How does alcoholism kill people

[Lou Tencodpees]

Not to derail the thread but I wonder what the general consensus is as it relates to qualified alcoholism if someone drinks an average of 3 drinks (beers or mixed drinks) every night for decades. No escalating consumption, no falling down drunken episodes, just a habitual practice of evening libations in the home (no driving, public hazard).

 

[ping-ping-clicka]

It's not just alcohol that will kill you, but a person own state of mind and lack of intent to prevent it all happening. I have seen people die from alcoholism, I have seen people realise and survive, state of mind can help you win or lose the struggle

here' a thought, stop drinking and the state of mind will change,
some folks think, first you change your state of mind the you can stop drinking.
O.K. hows that working out for the folks using that particular discipline?
The program of recovery that works for the individual is the right program for the individual.
To not stop drinking is fine too. If one can drink with unwanted consequences please have another. If one has consequences that are unwanted maybe there's somebody that an help the individual understand how and or why the unwanted consequences are occuring.
This a a great game. The game is about ending human suffering. Let's not confuse the goal with the particular vehicle used to arrive at the desired goal.
If I want to get from San Francisco to Oakland I could walk, take a bus , drive a car, helicopter, bay feary, swim, etc, etc, etc, the how isn't important . Let us not confuse the means with the goal, the same goes for obsessive compulsive behavior
I real don't like being compelled to smoke. So I quit. Not because I didn't enjoy the nicotine rush that calmed and soothed me, its because I hated being told what to do at a physical level, compelled to avoid discomfort. Years later when diagnosed with stage 3 throat cancer I though "I'm glad that I stopped smoking 25 years ago."
I got to chose stopping smoking all on my own for my own reasons . I hate being told what to do.
So if Smoking Drinking Drugs Risk taking behavior is working for you fine. It is not a moral issue, the "ISM" aspect, the disease is just like my broken humerus or fibula, there was nothing moral about broken bones and doing the things that helped my body heal the bones is not a good thing or a bad thing it's about the appropriate behavior under the circumstances. For those that subscribe, people that drink and drug attend pantheistic rituals and those that don't all get into heaven.Even those that deny the pleasures of the flesh for their entire life time they get in too.
IT' Just a thought.

 

[Mike Eskimo]

It is amazing how much you can drink and still function if you have that capability. When I drank, all my house drinking was done out of those bottles with a handhold on the side of them. I don't know what they were something like two litters. Whatever they were, they lasted maybe two days of house drinking, that didn't count my out of house drinking. I did this for a number of years, then one day just quit cold turkey, almost twenty-five years ago. I'm still going pretty well and have gotten my three score and ten, and pretty soon ten more!

I know - I’m just thinking if I wanted to go from my current 3-5 beers a week to 42, I know it wouldn’t be pretty .

And, I know that 42 a week might be a step down for a lot of guys.

Not to derail the thread but I wonder what the general consensus is as it relates to qualified alcoholism if someone drinks an average of 3 drinks (beers or mixed drinks) every night for decades. No escalating consumption, no falling down drunken episodes, just a habitual practice of evening libations in the home (no driving, public hazard).

Judge not lest ye be judged !

Not me.

 

[soundchaser59]

Think about it for a minute....you're pouring alcohol into your body.

And most people don't think of it, but remember alcohol is also considered a solvent. You can imagine what chronic solvent ingestion can do to the various organs in the body. IMO there is nothing good that can come from ingesting alcohol, despite what they say about the occasional glass of wine.

 

[Spox]

Just had a flashback to when I was at absolute rock bottom with it. Living in the worst of the worst skid row housing scheme/project. I would always leave some beers in the fridge for breakfast and woke up one day and opened the fridge to find no beer. I realised right away what had happened, I'd been comatose drunk in the early hours of the morning and decided I wanted cold beers and put the four pack into the freezer then blacked out. I remember sitting heating up a can of beer in a pan of water trying to unfreeze it and pouring any dribbles which would come out of the can into a glass and drinking them then going back to the can in a pan. There's a market there for a TV dinner.

I sat holding a relatives hand in the hospital as he died of alcoholism in his early fifties, he was a complete wreck by that point, I'd gone up to his house a few months previously and it took him fifteen minutes to crawl to the door and open it. He did not die easy, he was conscious and aware of what was happening and scared.

