Detoxification

Before you go into rehab it’s usually the case that you need to go to a detoxification clinic first, to get sober. For those that haven’t had the pleasure, let me tell you that detox is not a place you ever want to end up. The usual drill, which I know all too well, is to turn up at any hospital in a state of advanced inebriation and collapse or be carried through the front doors of the Emergency ward. I’ve arrived in all manner of ways. By ambulance, staggered in and fainted, been literally pushed out of someone’s car who then drove away fast: anything to get you there really. You’re then triaged and immediately put at the front of the queue. They can’t have drunks and meth addicts lying on the floor or ranting around the place. They find you anywhere to collapse within the bounds of reasonable safety (often just a mattress on the floor of a side room), give you some Valium and forget about you for a couple of hours. Eventually a mental health nurse arrives, takes one glance at the wreckage, asks a few questions about suicide ideation and then gets you carted off to the looney ward, there to reside with the other foot shufflers and ranters.

Your mobile phone is the first thing they confiscate before you get assigned a very basic room with just a bed and side table, and maybe your own loo if you’re lucky. I was told that the phone gets taken mainly because a lot of the patients might not just be drunks or junkies, but may have severe mental health problems. One nurse told me that these kind of patients start calling all sorts of people for help, such as the police or fire brigade, who have to respond by law, and then all hell breaks loose. One guy even called the military and asked for the SAS to come and break him out.

Once you’re in and they’re sure you haven’t got a knife or anything (I usually do for various reasons), a bombardment of benzodiazepines, such as Valium, begins. They give it to you both on a schedule and on demand, at least at first. The immediate concern is that, having suddenly stopped drinking a lot of alcohol, you’re liable to have a seizure. Benzos prevent this, by kind of aping the effects of alcohol without the associated risk. And they give you a lot. My most recent shrink told me that if he was to have taken the amount of Valium that I’d been given he’d probably be in a coma. But for the alcoholic it works differently on the body. I’ve been given loads and stayed awake before, albeit with eyeballs rolling in my head. In really bad cases they hook you up to a line of Thiamine (Vitamin B), essential to stop the alcoholic brain blowing yet more holes into itself.

The first two or three days are spent like this. The early detoxer is usually emotionally labile, unable to eat, go to the toilet or maintain basic hygiene and may be subject to hallucinations, sweats, tremors and extreme physical and emotional anxiety. Without the constant line of benzos, it would be completely unbearable. Not that it’s a competition, but in my view, alcoholism in full effect is worse than heroin addiction, not least because the poison of choice is socially and legally acceptable and absurdly easy to obtain – but just as lethal.

Anyway, after about four days of hell, normality slowly begins to sink back in. You finally make it to the shower, food can be taken and some sense of personal dignity may be restored. Arriving as one does in a state of disorder, fresh clothes may be needed, which a rummage through whatever ill-fitting lost property the ward happens to have knocking around. Around days five and six, you’ll be feeling a lot stronger, albeit heavily sedated with enough Valium in your system to stop a horse. You may also be given something called Olanzapine, an anti-psychotic drug often used for people with Bipolar Disorder. A useful side effect for the recovering addict is that it stops the wild ruminations that race through your mangled mind, and thus cause the Valium to not be as effective as it should be at sedating you.

Staffed by highly trained, empathetic and good-humored psychiatric nurses and doctors, detox will work and get you ready for rehab, but the struggle for those few days is terrifyingly real. And the food is truly appalling. It’s worth avoiding detox just for that.

Depressingly, I’ve ended up in these sorts of clinics enough times for the nurses to now know my name. ‘Hey Nick, back again? Fuck me you look terrible’. But for all their help and humour, when it comes down to it, the journey to recovery is one you kind of have to take on your own. Collapse through the doors of the Emergency ward my friends, if that’s what it takes, because your next stop might be the one you don’t come back from.

One day at a time.