6 ms·

Surviving an Alcoholic

90 points by joshrotenberg 11y ago

wcummings 11y ago
I wonder if the author is understating the role acetomenophen had
- rz2k 11y ago
  Probably she is understating the role of acetaminophen in his death. But, I get the impression that she is also understating the magnitude of verbal abuse she experienced, not caused by the acetaminophen. We can also guess that while he may have been susceptible to alcoholism, the incidence could have been spurred on by some other problem — but we simply don't know.
- alrs 11y ago
  Of the $64K surreptitiously spent on liver abuse, I suspect that acetaminophen accounted for less than $500.
  - fecak 11y ago
    You can do severe liver damage with under $10 of acetaminophen if you take the wrong dose with alcohol.
    - alrs 11y ago
      I've had a family member in the hospital with a failed liver. I just gave a eulogy for an old friend at his local NA meeting room. Yes, you can hurt your liver with Tylenol. In the cases close to me, and in the case described by the author, the culprit was clearly alcoholism. Anecdotally, I've never heard a story about a man warned by his doctor to put down the Acetaminophen who kept going and died within a year.
      - fecak 11y ago
        I too have seen liver failure, where acetaminophen use was mentioned by doctors as a contributing factor. My comment was intended to highlight the fact that the combination of even a relatively small amount (not overdose levels) of acetaminophen combined with alcohol can be damaging. Your comment about $500 worth of Tylenol seemed to diminish the role it could play in damaging the liver of even someone with no addiction. And $500 buys a huge amount of Tylenol. The family member I lost (well-educated) was unaware of the alcohol/acetaminophen combination being potentially damaging. My reply here aims to inform anyone who may not be aware. Be careful.
      - mistermann 11y ago
        Is Ibuprofen ok?
    - brohoolio 11y ago
      More like 50 cents. This American Life has an episode that dives into the dangers. It's probably still one of the leading causes of overdose in the USA.
      - nhstanley 11y ago
        Certainly the leading cause of liver failure and need of liver transplants. http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/Depression/2233 http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/Depression/2233
- empressplay 11y ago
  Exactly. The over-consumption of acetaminophen also suggests a slow-motion attempt to kill himself.
jacobtracey 11y ago
What a bitter, twisted thing to write about a dead person. It seems her husbands problems have become a large part of her identity, and what greater way to feel better than write an opinion piece about how shitty he was in the NYT?
- mylons 11y ago
  He drug her down with him. There's no excuse for that.
  - Mr24601 11y ago
    Its generally incorrect to moralize (ie no excuse) anything, especially an addiction.
  - jacobtracey 11y ago
    I wasn't excusing anything, simply stating that perhaps airing ones dirty laundry - particularly about a dead person - in a newspaper no less, just seems bitter.
    - grayclhn 11y ago
      A more charitable interpretation is that she is sharing her experience because she felt like no one she spoke to had a similar experience and wants to reach out to other people in the same boat. She writes the first part ("no member’s situation was similar to mine") but the second part is speculation. If you look carefully, you'll see that it's a post on a blog that deals with end of life issues, so rest assured that it's not a newspaper and every entry probably deals with dirty laundry about dead people in some way.
    - vacri 11y ago
      It's comments like this that shame people talking about hard times in their life, and help perpetuate the problem. The author even leads off with how she's shamed into not talking about the problem. The article is also not the hatchet-job you're painting it as. She's not abusive towards her late husband, but talking about how the alcoholism screwed them both over. By shaming people into not talking about this, you're also preventing people from finding parallels in their own life, or finding out about support groups.
booleanbetrayal 11y ago
and this is why marijuana is a superior alternative for chemically-induced escapism
- adrusi 11y ago
  Except that as a method of escapism, alcohol is much more effective than hemp. Alcohol numbs emotion, hemp simply slightly dissociates the user from it.
  - pics_at_last 11y ago
    I've never tried hemp. You make it sound like an excellent treatment. The aim of all the mindfulness meditation is to observe your thoughts and feelings and stay disassociated from them. Much better than switching them off with alcohol.
- staunch 11y ago
  A family member got off alcohol by going back to his pothead days for a while and eventually tapering off to nothing. So it can be a helpful reverse-gateway drug.
grayclhn 11y ago
