Alcoholism – Vol. 466, Sept. 6, 2018

Alcoholism is a very huge problem in our society today from those who are fairly young binge drinking at college to the elders who are self-medicating their pain. The statistics are grim. 

Six people a day die from alcohol poisoning, and most of them are not college kids. Adults from 35 to 64 years of age account for 76% of those deaths, with 75% of them being men. 

Only 8% of those who suffer from alcohol use disorder in the United States ever receive treatment for it. 

Women who drink can find themselves having unprotected sex, contracting STDs and unwanted pregnancies. In some cases, they are sexually abused, especially if they experience blackouts.  

When people who have major chronic health problems such as diabetes, heart problems, and liver disease, alcohol causes even worse problems. 

Sadly, alcohol is one of the more difficult things to give up. For one thing, many of the people with this problem will deny that alcohol is the problem. It doesn’t matter if it other issues arise as a result, they will have a very hard time acknowledging that alcohol was the cause. 

Until I took care of a friend who had congestive heart failure and a problem with alcohol, I never knew that people could have an issue called ‘pre-satiation,’ meaning one is filled up on alcohol calories and therefore won’t eat food. I also did not realize that a person could go from eating normal meals to not being able to eat even the blandest of foods like plain scrambled eggs, retching with each bite, the stomach no longer able to take in the food. 

Lastly, was the issue of an alcohol coma – where the body is unresponsive to any stimuli, the body so poisoned by the alcohol. 

One has to ask the question of how one can get into this particular state, and I can tell you from watching someone go through it, it is a matter of living for the release from pain that one is experiencing. In this case, it was the horrific physical pain of arthritis in the left hip, to which no medical painkiller was given that was hearty enough to do the job, along with the loss of quite a few friends over a period of months. To be clear, this process only took a matter of nine months – from no alcohol use to this condition. 

Sadly, his friends would always tell him to drink a Guinness, knowing that he loved it, without any regard for the negative effect it would have on his health, especially with the heart condition. It doesn’t matter the level of education of the people involved, drinkers love drinking with other drinkers, period. Once the beer started flowing, it did not stop till more liquid in beer was ingested then was allowed for an entire day’s fluid given the heart condition. His heart just couldn’t effectively deal with all of it. 

There was nothing I could do to stop the problem. I did tell his entire medical team including his general practitioner what was going on, and no one seemed to be able to do a thing about it. I was told I was the problem and to be gotten rid of, so I ended up leaving the house while he was in the hospital the second time for the alcohol poisoning and rehab after that. 

It seems that until a person is hospitalized, no one is willing to take the steps necessary to help someone else, especially when they don’t want the help. And, therein lies the problem. To my mind, if someone isn’t in the right mind to take appropriate care of themselves, it is time for those who have the onus of caring for the health as a professional person, seeing the negative indicators from the health issues that are already being treated, then an intervention needs to happen. Sadly, this is not the way it works, at least in Connecticut. 

I could go into all the symptoms that an alcoholic experiences, but it isn’t really anything that you don’t already know – irritation, anger, getting into fights, lost time at the workplace, staying at bars till all hours of the night, hiding the alcohol at home, etc. The problem really is that unless the person with the problem wants the help, or unless they end up hospitalized as happened in this case, there is very little that can be done about it. It is really up to you whether or not you choose to stay or leave. But, I would say after this whole horrible experience, it is better to leave then be abused by a person who is unwilling to confront the issue head-on, blaming you for the problems they are having. And even with the rehab, who is to say that alcohol won’t become a problem yet again in the future? Depending on the statistics one finds between 5% to 30% ever fully overcome their alcohol issue. Those are very poor odds, less than placebo in fact.