The Diary of a Victim of an Alcoholic

News media tells us that the rate of fatalities from excess drinking in 2022 in the UK were 41% higher than in 2019 with women showing the biggest rise. It was a record high in 2022. There were 16.6 deaths caused by alcohol per 100,000 in 2022 compared to 11.8. The information comes from the UK's Office for National Statistics. The research indicated that those who were drinking quite a lot of alcohol before the pandemic increased their consumption during the pandemic. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to understand why. The long lockdowns. The long periods of furlough during which, in the UK, people received 80% of their salary from the UK government grants. That proved far too expensive and it was far too generous in my view. But it is clear that when a government allows people to do nothing for long periods of time while receiving a good income, they gradually disintegrate in terms of their personal care, well-being and structure in their life. People need the structure a...

A daughter has described her mother's descent into alcoholism (Metro online newspaper). Every step of the way including her death ticks a box about alcoholism. It's a good story for that reason but it is tragic. Utterly tragic. By that I mean for the daughter more than for the mother. She was drinking two litres of spirits every day and was out of it. It is always the relatives who suffer the most and here is her story summarised. Note: please forgive the odd typo. This was written in haste. Note 2: I have cared for a binge alcoholic for years 😎😢 . But time is running out. I can't really do it anymore. It is too hard or too horrendous to be honest. Although Jane (not her real name) is sober for three months on the trot until the next 4-5 week binge comes along followed by 3 weeks in hospital if she survives. The binges are very severe. Her mother always liked a tipple. She would drink in the evening and then progressed to having a drink before she went to bed and then to ...

Jane wants to die. She has desired this for many years. She continues to drink. Just to remind you, she is a binge drinker. This means that she does not drink continuously like most alcoholics but pauses between binges of about a week. The pause until the next binge maybe a month or maybe less. The binge itself may be longer than a week or less. She drinks need vodka normally. Out of the bottle. She has written a new will quite recently. She has told me that she is preparing for her death. She has not told me how she will end her life. Today I can't reach her. She may be ill or she may be drunk. The third possibility is that she may be dead. She is suffering from associated illnesses such as nerve damage in her left leg due to an attempted suicide. I won't go into details but that is causing problems and I think you will find on the Internet that sometimes an excess of alcohol in the body can stop the pancreas working (and of course it also causes chronic pancreatitis) which ca...

I thought I would share this little snippet of information with you. Alcoholics fall over a lot. If you live in a home with hard floors this can kill you especially as the alcohol in booze is a diuretic. You have to go to the bathroom, the room of shiny tiles and hard basins. Over the years and with constant pestering by me, Jane has learned to crawl around the home when drunk. She has had some bad falls in the past - nasty breaks. Crawling looks and is undignified but an alcoholic will never break anything when crawling. Safety always comes first. I found it unnerving when Jane walked (staggered) to the bathroom. I would wait for the dull thud as she hit the floor. She would lie there stunned or knocked out. Eventually she would wake up and calmly carry on! I shan't tell you the list of injuries she has incurred while walking and falling. She is a expert crawler now...

Alcoholism puts the alcoholic betwixt life and death. It places the person in a kind of twilight zone that is not truly living and neither is it death. Although the person pushes the door to death ajar from time to time, he or she usually doesn't pass through. Eventually knocking and pushing on the door enough times results in the door opening and the alcoholic passes to the other side. Jane has been in a near death situation on a few occasions. This is usually due to pancreatitis. Heavy drinking damages the pancreas. I am not sure how and I can't research it right now as my internet connection is extremely poor. If the pancreas stops working so do we it seems. From my perspective the alcoholic removes themselves from the world when drinking heavily but not quite to the point where they kill themselves. As I said it is a sort of in between zone. Well that is the case with Jane. She just doozes throughout a week long binge. What is unfortunate is that the alcoholic places th...

