Baclofen, after the cure.

[Otter]

I've noted a marked aggression in a certain person who I know who gets very agitated when I don't do what I'm told.

The point being, that if we look at baclofen as a treatment for "alcoholism" but alcoholism is merely a misdescription of a neurological problem, then we are saying that baclofen is a cure for a non-existent disease. Alcohol is merely a crude treatment for the illness, and consumption of alcohol is a "symptom" or result of the illness, and you can't "cure" a symptom.

What then happens when you have so say cured yourself of alcoholism or you think you have because you are no longer drinking?

Around this circle the talk is about then "tapering off" and there is a lot of thinking going on about whether one can taper off or whether this is a life long condition.

My own view is that there is an underlying condition and that it is this condition, call it Gaba-b dysphoria if you want, which is being treated with baclofen. Imagine, for instance, that there is a deficiency in this area, some damage or a missing chemical. Once you stop drinking because you have supplemented this missing chemical with baclofen, then does this actually cure the underlying problem. I don't think it does and I see that as a problem in tapering off or coming off completely because you feel you have beaten "alcoholism" once you stop drinking.

My take on it is that baclofen is also an anxiolytic. It treats an ongoing condition, such as restless leg syndrome, and you can get a prescription for it for that ailment, as Ameisen found out. So, even if you have stopped drinking you need to look at whether you still have a problem and how best to treat it. At that point, do you continue with baclofen at low dose, as and when needed, or regularly, or switch to some other anxiolytic?

I don't know the answer to that and there are perhaps not enough people who have been on baclofen under the supervision of a doctor for this to be something which we will get any answer in the short or medium term.

I am just throwing this out there for any comments.

[Otter]

About a year ago my wife's father and mother came for a visit. On returning home he fell and fractured his hip. In the course of recovery over the summer he nearly bled to death and had to be packed to stop internal bleeding. My wife returned home on a number of occasions to be with him and to help him settle in at home. Her last visit was in November, when he was reportedly back to normal although he had suffered a stroke and could barely talk. A week after she came back home, her father died.

Over the winter we have taken on responsibility for a deaf, blind 91 year old woman whose son had a heart attack and left her with no one else to care for her and in hospital. We thought she was near death when we first met her and brought her into our home. She had not walked for many months and had become incontinent so we hired someone to care for her during the day and looked after her needs during the rest of the day.

I then turned to sorting out her affairs as she had no access to her banking and her home was indescribably dirty and had been filled with building tools and equipment by her son who plainly was an alcoholic. The walls were blackened with mould and the place had not been cleaned since he moved in in 2001. I spent months emptying out boxes and clearing out. She then confided in me that he had said he was going to kill himself and then did so.

On Tuesday I cleared the remaining debris from her house and took her home with 24 hour care. She is on her feet, able to look after herself with minimal assistance. She can see enough to find the bathroom. Other than these problems she is a very strong lady who lived on her own for many years or in the company of her other alcoholic son.

In the course of clearing the remaining garbage I came across a bag of rat poison next to where the son died, in an armchair in front of a computer screen which was open at a site with a printable Will form.

A few weeks ago my wife's mother lost her wallet with all her banking cards. She was subsequently contacted by "security" at the bank who advised her to transfer all her life's savings into another bank account, gave her very precise details...so she did. That was a scam and she has lost all her savings. She only has her pension and her house.

My wife had a gastric band inserted 4 years ago and lost so much weight that she has had to have surgery to find the port. Now she has further problems and cannot eat. She is fading away, losing about 20 pounds over the last two weeks. She no longer takes baclofen. Even if she did, she throws up all her food every hour or so. We have five dogs, some of whom sleep in our room.

In all, we were awoken during the night about 5 times by dogs, our elderly guest and by my wife vomiting.

I have had to spend a week getting round the clock care for the 91 year old. On Friday I was interviewed by police because my German Shepherd bit an employee of the local municipality. Because our dog is not registered to us and there are thousands of such dogs who are considered wild here and there is no policy of capturing them, the dog got away with it.

All in all, the changes and stresses and the gastric problem have resulted in my wife drinking and then going down the road to a gf's house. This gf thinks that my wife is ok and because she is a "nurse" of some sort, thinks that when I say that my wife has become delirious, and is in need of hospitalization, thinks I am a control freak and nut case for thinking my wife has an alcohol problem. My wife, however, thinks I am in a relationship either with the 91 year old or the carer, or both, and that I should simply ship the old lady off to a home, take her money and fire the carers. She has taken to self harming herself, drinking heavily, screaming abuse, playing loud music and generally being extremely abusive and aggressive towards everyone, except the gf who is plainly also a heavy drinker. "Scots/Irish" they both are so that explains it.

