“But I don’t drink heavy anymore,” he said with such despair that I knew that this was going to be hard.
I drank just like anyone else he said with an uneasy laugh.
“And what was that,” she said smiling shifting the stethoscope on her neck.
“Three or four beers of a night after work. I worked hard in the sun. The weekends were a bit different what with visitors and things it could get a bit heavy then” he said imploring her to understand he wasn’t a dirty alcoholic.
He was drinking as everyone else did. You know the Aussie way.
“I know and I know everyone else did or does but that amount is deemed excessive medically for a reason. Some people can drink that way for 80 years and die without an implication and then there are people like you who cut their drinking, eat well exercise well but the drinking it still hurts them.”
She was doing a fine job telling someone that their past drinking and to a point their present drinking had become a problem by ‘medical standards’. I didn’t envy her as she sat there looking at him trying to make him understand.
By ‘lifestyle standards’, it was the norm and still is because I know people who believe the only time alcohol is a problem is when it affects their work. It doesn’t include the bottle or two they drink of an evening despite recommended daily allowance of just 20mg of alcohol is safe. That’s meant to be two glasses but there is no standard drink size in Australia.
Yes, I know the idea of everyone metabolising it at a different rate is what your thinking but don’t shoot the messenger, they are the facts.
She turned in her chair giving me a smile ‘If you continue to drink alcohol as you do the problem will get worse if you stop this is as bad as it gets’. She was talking about the numbness in his feet.
The room went silent. So silent you could hear the scribbling of her pen, you could hear him shift in his chair as the news that his past drinking had now become a problem. Despite being as ‘healthy as an ox’, he was on the verge of being diabetic. Of losing sensation in his feet. All this from what he did in his 30,40 and 50’s. He looked at his feet. He cleared his throat his eyes watered. He was embarrassed but there was or is no need he was far from an alcoholic even by my standards.
Personally I don’t drink much. I did in my early twenties but I remember alcohol being the igniter for arguments, for my mum bringing home broken women and the reason my mum left sandwiches in fire hydrant boxes for the homeless. I stopped drinking as I did when I met my husband a complete non-drinker with thanks to his childhood realising I used my six vodka shots every Friday night as a drug to make me a more social person {because without it apparently I was just horrible}. I stopped because it was becoming a habit I was using it as a drug a social inhibitor because without it I was unable to relax, be myself and I often used it to fix things but the reality is it never really did.
Now I don’t drink unless my husband is home because I’m on the job while he is at work and so it once or maybe twice a month. I don’t want it to be normal for my kids as it was me and yet I don’t want it to be so foreign that they don’t know about it and moderation.
I’m in that in-between place not sure how to handle it. I enjoy a nice red and love a vodka and lemon on a hot day and we are careful how we present alcohol to my boys because by many we know its drunk the wrong way its killing them and making them sick.
In Australia, alcohol kills 15 people a day and 430 people a day are hospitalised with alcohol related illness. When I first heard that I thought of the two sixteen-year-old boys who had got into their parents gin cabinet one night as I waited for my cousin in the ER. They were on the brink of death, having almost successfully poisoned themselves in one night. My cousin now suffered seizures having received a brain injury after being involved in a car accident with a drunk driver. Those two boys are lucky to have got away with a stomach pump and a severe hangover, my cousin not so lucky now having the thought process of a three-year-old and his mate driving the car was not lucky enough for any of that.
However, that statistic has nothing to do with drunk drivers or sixteen-year-olds getting into their parents gin cabinets. Excessive alcohol is the leading cause of diabetes, cancer, neurological disorders and heart disease. And to be fair to the people I know to show how ‘normal’ how culturally ingrained this is the NT has the highest rate of hospitalisation in Australia at 11.8% compared to the rest of Australia at 4.5%. These statistics don’t even include those that have died from alcohol related accidents.
And while we might be starting later people are drinking longer into their lives, women who historically didn’t drink much, now are drinking for extended periods throughout their lives. Long time drinking of too much red and white wine is now producing long time results later. We drink more wine than water on average.
It was then in the silent I turned to him touched his shoulder and said ‘at least it’s not your marbles’.
He looked at me and smiled his cheeky grin his eyes smiling and said ‘that last drink will get you in the end’.
Xx Deb.