I'd strongly encourage anyone who is upset or intrigued by this post to attend an open Al-Anon meeting[1]. (AA is for alcoholics, Al-Anon is for friends and family members of alcoholics. "Open" meetings mean that anyone curious is welcome to attend; otherwise you're expected to be affected by a friend or family member's drinking.) TBH, the author seems remarkably nonjudgemental, given that her husband undeniably drank himself to death a few years ago. Alcoholism's pretty shitty all around. [1]: http://www.al-anon.org/how-to-find-a-meeting http://www.al-anon.org/how-to-find-a-meeting edit: "drinking" originally was "alcoholism" but I edited it after posting. It's a small but important difference --- you don't have to believe that your family member is an alcoholic to attend an Al-Anon meeting; you just have to feel that their drinking is affecting you. And, to be clear, this comment only reflects my opinion.
- aantix 11y ago
  "In The Rooms" puts on several virtual AA meetings a day (via a custom video system they built with OpenTok's APIs). I sat in on a few while researching various non-typical video conferencing systems.. https://www.intherooms.com/ https://www.intherooms.com/
bsder 11y ago
While I'm glad this is helping her to heal, I'm more interested in what could have been done. Why in the world would someone suddenly start drinking at a level where it kills them? At age 45? This seems more like a mental health/depression spiral and the alcoholism was self-medication. Especially since the word "professor" is being thrown around. If I remember correctly, there was some research that showed that men's hormones start going haywire when their partner goes into menopause. Combine this with the fact that a professor is always surrounded by young girls (professors have a higher divorce rate than average), and I have to wonder about a lot of things. Ultimately, it's his own damn fault. But, mental illness has its own stigma.
- comrh 11y ago
  > mental health/depression spiral > Ultimately, it's his own damn fault. These seem incongruent. Is it really helpful to just say it was completely a personal failure? If we're going to talk about addiction as a disease and its comorbidity with mental illness surely "well he was a weak person" isn't helpful?
  - bsder 11y ago
    So, it's never your own fault? This bothers me as much as it's all your fault. You can't just commit everybody who isn't "normal" all the time. Being an illness that needs to be treated and being your own fault are not mutually exclusive. If you have cardiovascular problems, drugs and surgery help, but you also need to lose weight and exercise. Mental illness is quite a bit less distinct. What is the border between individual will and chemical machinery? People have been arguing that for centuries, and we're not really any closer to a good answer. In addition, I'm more than a little skeptical that he "suddenly" became an alcoholic at 45. If he was 50 right now, he's right at then end of the "3 martini lunch" brigade that became socially unacceptable about 1990. I suspect he may have been consuming a borderline alcoholic amount of alcohol, but that something finally pushed him over the limit. Ultimately, it's just tragic irrespective of fault.
    - billjings 11y ago
Devthrowaway80 11y ago
Well, that answers the question of "should I skip my meeting tonight?" I guess.
- internetBuddies 11y ago
  But doesn't this count as a virtual meeting, since we're all transhumanists here, and view the internet as a valid surrogate for social interaction?
empressplay 11y ago
This guy had a meltdown, full stop. If alcohol hadn't been there for him, something else would have. Don't get me wrong, alcohol is a nemesis of my own and I'm happy to point my finger at it when it's warranted but this guy wasn't looking for existential comfort from alcohol, he was shutting himself off (arguably with the intent of doing so permanently). This was suicide-by-booze, the "suicide" being the more relevant part here. The "booze" part could have been anything.
- davydka 11y ago
  I was surprised that it 6 years to drink yourself to death. I agree it was very sudden and that something must have happened to trigger that. I feel like it could have been a genetic predisposition. Our bodies have lots of internal alarms and triggers. Perhaps something went off that triggered this downward spiral. A combination of environmental stresses coinciding with internal clocks. We'll never know. This is definitely a sad story. I appreciate the authors honesty about it. I'm very touched.
juddlyon 11y ago
If you know someone with an alcohol problem, encourage them to seek help.
- aaron695 11y ago
  This is meaningless. They know they need help. They don't need you to tell them. [edit] Google for what you really should do. But this is quite bad advice.
bambax 11y ago
Wow. Some people can write! Edit: surprised by the downvote; for what it's worth, there is zero irony in this comment: I did find this piece very well written.
mirimir 11y ago
I found the piece very frustrating, because there's nothing about what drove him to alcoholism. I can't imagine that he was intentionally combining acetaminophen and alcohol to kill his liver. That's such a slow and painful way to die! As I read, I kept expecting to see something about physical pain that he was suffering. But on the other hand, I recall a recent article about acetaminophen effectively numbing affect. So maybe it does a better job of that, when combined with alcohol.

