Polar was suspected but I never ever gave the rehab process enough time to establish this. As usual in four or five days I got discharged and went back home and for about a week I did find myself in an awkward position of not being able to navigate physically without assistance.
I was living in an up stair apartment and couldn’t walk up when I came home and didn’t walk down at all for a week. I stayed of the booze and a strange thing happened one morning. I got up feeling very well and I had a guest who had come to see me and I didn’t realize I had walked down with him to see him off unconsciously. I was elated and I quickly showed off to my wife and I really thought I had done it!! So much so that a long lost friend of mine who coincidentally visited me that same morning commented that I looked really good. She would know as just a year or so before that I had visited her in my old home town and I was so drunk I could barely walk. I immediately went around socializing and getting back into the circuit and everything was going so well and I was in 7th heaven. Eating well, sleeping well and I never felt so great. Guess what? One day I just felt the need to have a beer!! And it didn’t take long for the feel good factor and everything else to just take a hike and from then on accept for a brief period in 2005 when my present psychiatrist diagnosed me with Bi Polar and my acceptance of it in July 2008. I have not felt as good as that time till this last rehab and my return to the half way home in May last year.
I have tried to analyses what goes wrong with me that this return to alcohol phase of mine is recurrent. After 2008 the only common thread in this drama of my life is my going back to my residence. I went back in January 2009 and was hospitalized in July the same year, went back in December 2009 and was in hospital in May 2010 and it is only this time that I have managed to spend an entire year without being in hospital accept in December last year when everybody thought I had the H1N1 infection before my trip to India. I have not been a saint by any means but I seem to have got over this problem at last. I do though keep reminding myself every day that the promise I made to myself that I will never be hospitalized because of alcohol is something that I will never let happen ever again in my life is of paramount importance and something not to be taken for granted.
The uncertainty of something going horribly wrong again was there in the run up to the first year anniversary of my promise. I had some important issues to resolve before I finalized my plans after I finish my studies next month. My deadline of 31st August is also drawing near. One third the year is over and I have just five months to achieve my goals. So many unknown eventualities and situations had to be dealt with and I had to be very clear in my mind as to what I could and couldn’t expect from those around me and how much I would have to be self-reliant to see the months after August this year to get to the point I want to be at, so that the dawn of 2012 would be the best of the last decade. I was very apprehensive that I wouldn’t be able to handle this without resorting to the bottle.
Well, I did it! I can now be confident that whatever I have to deal with in the future is not an issue any more and the relief that I am no longer dependent on alcohol is probably the greatest achievement in the years since 1996. I think I am now ready not only to lead a normal life that will be fulfilling but also start looking at what really went wrong after I lost my Brother in Law in 1992 and maybe I will at last find the truth that I have been either consciously or subconsciously avoiding and come to terms with it in every sense of the word!