Yesterday we had a very good and calm discussion and I thought it was all resolved. She took some baclofen in the morning but by 6 pm had become irate, aggressive and out of control. In this state she cannot discuss anything rationally.

Now she has gone off, drunk, with the gf to some restaurant where she will get even more drunk and will come home in a car, fall into some hedges and then stumble up to bed.

She cannot take baclofen because it irritates her stomach pouch and she throws up. Having been recovered for some years now and managing any minor slips easily with baclofen we thought she had "recovered". However, what is obvious to me is that she is not coping with all the anxiety and stress we are going through and is now in full blown delirium. In very short order, "the drink took the woman".

Of course, there is no one out there, as there wasn't 6 years ago to help so once again my son and I are on our own. It is as clear as day to me that this illness is anxiety related and that it is connected to anger, aggression and violent behaviour. They are all part of the automatic responses to anxiety-creating situations and when there is dysregulation of that part of the brain, for whatever reason (genetic, damage, alcohol damage, etc..) one is susceptible to grabbing a bottle to medicate this. When some of these events are outside one's control, then it is difficult to sit the person down and just say "take your medication". The problem becomes one of dealing with someone who, because of bereavement, lack of sleep, lack of food and now alcohol, has such a serious problem that she needs to be hospitalized. A doctor nearby has suggested putting her on a drip and removing the gastric band so that she can eat. My wife just wants to blot out everything by getting hammered.

Anyway, apart from that, things are just great...

[MeJustMe]

I'm very sorry to hear this latest news Otter. You have a lot on your plate, to put it mildly. I just worry that you have taken on a lot, and it is putting you under enormous stress. I'm sure you are well aware of that.



The question you pose of whether alcohol addiction is linked to anxiety -- I would say a resounding yes. But I don't seem to have the anxiolytic effect from Baclofen. I did for perhaps a week very early on -- but that was it.

A few weeks after my mother died last year we took a driving holiday. My wife had to keep asking me to stop tapping my feet or hands. I had not even realised i was doing it.



I have for much of my adult life resorted to remedial massage to get relief for a back almost locked up with muscle tension in times of stress. That hasn't changed with Bac.



I suppose my AL addiction is complicated by depression. So while I have had no desire to drink for more than two months thanks to Baclofen, I am not satisfied with life. I take anti-depressants. It is almost as if I am the reader, rather than the protagonist, in my life's story.



I do have a copy of Vincent Peele's 'The Power of Positive Thinking' here somewhere. Maybe that would help

[SKendall]

Otter, I'm so sorry. You must be highly stressed by this turn of events. You have sacrificed much throughout your marriage. Do you think it was the sleeve that started all of this? It is just mindfully tragic.

Please take care of yourself.

[kronkcarr]

Otter,
I sure am sorry about your situation right now.

There's much talk about brain plasticity and how our brains create new synapses but I don't know if baclofen plays any role here. I've said this on the other site: I can see that I could return to over drinking if I didn't have other interests that are important to me. I don't think I'd return to the shitfaced nasty behavior of my past. I'm appalled by the way I was and I have a healthy fear of messing my life up again.

I hope something switches and you all get a break.

[Mom21961]

So sorry

Otter,

:hug:

I'm so sorry to hear this. I know you went through hell to get your wife sober including standing up to the medical community and moving to provide the help she needed. I truly hope things work out.

Again, I am so sorry.

Mom2

[Otter]

Thanks.

I think it is just the stress of the situation we are in at the moment. She has now taken a dozen or so Baclofen pills and some diazepam and is konked out in bed. I suspect losing 20 lbs in a week hasn't helped. The doctor said she should be on a drip and then we have to consider surgery to remove the gastric band so she can eat properly.

This truly is a neurological condition. Nothing could be clearer to me now, after all these years, and seeing how she has reacted to stress.

It's a pig of a situation really, because we are still getting people in our lives who think they know it all. Why have we left the care system of the UK? How could we think that with this kind of illness we could take on such a heavy responsibility? The child is most important!. You need counselling. You need to change your medication every so often because all medications stop working after a while... Never heard of baclofen. Who is the doctor you say is prescribing this?

It's still the same and I still feel angry just thinking about it and talking about it to people who think they are helping but are trotting out the same old BS I have heard for so many years, and if they have some sort of qualification in care or nursing, etc, they won't listen to one word you say to them.