90 points by joshrotenberg 11y ago

wcummings 11y ago

I wonder if the author is understating the role acetomenophen had

rz2k 11y ago
Probably she is understating the role of acetaminophen in his death. But, I get the impression that she is also understating the magnitude of verbal abuse she experienced, not caused by the acetaminophen. We can also guess that while he may have been susceptible to alcoholism, the incidence could have been spurred on by some other problem — but we simply don't know.
alrs 11y ago
Of the $64K surreptitiously spent on liver abuse, I suspect that acetaminophen accounted for less than $500.
- fecak 11y ago
  You can do severe liver damage with under $10 of acetaminophen if you take the wrong dose with alcohol.
  - alrs 11y ago
    I've had a family member in the hospital with a failed liver. I just gave a eulogy for an old friend at his local NA meeting room. Yes, you can hurt your liver with Tylenol. In the cases close to me, and in the case described by the author, the culprit was clearly alcoholism. Anecdotally, I've never heard a story about a man warned by his doctor to put down the Acetaminophen who kept going and died within a year.
    - fecak 11y ago
      I too have seen liver failure, where acetaminophen use was mentioned by doctors as a contributing factor. My comment was intended to highlight the fact that the combination of even a relatively small amount (not overdose levels) of acetaminophen combined with alcohol can be damaging. Your comment about $500 worth of Tylenol seemed to diminish the role it could play in damaging the liver of even someone with no addiction. And $500 buys a huge amount of Tylenol. The family member I lost (well-educated) was unaware of the alcohol/acetaminophen combination being potentially damaging. My reply here aims to inform anyone who may not be aware. Be careful.
    - mistermann 11y ago
      Is Ibuprofen ok?
  - brohoolio 11y ago
    More like 50 cents. This American Life has an episode that dives into the dangers. It's probably still one of the leading causes of overdose in the USA.
    - nhstanley 11y ago
      Certainly the leading cause of liver failure and need of liver transplants. http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/Depression/2233 http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/Depression/2233
empressplay 11y ago
Exactly. The over-consumption of acetaminophen also suggests a slow-motion attempt to kill himself.

jacobtracey 11y ago

What a bitter, twisted thing to write about a dead person. It seems her husbands problems have become a large part of her identity, and what greater way to feel better than write an opinion piece about how shitty he was in the NYT?

mylons 11y ago
He drug her down with him. There's no excuse for that.
- Mr24601 11y ago
  Its generally incorrect to moralize (ie no excuse) anything, especially an addiction.
- jacobtracey 11y ago
  I wasn't excusing anything, simply stating that perhaps airing ones dirty laundry - particularly about a dead person - in a newspaper no less, just seems bitter.
  - grayclhn 11y ago
    A more charitable interpretation is that she is sharing her experience because she felt like no one she spoke to had a similar experience and wants to reach out to other people in the same boat. She writes the first part ("no member’s situation was similar to mine") but the second part is speculation. If you look carefully, you'll see that it's a post on a blog that deals with end of life issues, so rest assured that it's not a newspaper and every entry probably deals with dirty laundry about dead people in some way.
  - vacri 11y ago
    It's comments like this that shame people talking about hard times in their life, and help perpetuate the problem. The author even leads off with how she's shamed into not talking about the problem. The article is also not the hatchet-job you're painting it as. She's not abusive towards her late husband, but talking about how the alcoholism screwed them both over. By shaming people into not talking about this, you're also preventing people from finding parallels in their own life, or finding out about support groups.

booleanbetrayal 11y ago

and this is why marijuana is a superior alternative for chemically-induced escapism

adrusi 11y ago
Except that as a method of escapism, alcohol is much more effective than hemp. Alcohol numbs emotion, hemp simply slightly dissociates the user from it.
- pics_at_last 11y ago
  I've never tried hemp. You make it sound like an excellent treatment. The aim of all the mindfulness meditation is to observe your thoughts and feelings and stay disassociated from them. Much better than switching them off with alcohol.
staunch 11y ago
A family member got off alcohol by going back to his pothead days for a while and eventually tapering off to nothing. So it can be a helpful reverse-gateway drug.

