Free The End of My Addiction by Olivier Ameisen M.D. Page B

hours discussing this with my sponsor. If you go, I know you will drink, and when you come back I won’t sponsor you anymore.”
    “What if I go and I don’t drink? Will you sponsor me when I come back?”
    “No, because I won’t understand what has happened.”
    I ended up going and being with my family. And I didn’t drink. But that spelled the end of my relationship with that sponsor, and it was a little while before I found another one.
    There are times in a binge when the alcohol induces euphoria and it feels possible to do anything, although of course this is a delusion. I heard tapes of myself playing the piano when I was drunk, rather than just having had a few drinks, and my performance was nothing to write home about. But the euphoria was a great relief while it lasted.
    The end stages of a binge turned everything sour with gastrointestinal distress. When I felt the point drawing near where I literally could not drink any more without vomiting, I began detoxing with Valium to prevent acute withdrawal.
    Often enough Joan called EMS despite my protests, and they took me to the emergency room. I wound up in the emergency rooms of many different hospitals, except New York Hospital. But the one that EMS took me to most frequently was at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital at 59th Street and Tenth Avenue, which was more or less directly across Manhattan from my apartment on East 63rd Street and which had, and has, a nationally recognized alcoholism treatment program.
    All the hospitals followed the same routine, and none was nicer than the others. Hospitals don’t treat detoxing alcoholics with the same concern and compassion that they show other patients.
    The one thing I wanted to avoid was starting to withdraw from the alcohol while I was still in the waiting room, so I drank until the moment EMS arrived. Then it was a matter of sitting in the hospital for hours feeling weak and awful—I had painful heartburn while withdrawing—with an IV for hydration and periodic doses of a benzo to prevent withdrawal from going into an acute phase. If I wanted to pee, I needed to ask for a urinal. A hospital once detoxed me with phenobarbitol, which made the experience almost pleasant, but every other time I got Valium, which simply kept the experience from becoming a nightmare.
    Once people are diagnosed as intoxicated, hospitals don’t let them leave until their blood alcohol level falls below a certain point. Otherwise if they walk outside and are hit by a bus, the hospital can be sued for negligence. A couple of times, I got fed up with waiting and snuck out early. On one occasion in the emergency room at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt, I discreetly took out my IV and slipped away.
    From start to finish, a visit to an emergency room to initiate detox took at least six or seven hours and cost around three hundred dollars for blood tests and so on. It cost much more if I was admitted as an inpatient and stayed four or five days for complete detoxification. Because my insurance coverage for alcoholism had been used up at Clear Spring, I had to pay those bills myself. And in an urban hospital detox ward, one can find oneself locked in for the night with some strange and frightening people.
    All things considered, I preferred to administer my own detox treatment at home, taking Valium to prevent acute withdrawal, hydrating myself by drinking lots of fluids, using Prilosec for heartburn, and taking B vitamins, especially B 1 , to prevent Wernicke’s encephalopathy, a potentially deadly syndrome strongly associated with alcohol abuse and characterized by unsteadiness, visual impairment, and a confused state of mind. One night in March, however, Joan called EMS and they took me to the ER at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt. In the detox ward a few hours later, I talked with another alcoholic named Andrew. I learned that he was a research engineer and was leaving soon to go into rehab at High Watch Farm in Connecticut.
    “It’s where Bill W.