Trigger Test

Day 86:  I'm off to New Hampshire and Maine tomorrow to visit some elderly relatives—my beloved Aunt Roza, who is so bent over she resembles a cooked shrimp, and my delightful cousin Marjorie, who just had a stroke and recently put her bean stalk, 90 year old hubby, into a nursing home because he kept falling.  He's now falling at the nursing home.   Isn't life grand?

I'll be hanging out at a lakeside military nursing facility, a retirement home in Portsmouth, N.H., and my cousin's basement wading through damp boxes and helping her move.  I'm not complaining, it warms my heart and brings me great joy to help my family, but the site of droolers, decaying flesh, and walkers has a tendency to send me into a tailspin which usually can only be soothed by my reliable old friend, hootch, booze, a little tipple.  But I'm hoping some mysterious naltrexone magic will occur and I'll reject the stuff like the INS rejects immigrants.


Day 86 could have been a one unit day.  I took my naltrexone, walked the dog, and when I got home I had no desire to drink.  None whatsoever, but I had taken my N, so I felt obligated to drink, so I had 1 unit of champagne which I did not enjoy.  That would've been it had my husband not wound up in the E.R. with a potentially ruptured spleen.  While we waited for the CAT scan results, the doctor coolly described the spleen as this pill like capsule that we really don't need to survive, but it's a reservoir for blood and if it blows, you can die, just-like-that, at which point I felt sick to my stomach and started to see stars.  Luckily my husband's spleen is intact, so we dragged ourselves home at 10pm.  I whipped up dinner and mechanically poured myself a hardy glass of champagne, followed by another one (5 units in all).  This session of drinking was purely habit; I usually cannot distinguish habit vs. craving so clearly, but tonight it was like a flashing red light.  I'm not happy that I drank 5 units, but I'm ecstatic that it had nothing to do with craving!

Since I don't know how to post from my Blackberry, I'll be taking a brief sabbatical from this blog during my geriatric romp up North.   I hope when I return, I'll have good news to report.  See you next week!