This article discusses the impact of addiction to alcohol

 

 

 

My health, homelessness, and its physical impact on my body – wow there’s a story I live with every day now.

Briefly, while living in the hostel, in the grip of my addiction to alcohol, one day, out of the blue, on a sunny day in the middle of town, my TENTH and final seizure happened.

BOOM…… fifteen stone hit the pavement, face first, no warning signs, nothing. Waking up to view the inside of an ambulance, with strangers (angels really) frantically trying to get fluids in, patching up my face, blood streaming EVERYWHERE, I asked… what’s happening…….?

That was my ‘moment’, sign, that I had two choices – die in a few months or finally admit my powerlessness over my ADDICTION, and truly start my recovery, not for others, as I’d done many times over years, but now for ME.

Those hepatology visits over the years, difficult as they were to hear, still hadn’t sunk in, my ego saying livers regenerate, as if, with what I was pumping through it, pure toxin.

Then, the physical body, weight ravaged like a hyena gorging, my nervous system shot by abuse, my brain receptors numbed to pain, my skin exploding into rages of beetroot shades, in between the jaundiced yellow hepatitis gifts you – need I go on, sound familiar 🤫

Today, coming up to four years in recovery, I’m a little plumper than maybe I’d like(not maybe😅), skin less like Violet from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, liver actually working (how – I will never truly know) and, although I have to live with balance issues due to peripheral neuropathy, I have a great life, full of love and connection with people I trust, value, care about.

How it could’ve been if I’d ignored that ambulance experience 😢