Alocholism puts the alcholic betwixt life and death. It places the person in a kind of twilight zone that is not truly living and neither is it death. Although the person pushes the door to death ajar from time to time, he or she usually doesn't pass through. Eventually knocking and pushing on the door enough times results in the door opening and the alcoholic passes to the other side. Jane has been in a near death situation on a few occasions. This is usually due to pancreatitis. Heavy drinking damages the pancreas. I am not sure how and I can't research it right now as my internet connection is extremely poor. If the pancreas stops working so do we it seems. Form my perspective the alcoholic removes themselves from the world when drinking heavily but not quite to the point where they kill themselves. As I said it is a sort of in between zone. Well that is the case with Jane. She just doozes throughout a week long binge. What is unfortunate is that the alcoholic places the...

It has been a long time since I made a post on this blog. One reason why I haven't is because I have some doubts about it; about its morality. When I started it, it was out of desperation . I had to do it to talk to someone. To express the anger inside. The powerlessness and anguish. Every emotion possible. As I may have said somewhere else on the blog, it is like living through a long slow motion car crash. And your partner is dying in the process. When she drinks it is as if I am waiting for her to die, either by falling over on a hard surface (one of her favorites) or getting hit by a car when she stumbles out to the local shop to buy a couple of bottles of Mr V. But I think on balance that the site is fair and useful. Useful to me and to some visitors. I gives a clue to how the victim of the alcoholic lives, in constant fear of the unexpected, the chaos. Pick the worst possible moment for Jane to drink and she will drink on that occasion. It is almost as if she does it delibera...

The Vomit - the horror - photo by funkandjazz The smell of an alcoholic who has been lying in bed amongst her piles of mess, binging on neat vodka, vomiting, barely eating, peeing in a bucket blah blah blah is quite horrific. She ponged. She was skeletal. Jane could barely walk. She wasn't and isn't the person I loved or my partner. She is some kind of mental patient in a dark dingy far away institution. She came out of her room looking for more Mr bloody V or wine, anything that contained ethanol alcohol, literally anything, and I hid some wine I had and refused to buy any booze. I also turned my head away and told her to go back to her dark den as her appearance disgusted and shocked me, which it did. Jane is now in hospital. As I said her vomiting after the long, long heavy binge was too bad. She was groaning and moaning all the time until 1 am in the middle of the night until I could take it no more and called emergency services and asked for an ambulance. I almost had a r...

Alcoholism chat - just a short one. Jane restarted her binge, as mentioned. She cannot stop this binge and I have no legal right to stop it. If I do it would be false imprisonment. Strange that. Maybe it's not so strange. She has the right to decide what happens to her. If I forced her to stop by, for example, locking her in her room, she would eventually sober up sufficiently to scream and there would be pure mayhem. I would be committing a crime. If a hospital drug her sufficiently to stop her moving or being conscious that is not false imprisonment. So that is the only way to get her to stop. She forced me to buy some more Vodka yesterday. She has been on a binge for about 2 weeks, or so, by my estimation, which is her longest. She will no doubt lose her job (at some time in the not too distant future). She is not, in fact, fit for work and must consider some other method of living. We could survive without her working. This depends on me staying with her, of course. I am abou...

Well, I've come back from the USA to find Jane going through another alcoholic binge and this one is a biggy. Hell fire and damnation, it's big, long and destructive. As I said the flat was a complete dump on my return. I have cleaned up the kitchen, my room and the living room. Tomorrow it's the bathroom. She is in her room sleeping on a pile of filth, junk, plastic bags, mess, vomit, food, more plastic bags, water bottles, empty bottles of Vodka etc. etc....I just close the door behind me and lock her and the mess away. Out of sight out of mind. Almost. Jane falls out of the bed sometimes and can't get back in. She calls out. I go in with a torch, into the black hole (the lights bulb has been removed and I can't get to the bedside light). I drag her up onto the bed. She calls out hours upon hours later for "something to eat". I have already bought some rolls from the local baker in preparation for this call. Rolls are good binge food as the food can...

