I Hope everyone in the group is keeping well and has had a positive and productive past year

Things have got very quiet lately in these rooms, which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it! lol It would be nice if everyone could come together again and share some experiences good or bad, or just say a quick hello if you are new to the group or want to just have a general chat in the forums with other members.

For many of us this can be a particularly difficult time of year depending on where you are at in your life, and it can be easy to trade in years of sobriety for a brief moment of stupidity thinking things in the long run will be okay.

I have just read one of the most horrifying accounts of someone else's former alcoholism and how it nearly killed them, I wanted to share this on here to remind anyone who is tempted by a 'quick' drink over the festive period of how this could easily happen to any one of us. It is someone's response to a question asking what would happen if you drank heavily every day.

Admin: If this is not allowed then please remove this post - I just thought it was particularly powerful and worth reading.

ALL CREDIT GOES TO THE AUTHOR GILL FITZGERALD

My liver died. I was drinking heavily every day for about 20 years. I avoided the doctor like the plague. I just didn’t want to hear it. Then I started to get nosebleeds. Horrible, very heavy nosebleeds. At this point I was drinking every morning just to stop shaking. I threw up every day religiously, and still drank. My husband took me to the er where the doctor dismissed my symptoms, packed my nose, told me to make an appointment with ear nose and throat, and sent me on my way. Dave asked me, begged me, to not drink that night because alcohol is a blood thinner, and I was already bleeding like a stuck pig. So I didn’t . Or the next day. The next morning I woke up I didn’t feel right. I thought I was going to be sick again, so I went into the bathroom, knelt down by the toilet, and instead of throwing up, I had a massive seizure. I had a second one as they got me to the hospital. I woke up a week later, and was presented with a diagnosis of Stage 4 Cirrhosis. A grueling year and a half later I had a liver transplant. I’ll spare the details of that year and a half, and just say that it included ascites, hepatic encephalopathy, broken kidneys, a coma, about 14/16 hospital stays, shitting myself, nausea, insomnia, pain out of this world, many many blood transfusions, more needles than one person should ever be stuck with, 4 point restraints In the hospital, etc. And humiliation. Now, I’m 4 years sober, on medication for the rest of my life, my immune system so low that I catch everything and anything that’s going around, anemic, stage 3a kidney failure, BUT I am forever grateful. I got a second chance at life, at the expense of a beautiful stranger, who had to die, match my blood type, which is rare B-, the suffering of my donors family, and a LOT of life changes. But I’m sober. Alcohol is so powerful it took all of that to get me to see I should have died. I almost did. Words do not give justice to the way I feel today, and how I see the world through sober eyes. It’s an unbelievable awe inspiring difference. The world was in black and white while I was drinking, now it’s full technicolor. I marvel at how I drank to that point. How my mind was so hyper focused on one thing, alcohol. It was the be all and end all of everything. And here’s the ironic part. My mother died of cirrhosis at 49 years old. The age I am now. I watched her go through everything I was going to go through not so long later. I watched her die. I watched how cirrhosis ravaged her. I was 26 when she died. I saw everything. And yet I still drank. That is the power of alcohol. It blinds you so you are willing to go to extreme lengths for it. That’s how drinking every day killed my liver