grayclhn 11y ago

I'd strongly encourage anyone who is upset or intrigued by this post to attend an open Al-Anon meeting[1]. (AA is for alcoholics, Al-Anon is for friends and family members of alcoholics. "Open" meetings mean that anyone curious is welcome to attend; otherwise you're expected to be affected by a friend or family member's drinking.) TBH, the author seems remarkably nonjudgemental, given that her husband undeniably drank himself to death a few years ago. Alcoholism's pretty shitty all around. [1]: http://www.al-anon.org/how-to-find-a-meeting http://www.al-anon.org/how-to-find-a-meeting edit: "drinking" originally was "alcoholism" but I edited it after posting. It's a small but important difference --- you don't have to believe that your family member is an alcoholic to attend an Al-Anon meeting; you just have to feel that their drinking is affecting you. And, to be clear, this comment only reflects my opinion.

aantix 11y ago
"In The Rooms" puts on several virtual AA meetings a day (via a custom video system they built with OpenTok's APIs). I sat in on a few while researching various non-typical video conferencing systems.. https://www.intherooms.com/ https://www.intherooms.com/

bsder 11y ago

While I'm glad this is helping her to heal, I'm more interested in what could have been done. Why in the world would someone suddenly start drinking at a level where it kills them? At age 45? This seems more like a mental health/depression spiral and the alcoholism was self-medication. Especially since the word "professor" is being thrown around. If I remember correctly, there was some research that showed that men's hormones start going haywire when their partner goes into menopause. Combine this with the fact that a professor is always surrounded by young girls (professors have a higher divorce rate than average), and I have to wonder about a lot of things. Ultimately, it's his own damn fault. But, mental illness has its own stigma.

comrh 11y ago
> mental health/depression spiral > Ultimately, it's his own damn fault. These seem incongruent. Is it really helpful to just say it was completely a personal failure? If we're going to talk about addiction as a disease and its comorbidity with mental illness surely "well he was a weak person" isn't helpful?
- bsder 11y ago
  So, it's never your own fault? This bothers me as much as it's all your fault. You can't just commit everybody who isn't "normal" all the time. Being an illness that needs to be treated and being your own fault are not mutually exclusive. If you have cardiovascular problems, drugs and surgery help, but you also need to lose weight and exercise. Mental illness is quite a bit less distinct. What is the border between individual will and chemical machinery? People have been arguing that for centuries, and we're not really any closer to a good answer. In addition, I'm more than a little skeptical that he "suddenly" became an alcoholic at 45. If he was 50 right now, he's right at then end of the "3 martini lunch" brigade that became socially unacceptable about 1990. I suspect he may have been consuming a borderline alcoholic amount of alcohol, but that something finally pushed him over the limit. Ultimately, it's just tragic irrespective of fault.
  - billjings 11y ago

Devthrowaway80 11y ago

Well, that answers the question of "should I skip my meeting tonight?" I guess.

internetBuddies 11y ago
But doesn't this count as a virtual meeting, since we're all transhumanists here, and view the internet as a valid surrogate for social interaction?

empressplay 11y ago

This guy had a meltdown, full stop. If alcohol hadn't been there for him, something else would have. Don't get me wrong, alcohol is a nemesis of my own and I'm happy to point my finger at it when it's warranted but this guy wasn't looking for existential comfort from alcohol, he was shutting himself off (arguably with the intent of doing so permanently). This was suicide-by-booze, the "suicide" being the more relevant part here. The "booze" part could have been anything.

davydka 11y ago
I was surprised that it 6 years to drink yourself to death. I agree it was very sudden and that something must have happened to trigger that. I feel like it could have been a genetic predisposition. Our bodies have lots of internal alarms and triggers. Perhaps something went off that triggered this downward spiral. A combination of environmental stresses coinciding with internal clocks. We'll never know. This is definitely a sad story. I appreciate the authors honesty about it. I'm very touched.

juddlyon 11y ago

If you know someone with an alcohol problem, encourage them to seek help.

aaron695 11y ago
This is meaningless. They know they need help. They don't need you to tell them. [edit] Google for what you really should do. But this is quite bad advice.

bambax 11y ago

Wow. Some people can write! Edit: surprised by the downvote; for what it's worth, there is zero irony in this comment: I did find this piece very well written.

mirimir 11y ago

I found the piece very frustrating, because there's nothing about what drove him to alcoholism. I can't imagine that he was intentionally combining acetaminophen and alcohol to kill his liver. That's such a slow and painful way to die! As I read, I kept expecting to see something about physical pain that he was suffering. But on the other hand, I recall a recent article about acetaminophen effectively numbing affect. So maybe it does a better job of that, when combined with alcohol.