Anyway, I suspect it will all work out. The lady she went out with yesterday took her to an Indian restaurant and refused to allow her to drink. There are now three women on our road who are happy to help which is great since it allows her somewhere to go if she is stressed. All these stressors are beginning to abate so I am hopeful, although without baclofen we wouldn't stand a chance. I am going to stop going to the drinking parties that we got sucked into last year. Burns night ended up with one of my neighbours heckling the speakers and then threatening to hit me because my dogs run up to his gate and bark at his dog. He has now been banned from Burns nights. Fun and games.

[Mentium]

Sorry to hear about this development. It is of no consolation I'm sure, that I agree with you that the illness/condition is indeed anxiety related. I am sure of that in my own case at any rate.

As you have no doubt realised - again as I have - habitual drinking only increases anxiety. Then we drink to blot it out..and the whole thing ratchets up increasing the anxiety and requiring just a bit more booze over time to blot it out again - and on it goes..

[Molly78]

Otter, sorry to hear all this.

I think WRT tapering off bac, there is a feeling that for some people, a long spell of treatment somehow "resets" the GABA-B system. Perhaps this is the case for younger people, but if you have decades of drinking behind you, or if you have organic damage to the CNS as your wife has, I can't see that you could ever expect that your nervous system will return to normal.

I hope things improve for you.

[Ne/Neva Eva]

You can post here, too, Otter, and just start a new thread. Just like you do here on MWO.

General Discussion - The End of my Addiction

[Otter]

Molly, thanks for that. I've reduced the anxiety situation, I hope. Perhaps this will break soon. Yesterday she loved me, today she hates me. I agree about the damage. We got hold of something called Hydergine which is said to repair stroke damage. It seems some things can be repaired but I think you are right that full recovery from stroke and years of drinking is likely to be impossible so continued treatment is required. But there's no doctor out there to help in this particular situation. We shall see. At the moment she is just plain and simple out of her tree.

Ne, I think I am having a problem in that I feel I have to restore some of the equilibrium on this site both form myself and the site because I am as much to blame perhaps for the chaos which went on here due to the lack of moderation but that appears to have changed for the good.

Frankly, though, I am in a state of shock. I was coming here, obsessively, for several months trying to figure out whether this troll was as bad as I thought or whether I was just going round the bend and what with all the other stuff in our lives I probably neglected my wife, sitting here on the laptop and not telling her what I was doing.

The other thing about the other forum is that whereas this forum stops non-members from browsing after a couple of views, TEOMA, doesn't so I still feel that I may have S(ome) F(ecker) stalking me and reading my posts. Gawd knows what he might do with them so at the moment I feel a bit safer here. Plus, I am not sure where I should post because it is set up for users, not random people like me. I don't need to go out of this chat board but I can't find anywhere I feel at home over there right now. I suppose it's a psychological thing and in time I'll get over it.

Also, I have to be careful about my own family snooping on me because they report back to my wife. She doesn't like here situation put on the internet, so I would be in big trouble if anyone ever found out that I was back here.

I'm waiting on the second edition of my paper which should be edited this week and that's me done in terms of baclofen work. I feel I need to concentrate now on getting that out there as something which will take what I have been doing in a new direction for me. I have work now here so I want to use what I have done in other things and build on it and the paper. I feel I need to rebuild and fortify myself and my family. The big thing now is not finding or using baclofen. It's now a case that even with this treatment, the general perception of an alcoholic and family of same hasn't changed.

This lady who my wife went out with on Sunday came here afterwards. She had stopped my wife from drinking but I got the same effing lecture from her I could have got off a social worker 10 years ago. I explained the treatment and showed her the box of baclofen with prescription for 15 pills a day. The response was not that my wife plainly had some serious medical issues, that I had helped her deal with. No, she said "tut, tut, how awful...this box of pills is out of date and should be disposed of". I couldn't believe what I was hearing. She treated the whole thing as nothing, questioned me as to why I had taken my wife out of the medical care system in the UK which she plainly thought would have sorted this problem out lickety split and then said it was obvious that we should never have taken on the responsibility of the old lady we are helping. It was the same institutionalized crap I have had for the past 14 years. In the end, though, it became obvious from my wife's behaviour that her mind was running out of control and the lady said "take your pills". I don't think she had seen anything like it before in her life.

I suspect that lack of food brings about adrenaline release and this is what I am seeing in my wife. That is what causes aggression in animals because they need adrenaline to hunt for food. It's just that I am the prey right now.

Ne, if you have any thoughts about where to post, privacy etc on TEOMA, let me know.

[Mom21961]

Otter,

You have to click general discussion on eoma to get to all the threads. There are three 'stickies' I guess you would call them on the top, but there is lots more underneath.

Mom2