I feel so weird and alone. This will probably be extremely disjointed and hard to follow, I’m having a very difficult time focusing. I just really need some coping techniques, I’m on day 3 and I’ve never done this before.
My drink of choice is silly. Carlos Rossi sangria, the embarrassingly big 3 liter glass jugs. I’ve never been a day drinker, a work-sipper, none of that. I come home from work (I own a small local business), pour myself a 16 oz glass of wine, and cook dinner for my boyfriend and two kids. I love trying new recipes, the more fiddly and difficult the better! I’ll continue to top up my glass until I’ve downed 1/3 of the bottle. That’s the rule I’ve set myself, the bottle has to last 3 days.
There’s not much more to say, I’ve been drinking like this for about 16 months or so, after a 12 month sobriety due to pregnancy and having a newborn. Then I slowly started adding back a glass or two a night. Prior to that, I was on the same schedule: a liter of sangria a night. Give or take a glass, I usually always waste 8-10 oz on the night I buy the bottle because I fall asleep before I finish the last glass.
Anyway. Last Wednesday I made this amazing dinner. Sweet corn and green onions fried in bacon drippings, tiny toothpick kebabs of 2 dime-sized bacon pieces with green beans stacked between and baked in a sauce of brown sugar, coconut oil and a dash of soy sauce, baked potatoes, and a store bought rotisserie. It was amazing, omg.
I also drank half the 3 liter bottle of sangria.
The next morning my stomach felt weird. On the right side, below my ribcage, kinda to the right of my belly button. It felt like… im not sure, a vague, non-descript discomfort. Like air caught in a place without nerve endings? Like the beginning of food poisoning, when things are just starting to feel wrong?
I had filled my sangria bottle to 2/3 full with water so my bf didnt judge me. I wasnt very hungry and i knew something was wrong, but i drank my watered down liter anyway. That night that ball of weirdness sort of burned, sort of ached.
The next day I just wasnt hungry. At all. All day. I could have stomach flu and I’ll still be able to eat, I always have an appetite. But I just felt full and blocked off at that same part of my stomach. I tried to eat and could only manage a bite or two.
So I started researching blockages, liver cleansing, toxicity. And my symptoms seemed to match so many of the markers for alcoholic liver… whatever.
I poured my sangria down the drain. Didnt drink at all that night.
The next day (saturday) I went to my mom’s to make dinner and had a glass with her. Still couldnt eat, still wasn’t even hungry, still felt like I was blocked (even though I’d gone to the bathroom 3 times that morning).
Sunday comes. Still not hungry, but dizzy. Eat a few crackers at breakfast, don’t even think about food during work, come home and make myself scrambled eggs and only manage a few bites. Just not hungry. That night, I don’t sleep well, even with the sleeping pills (i take 2-3 diphen whatever almost nightly).
Next morning, Monday, I’m feeling antsy and overly energetic, like I need to be doing something. My bf and I go shopping for my older son’s bday party and the anxiety I was feeling about the party disappears. I’ve planned ahead, i feel good. We go home, do some work in the backyard and I discover HUNDREDS of Squash Bugs have taken over my 3 pumpkin plants. Thankfully, I’d also just discovered that dawn and water in a spray bottle is super effective at dispatching them. So I gleefully murdered an entire nation on each plant.
That night, (last night) I wanted a drink pretty badly. I expected it, was ready to be irritable, dealt with it, went to bed.
Cant sleep
Get up, take a 4th sleeping pill.
Cant sleep.
At 1am, bf comes to bed. I happen to glance out the window in our room… and I see the unmistakable long black leg of a kitten-sized squash bug climbing the umbrella on our porch table.
Clearly, I’m seeing things, which I also expectes and was prepared to ignore it and go to sleep.
Cant sleep. Every time I close my eyes I see hoards of squash bugs climbing towards my face, bursting out of the wall, crawling on the blankets. So i open my eyes, cause im not about to fall into THAT dream. Suddenly I hear a man’s voice outside. I look out the windiw again and see several young men jumping the wall into the corner of our yard. They’re jumping into our yard, one stands on the wall, and maybe they’re handing him things from our yard?
I hear a man shout something, then someone else scream “CALL 911!”. Then lots of shouting and screaming, and I’m thinking maybe my neighbors are having a party and it’s getting out of hand? I get up and go to anither room in he house and cant hear or see anything anymore. Weird. In my bedroom, I can ALMOST make out the conversations these people are having, but in the living room, nothing. So I’m hallucinating still. Great.
I go back to bed and realize the umbrella outside is moving. Like someone is closing it. I realize at thst point that the men I saw in the yard earlier are trying to steal the table. Im very still, not wanting to wake my bf unless im certain.
This is all so long winded and stupid, I’m sorry. I ended up convincing myseld that the men iutside had a tiny camera on a stick and had opened the sliding door into our room and were using the camera to find us, so someine else could point the gun in, around the curtain, and shoot us.
Eventually I must have passed out.
I woke up feeling like hell. So dizzy, so disoriented and confused. When I told my bf what happened, he immediately bought a small bottle of wine (!!!l) and said that I needed to taper off slowly, that I could be in serious danger of having a seizure or going into shock. If i hadnt gone through what i did last night, i would have laughed at him, but I was shocked and appalled to realize that my body was physically addicted. I honestly thought it was 100% a mental crutch I had, never in a billion years would I have expected to experiece withdrawal symptoms. I never had before, when I quit drinking cold turkey for both pregnancies.
huh. ya know, I sat down to write this because I was so anxious and antsy and irritated and needed help figuring out how to get through tonight… but now I feel better. Much better. I really didn’t want to have to “taper off”. I told him to hide the wine and only give it to me in dixie-cup sized doses if I had another bad night. Mostly I just didnt want to have to restart my timer on this app for a dixie cup of wine to keep the hallucinations away. But now I feel almost normal. Maybe I can even eat something. Okay, well, good talk. Have a great one!