 

[Toto'sDad]

FiestaRed posted an angry face at my post on quantity of beer. I would like to point out, I don't drink, and haven't for what will be twenty-five years next month. I do know that lots of people drink a twelve pack when they get off work. People who work physically hard all day long, often drink hard when they leave work, some drink at work.

My son and I got tested for drugs years ago, it was supposed to be random drug testing, but we'd be tested every couple of weeks. It was okay with us, we got two hours of overtime, and a free dinner out of the deal. The reason they tested us, is because EVERY time they tested one of the other workers, they'd have to fire 'em. Better to go with known commodity.

 

[Kandinskyesque]

great question.

thank you for sharing your experience and I wish you and your family and friends good health.

I am on the spectrum.

I drink alcohol every day.



how much is too much?
there are people who drink huge amounts.


moderation is key.


my friend days a standard physical will check your liver. They can see the problem.


there are guidances.


I don’t drink before four o’clock. Unless there is an important football game.

I only drink beer.

i limit my intake to six beerz a day.

I have not missed a day of work in 18 years.


I May not last a real long time but as Neil put it Rust Never Sleeps.

It depends on why you're drinking, in my experience.
Would you find it difficult to stop for a month or two, if you had to go on medication?

I looked for every method under the sun to control my drinking for 20 years.
From, meditation, to hypnosis, to self-help books, I even took up firewalking to see if I could develop a positive mind set to control it because I couldn't imagine life without it. How else was I to calm the storm going on inside.

10 years ago, I went into a rehab aged 45 after 20 years of knowing I drank too much.
As somebody cleverer than me said...
"I was better off inside a 12-step meeting pretending I was an alcoholic, that outside them pretending I wasn't"

I didn't feel any better sober at first, the storm was still there, but I learned to accept that over time.

I'd also had mental health issues for as long as I'd been drinking. More conflicting diagnoses than there were books on the subject over 25 years.
They didn't stop either, but I'd been living with the aftereffects of a brain injury from my teens, so that was a factor.

After a stay in hospital at 5 years sober, I was sent for an assessment, and it was an arduous process for myself and my family.
The conclusion was, having looked at my adult AND early life that I was on the Spectrum.
The assessment team had doubt about it.

Dealing with the news that I'd spent 50 years of living with an invisible passenger is a whole different story but I'm through the worst of that.

The reason I am telling you this is that during the summer I had a long conversation with my old sponsor from back then and my neuropsychologist, about why I found it so difficult to stop, despite 7 days a week in 12-step meetings for 3 years before I went into rehab.

Having a brain injury AND being on the spectrum brings its own complications with trying to stop because of perseveration.
It's not insurmountable, I'm 10 years sober now a day at a time.
It wasn't the only reason stopping was so difficult
I'm also convinced that irrespective of my other conditions (brain injury and ASD), I'm still an alcoholic.

What sobriety has brought to the table for me is that it's a hell of a lot easier to accept and manage these conditions without adding alcohol and weed into the mix.

 

[Spox]

On a lighter note, kind of. Me and my buddy I mentioned last night who had gone quiet on me for three weeks used to go to an off licence to buy our poison, usually about ten pints of cider and at least a bottle of red wine each each every single night, we would also buy beers, port, sherry and sometimes spirits. We had discovered a cheap Romanian red wine the store stocked and over a year or so we pretty much drank all of the stock and all of the re stock deliveries until one day they said that's it, you've drank it all. We then switched to the white but all of a sudden that ran out too and the staff told us that we had alter egos, two guys who had drank them dry of the Romanian white whilst we drank them dry of the red.

We were a bad influence on each other and had the misfortune of me being moved into the top floor of a building in which he was living on the ground floor in the sinkhole estate, we were doomed at that point, there was another alkie called Andy living on one of the floors between us who would sometimes show up at my friends door waving a bottle with just the dregs left in it going "where's the party?" and he was not a good enough friend for us to share our cargo with so would send him packing. I actually banged into him a few times about a decade ago, he was living in the same mens sheltered housing as one of my relatives and had genuinely quit drinking which I was really happy to hear, that made two out of the three of us. My friend on the ground floor hated peas so when he was at work I glued peas to his windows and would write to pea companies under his name with ludicrous letters of praise ending with God bless you and one of them sent him a cheque for £1.

