my story

[Chris]

First of all, I want to thank so many of the people who put up with me today in Chat. I read a lot of the stories on here and it seems that we have huge differences in our drinking patterns. There was a time that I could go through a bottle of vodka a day, (no more) but I realized that not only was it expensive, I was quickly killing myself. I work in an industry that is extremely aggressive and very stressful. I also own my office and have employees. Now that I just sat back and read what I wrote, it looks as if I am justifying myself or making an excuse, and I apologize for that. No one forces me to drink. Where I think I am different than a lot of the people on here is, I dont binge drink. I dont black out and I rarely ever have a hang over. What I do is start my day off with a drink (mostly beer any more, sometimes wine) That is AFTER spending 1-1/2 hours in the gym, so I basically threw the entire workout down the toilet. So I usually have my first beer around 7am, then another around 10am when I tell my employees I am running for coffee. Then lunch time comes and of course, it is acceptable to have a few beers. I come back to the office, usually no one has a clue. I then go for a cup of coffee again around 3 and have another beer. So, as you can see, I am not getting drunk, but my body got conditioned to a small amount of alcohol every 3-4 hours. At night, I will have 5-6 beers and go to bed early. I then have to usually wake up around 1am and have another one to go back to bed. Long story short, I decided to quit today. A friend of mine came over, took my wallet, my keys as I told him that it might get ugly. By 11am I was shaking, sweating and I actually threw up. I must have drank 2 gallons of water today, I paced my house from wall to wall but stayed close to chat. I spoke with a few people on here and they told me it was very dangerous to do this, then my girl friend called my friend to see how I was doing (as he was sitting 8 feet away from me) and told him to let me have a beer because it is dangerous. So there was actually only two beers in the house, of which he hid from me, and he gave them to me. Within minutes I stopped shaking and sweating, which scared the HELL out of me even more. So I am not sure if I am now more afraid of drinking or NOT drinking. It is 1:30am here and have taken lots of melotonin and can not go to sleep. I cant afford to go into a re-hab right now due to my being needed in my office. So, I think that maybe the thing to do is just hold off as long as I can, make the 3-4 hours in between beer 5-6 hours, then 8-10 because I can NOT go through what I went through today again. And that folks, is what I spend every hour that I am not working, thinking about. :thanks:

[Popeye]

my story

Be careful. What you want is achieveable. Please look after yourself. I am no expert, but I know that it can be very dangerous for some people to just stop in one go.
Good luck Chris.
paulb