After a few years of sobriety, I told myself the oldest lie in the alcoholic's playbook: I can have just one. One turned into several, and within a few weeks, after an attempt to put the bottle back down, I was in the ER with alcohol withdrawal.
After the nurse's assessment, I'm seen by the emergency physician. She's young, but obviously qualified. She returns a few minutes later and, as soon as she's back in her chair, an older, more serious-looking doctor enters the room. He verifies my name.
"We're transferring you to the ICU."
"Am I going to die?" I ask. It comes out almost automatically, like an exhale.
"No, you're not going to die," he says. "But we need to treat you more seriously."
No questions about how much I've been drinking. No questions about my past medical history. Just onto a gurney and up three floors, past something called the Intermediate ICU. The knowledge of this previously unknown location does not inspire any hope.
After I'm transported to my room and changed into a gown, the scene morphs into functions of the body we don't talk about, even with an anonymous online handle. It's safe to say I think I'm making a young male ICU nurse consider joining Indeed before the evening is over.
I'm immediately made aware of the phenobarbital protocol. Phenobarbital is a powerful barbiturate used to treat severe alcohol withdrawal, including DTs and seizures. Something about the word "protocol" makes it feel much more serious. I'm not just getting a drug, I'm undergoing something with a manual.
As the shakes and stuttering intensify, the hallucinations begin. First, my cats. In my altered state, I believe they've followed me out of my apartment and into the ambulance. They hide in the corner of the hospital room, unseen, the way cats do at the vet. They're there with me. Then, the hallucinations intensify.
As I close my eyes, I see myself in a scene at a crowded beach, but not one that's fun. It's angry, like a rowdy festival. I open my eyes and I'm reminded I'm in the ICU. I close my eyes again and I'm in a car with strangers driving on the highway who aren't acknowledging me.Every time I close my eyes, I'm transported back into one of these two scenes. Every time I open them, I'm back in the ICU. Over and over again.
I convince myself that, in addition to the withdrawals, I've also developed multiple personality disorder. I think I am the three people in these three lives. When I open my eyes, I explain to the doctor, in detail, that I need to be treated for this as well. A few moments later, he vanishes from the ICU room, a hallucination himself. The cats come and go.
The phenobarbital puts me into periods of sedation. I wake from them from time to time, but not slowly, the way one does in their bed on a Saturday morning. It's an immediate jolt into full awareness. Each is more terrifying than the last.
The jolts into consciousness are accompanied by more hallucinations. I see the faces of vague comic book characters, like Wolverine. They change every second, as though I'm flipping through channels on a horrifying TV.
Eventually, the protocol does the job it's meant to do. I am, as it turns out, incredibly lucky. I continue to shake violently, but at least the hallucinations have subsided.
The next round of phenobarbital comes. There are eight doses in total. The drug's extraordinarily long half-life means it accumulates in the body. Too much can suppress the central nervous system to the point that a person stops breathing.
In a few days, I am just another patient in a hospital bed. I no longer require much attention from the nursing team, who have other withdrawal patients to attend to. As the saying goes, being ignored in the hospital is a good thing. It means there are sicker people to attend to.
I am now three days removed from the ICU and back on my own, a near-death experience behind me. It has profoundly changed the person I am as I type this today.
At the moment, I feel nothing but gratitude. Gratitude for the nurses — the real-life angels who walk among us — physicians, and hundreds of unknown heroes who help make a hospital run. Gratitude for a second chance at life. Gratitude that I somehow, by the grace of God, have escaped with no damage to my liver or other major organs. Gratitude for automatic cat feeders and water fountain bowls. And gratitude for the half dozen friends and family members I spent hours on the phone with throughout the process, who helped me through the experience emotionally.
Alcohol is an evil that I have inflicted on myself. It has made me someone I never wished or thought I would ever be. It has made me hurt the people who have cared about me most. I was the one in the hospital bed, but the people I love were the ones left wondering whether I would ever come home.
It's time to leave this demon behind. I have a lot of good in me. I know that good can come out if I put in the determination and work necessary to become sober. I am three days removed from the ICU and three days into attendance at AA. Another cliché that turns out to be true is that the real work starts now. I'm prepared to do it.
My hope is that someone might read my story and see the horrors of what the end of the road can look like for people suffering from severe alcohol use disorder. There were sixteen beds in that ICU. Nine were occupied by people withdrawing from alcohol. I was one of them. I never met the other eight. I don't know their names, their stories, or whether they made it home. But I feel connected to them in a way I can't quite explain.I'm doing this for myself and for my family. But in some way, I'm doing it for those eight people, too.
I hope you all are keeping well and keeping sober.
I will not drink with you today.