 

[Mike Eskimo]

It’s almost like I couldn’t make up some of these stories.

Or it’s like I would try to make one up and stir in as much human desperation, pathetic living, and just plain giving up, and it still wouldn’t equal some of these.


Oh, you know how a lot of people say, who don’t understand the whole alcoholism bit, those folks will just say “well it’s a choice and you chose to drink and you chose to throw your life away or you chose to drink to excess til you died”.

I had an old next-door neighbor, who actually did do that.

And he will tell people flat out he made a conscious choice to do it.

he actually has said multiple times - “I wanted to be a writer, and live my life as an artist, and thought that that was a component of it. The romance of it”

Blew up his marriage, blew up his relationship with his kids, and to a certain extent his standing in this small town.



He lives about an hour away from here, now, with a new wife that he met while cheating on his old wife, and I really do not know whether he still drinks or not. I believe he stopped, but no one really cares because he was such a massive egomaniac the conversation doesn’t stay on him long because people really aren’t that interested.

Cold but true.

 

[ping-ping-clicka]

one drink at a time.

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[ping-ping-clicka]

one drink at a time.
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[cyclopean]

If you are actually asking yourself if you are drinking too much, it means you are.

No, sometimes it’s good to sanity check yourself.

 

[cyclopean]

Seriously? You need to ask?

Organ failure, various cancers, cirrhosis, gastro-intestinal haemorrhage. It's a long list.

I think he does, because if you’re not around a lot of people who live hard, you’d have no reason to know the various ways that people die from drinking too much.

 

[57joonya]

Looking around, I don't see alcoholism in my family. I like a glass of wine with my evening meal, and I'll probably do that three times a week. I don't often have a drink on its own. Maybe that's my secret, but I don't seem to have an addictive personality.

That’s how it’s supposed to be done . Nothing wrong with that

 

[57joonya]

Not to derail the thread but I wonder what the general consensus is as it relates to qualified alcoholism if someone drinks an average of 3 drinks (beers or mixed drinks) every night for decades. No escalating consumption, no falling down drunken episodes, just a habitual practice of evening libations in the home (no driving, public hazard).

If u go by averages , that’s my father . But I know for a fact sometimes he won’t have a drink for a day or two , and sometimes he might have 6-8 . But usually 3 drinks :he just reached 80. I don’t know if that person exists ; maybe somewhere.but in my experience, everyone who likes to have a couple a day , occasionally will get carried away

 

[buster poser]

And most people don't think of it, but remember alcohol is also considered a solvent. You can imagine what chronic solvent ingestion can do to the various organs in the body. IMO there is nothing good that can come from ingesting alcohol, despite what they say about the occasional glass of wine.

Water is also a solvent.

 

[BigDaddyLH]

Water is also a solvent.

I didn't know there would be a chemistry quiz

 

[badscrew_projects]

One of the nature’s most powerful solvents too

 

[Fiesta Red]

FiestaRed posted an angry face at my post on quantity of beer. I would like to point out, I don't drink, and haven't for what will be twenty-five years next month. I do know that lots of people drink a twelve pack when they get off work. People who work physically hard all day long, often drink hard when they leave work, some drink at work.

My son and I got tested for drugs years ago, it was supposed to be random drug testing, but we'd be tested every couple of weeks. It was okay with us, we got two hours of overtime, and a free dinner out of the deal. The reason they tested us, is because EVERY time they tested one of the other workers, they'd have to fire 'em. Better to go with known commodity.

I was angry at the littering. Unfortunately, emojis don’t always express the content to which they were aimed.

I apologize and will change it to sad.

 

[Fretting out]

I heard from a doctor once (and this is before fentanyl) that people can be maintenance heroin users for decades and survive, but once somebody starts getting really serious about their drinking , they don’t last nearly as long.

Other than possible bowl incontinence/chronic constipation there’s no really negative impact on the body from opiate use (clean pharmaceutical grade) as in you can live a normal long life on a maintenance dose

Alcohol on the other hand… can’t really say the same for it