When Timaru Courier reporter Shelley Iñón decided it was time to face up to the role alcohol was playing in her life, she did not realise that stopping drinking was only the beginning. In this third instalment, Shelley shares her alcohol-free journey.
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It took over a fortnight until my withdrawals kicked in.
There were 16 days of ‘‘white-knuckling it’’, a term my chief reporter informed me of.
Alcohol had been a big part of my life, but it had not make an appearance every day.
There had been stints where I had decided not to drink for three days, because I needed to lose weight, or ‘‘I should cut back’’.
Stopping for short periods was easy, after all . . .I was not an alcoholic, was I?
I also would not have classed myself as a binge drinker . . .because that might have required me to go to parties instead of just drinking wine alone on the couch.
And the last time I had ingested enough alcohol to actually vomit was nearly two years previous.
I was just — like so many women across the country — a mummy drunk who was taking the edge off a hard day with a hard drink.
I was dubious as to whether a mummy drunk would even have withdrawals.
Christmas functions began in earnest, and I watched the endless array of drinks wandering past.
I could see the condensation forming on champagne flutes, smell the Coruba and coke on the breeze.
I am sure — if I listened hard enough — I could hear those bubbles popping.
There were fleeting moments when I imagined myself snatching a drink from someone’s hands and gulping it down with disapproving faces watching on, but that was all imagined.
The reality was — to badly misquote Kate Moss — there was not a single drink which could taste as good as sobriety felt.
However, there was only so long I could go on until my body decided rent was due.
On Tuesday, December 13, I hit the skids.
I had been busy typing something at work — about upcycled Christmas decorations if I remember rightly — when I opened a text message from my mother.
My grandmother had died the previous night.
I was stunned.
My grandmother had such sturdy natural defences that dying was just something I could not imagine her doing.
Death of family and loved ones had always been a trigger for me to drink.
I went home to find my husband pulling carpet out of the kids’ room and the hallway.
He told me he had been renovating the kitchen, but he had begun wondering if our bunnies (who slept under the kids’ bunk bed) had fleas.
After visiting the vet and applying the flea potion to the disapproving pets, he had read about washing their bedding. . .so he had paused mid cupboard sanding and dragged the aged carpet out.
The doors for the kitchen cupboards were in the shed, the old carpet was on the lawn.
The chaos of renovating had always been another big trigger for me.
Or was it a trigger? Maybe it had only ever been an excuse?
‘‘Grandma died last night,’’ I told him. Hoping if I said it loud enough I might begin to believe it myself.
‘‘Oh, s…!’’ He paused, his hammer about to rip a nail from the hardwood floors. ‘‘Are you OK?’’
‘‘Yup.’’
I was OK . . . But also, I was not OK at all.
My body had had enough of my health kick. It wanted empty calories laced with a carcinogenic drug, and it wanted them now.
I had started getting a hum in my ears.
A constant hum, a noise I could not escape . . .and it just kept getting louder.
I jumped in the bath.
In the ensuing days, the tension built.
My cousin wanted to know when I was coming up to the funeral, because I could stay with her.
I checked flights, over $1000 on return fares . . .money we desperately needed for those same renovations my husband was still working on.
They had selected the day for her funeral, and — with noone to look after the children while I was gone — I would have to buy two more tickets and risk having heart palpitations just looking at the price.
My grandmother’s funeral coincided with a dentist appointment: I was getting a tooth fixed which had been broken at my friend’s house only weeks before I stopped drinking.
I had chomped on an olive which had a stone inside. My reflexes had not been that fast — thanks to the alcohol in my bloodstream — and I had spat a bit of tooth out.
The sharp edge of the tooth was slicing a little too close to my tongue for my liking, and it was the last dentist appointment I could get until the new year.
Work was insanely busy, we were wrapping up for Christmas and had two editions we needed to get finished within a week, and we were a staff member down for the last two days.
The noise in my ears was getting louder and louder.
I messaged my aunt, I would not be able to come to the funeral, and would have to watch the livestream instead.
Meanwhile, the children were about to be off on school holidays and were finding many things to be aggrieved about. They tried talking to me, but I could not hear them over the hum.
My aunt began ringing. She was wondering why I was not going. Did I need money?
The noise, all of that noise. . .. It was getting to my head and into my soul.
In the past I would have drunk a litre of lemonade heavily spiked with gin and tuned out to it all.
I jumped back in the bath.
I started getting migraines.
All I remember was the baths. Bath, after bath, after bath.
There were so many baths I worried there would be water restrictions. I had come so far now that I really couldn’t fall at the final hurdle, could I?
