In Which We Ponder Hurricanes, Family Dynamics and the Stigma of Antabuse

So, the Crabby household survived Hurricane Irma, but not before packing two cars with six crabby people and two crabby dogs and getting the hell out of town, whereupon we shacked up with a crabby relative in crabby ol' Georgia, land of confederate flags and enormous statues of Robert E. Lee carved into otherwise unremarkable mountains.

We had planned to hunker down and weather it out, so to speak, and dutifully shuttered the windows and filled the bathtubs. We're Floridians now, dammit, and we're not afraid of some piddling little Category 5 windstorm. It wasn't until we sat staring in dumbfounded horror at the images coming out of Barbuda that we dropped our Shirley Temples and our Virgin Maries and fled for our lives. I mean SRSLY, look at these pictures:



Not to sound churlish, but who the fuck ever heard of Barbuda anyway, until it was wiped off the map? Thoughts and prayers for the people of, etcetera, etcetera, I'm just sayin that without those pictures we might never have fled.

As it was, we returned days later, our nerves frayed to the breaking point by a week's worth of extended family disfunction, only to find that the storm's dreaded "eye-wall" had shifted west, leaving us relatively unscathed. Again, thoughts & prayers for those affected, but I wish now that we had stayed put and to hell with the eye-wall. Is all I'm sayin.

It will surprise no one that there were moments a-plenty when I could have used a good stiff drink or three. Like when my sister-in-law, not ten minutes after our arrival, opened our conversation with "So, are you still taking the Antabuse?"


Well, thank you VERY MUCH for asking an embarrassingly personal question before I'd even set down my sleeping bag, and yes I am, and no, it doesn't make me an uber-drunk, and anyway why is all my fucking personal business even a topic of discussion in this family? To which the S-I-L got all huffy and played the "well EXCUSE ME me for caring" bullshit card, upon which the slamming of doors and other hilarity ensued. (Okay, it wasn't like that. I'm actually very fond of S-I-L, and she's one of the few people whose opinions in most regards I regard as infallible. There were no grouchy exchanges, no slamming doors, but when she asked if I was still closet-smoking, I lied and said "No, of course not!" Because damn it, stop asking.)  

Anyway, it may come as a shock to some people that I take the Antabuse. I don't volunteer the information because I don't really want to talk about it. This is not because I have anything to hide -- god knows, at this point the entire fucking world knows I'm a drunk, albeit one who's determined to remain an EX-drunk even if it kills us all. I'm not, god forbid, ashaaaaaaamed of it, having, it seems, little capacity for shame. No, the reason I don't want to talk about the Antabuse is because people jump to all kinds of weird and bizarre conclusions about the stuff, and about those who take it.

Example: I was sitting in yet another useless AA meeting one day when I let slip that I was taking Antabuse. The drunk chick who had just spent 20 minutes recounting how she'd lost her job, her kids, her house, her spouse, and who had just described in steaming, technicolor detail how she had hit rock bottom and climbed out of a gutter soaked in her own vomit, looked at me and said with a straight face, "Wow, you must be really fucked up."

Or the drunk who proudly acknowledged to me that he's been going to AA twice a day for 30 years, but piously and without a trace of irony explained that he doesn't believe in taking Antabuse "because it's just a crutch."

Which made me think of this:



Anyway, the Antabuse stigma is so great that many pharmacies don't even carry it. After moving to another state a few years ago, I went to re-up my scrip. The pharmacist looked puzzled and announced that they didn't have any in stock because no one had ever asked for it before. I'm apparently the only person in a 100 mile radius who takes it.

Really? SRSLY?

My experience with Antabuse started when I first entered rehab a number of years ago. It was a requirement of being in the program. I thought it was overkill, but the fact is that it worked. This is because Antabuse operates on a very simple principle: It makes you violently sick if you drink while taking it. As in, pounding head, puking sick. It doesn't make the cravings go away. It doesn't help with the anxiety, or the shakes, or the underlying reasons why you drink. It doesn't affect your mood, or treat your depression, or help you focus on achieving your long-term goals. It simply makes you puke your guts up if you drink.

Which, in my case, was enough to stop me from boozing. It shut down my own internal dialogue about how I could still kinda-sorta drink a little if I just moderated it, (which never worked), I could still enjoy an occasional beer if I kept it to weekends (which never worked), I could still somehow get away with it because it would only be this once (which never worked). Addiction for me has always been about that internal dialogue, the games I play, the lies I tell myself. Antabuse removes all of that shit from the equation, because I physically cannot drink with it.Which frees up my inner resources for other things, like cleaning up after a hurricane and writing this shitty blog.

Anyway, think whatever you want about it, or about me. I'm now officially out of the closet with this. I don't plan to take it forever, but for now it helps keep front and center the conviction that I Can Not Drink Any More.  And until that notion takes full root in my psyche, I'll keep doing what I'm doing, crutch or not.