Although all scientific reports should be digested with caution, there was a report recently that said that binge drinking leads to an increased risk of Alzheimer's disease in older age. This is not at all surprising if true. Alcohol is a poison in large doses. Even in relatively small doses it is unhealthy but we consume it nonetheless. The after effects tell us how poisonous it is but we treat the after effects as some sort of routine process not as the body telling us that it is poison. We can feel sick. We get a hangover. Apparently a hangover is due to the brain swelling up. If you observe hard drinkers their entire body looks frail as if it has been broken down throughout. I would be surprised if there was no damage to the brain. In fact I think that Jane is more forgetful than she was or her memory is less good. As the change is gradual it can be hard to measure especially if you aren't actually looking out for it. Alcohlics don't care that they are hurting themselve...

photo by chrisjohnbeckett Do you want to know how alcoholism kills? By alcoholics putting themselves into situations that are dangerous. Eventually if you do it enough times you'll get badly hurt or worse. Take Jane. She went to hospital after a binge (usual stuff). Got diagnosed with appendicitis (incorrectly). Had a botched operation. Had two more to repair the first. Got a massive scar down the middle of the stomach. Got signed of work for at least 6 weeks after leaving hospital, where she was for two weeks. She almost got killed in hospital. She gets bored because she can't do anything because of the operation. She drinks when she is bored. She get blind drunk with a weeping gaping wound in her belly (the healing scar). She gets out of bed for food blind drunk. She falls over on a hard floor. She gets knocked out. She goes back to bed. She gets up again about 12 hours later to go to the toilet. She falls over again and gets knocked out. Both times she could have been ki...

Photo by Giant Sloth This is another short post on alcoholism and death as Jane gets nearer than most to it some of the time. She has been out of hospital for about 4 days now. She is very poorly still. The surgeons screwed up the operation to remove an appendix that didn't need removing because Jane was in hospital with stomach pains as a result of an alcoholic binge. Surgeons have to play safe and they removed a healthy appendix because a bad one can kill. The trouble was they admit to cutting an artery, which bled internally for 4 days before they inspected with keyhole surgery. The original operation was done with keyhole surgery too. The third operation was done the old fashioned way and has left a 12 inch wound down the middle of her stomach which is very painful. It bleeds and oozes and causes a lot of discomfort. At one time in hospital I thought she might not come out. She shouldn't have gone in. If you're an alcoholic you can find yourself in the above situat...

photo copyright crowolf published under a creative commons license kindly granted. These 2 ignominiously go together - Alcoholism and Death . Just after Jane's mini-binge (believe me it was a very minor binge by her standards) of about 20 hours she felt, as usual, suicidal. Jane always feels huge remorse and regret after a binge. She feels bad about letting herself down and bad about messing me around (although it wasn't that bad to be honest - it did though mess up what could have been some time together, which we are lacking at the moment due to work). Jane really does genuinely feel suicidal after a binge. But I must say I don't think she'll ever do it. She hasn't got the courage - I know that sounds horrendously cruel etc etc but this blog is about the plain truth unvarnished. It takes courage to kill yourself and a lots of despair. Jane has the one but not the other. Anyway to get more positive. We had a little talk and I in my usual style, mentioned...

Every time my partner binge drinks I think this could be the time when she becomes another alcoholism death statistic. She nearly always (90% of the time) has to go to hospital after a binge. This is because she consumes about 8 bottles of neat Vodka and some other bits a pieces (what ever is to hand) over the period of the binge (3-10 days). This amount of neat spirit damages the body in these areas: Brain Pancreas Liver Kidney for her Teeth (making yourself sick a lot) Mouth Throat The body generally is weakened For her the main problem is not the liver. Binge drinking it seems allows the liver time to recover in between binges. It is only when you are pickled in alcohol for a very long time that you suffer liver damage. However, my partner does suffer from pancreatitis, which is a potential killer and on several occasions she has been in a critical condition. She has other problems to but more about that later. Whenever she goes to hospital they keep her in for longer than I would ...