Well to start with I am no longer waking up shaking, hallucinating, throwing up, and having seizures. The year leading up to me coming into treatment I was in an extremely toxic relationship. We drank and used together 24/7. We were incredibly codependent and I believed that was true love. Looking back I can now see how insane this thinking was but when I was in the it I thought this was all normal. On my 22nd birthday my girlfriend and I went to a five day long music festival called Lightening in a Bottle. I had never been on so many drugs at once for a week long period of time. I had brought with me to the festival a ton of Xanax and a fifth of banana 99, for the mornings at the festival, because I knew what would happen if I woke up with nothing. Unfortunately or fortunately on the last day of the festival I woke up with nothing because I finished all of my shit in a black out the night before. Everyone was still asleep and the bars weren’t open until 12pm and It was only 8am, so I was fucked and I started shaking and hallucinating which eventually woke up my girlfriend and she started to freak out. It wasn’t long after that, that I started going into nonstop grand mal seizures. Everything from that point was a blur but I started to come to in a hospital bed with my girlfriend crying in the corner, nurses around me, and a doctor looking at me like he had just seen the most horrific thing in his life. The doctor told me that if I had shown up at the hospital just an hour later that I would have been long dead. My withdrawal symptoms were so severe that it would have killed me. He then began to tell me that he had never seen alcoholism so bad in someone my age and that the withdrawal symptoms I had were that of cases he had seen in people who had been drinking heavy for 30 years. He told me that my liver was on the verge of cirrhosis and that if I continued to drink and use the way I had been that I wouldn’t be alive by this time next year, and that if I wanted to live I’d have to get sober. I didn’t care, it didn’t faze me in the slightest. I was literally prepared to die an alcoholic death and could not care less. My girlfriend had been on the phone with my parents and told them everything that happened, from waking up that morning, to the point of me waking up in the hospital and having had 6 grand mal seizures.
When my girlfriend and I showed up at my parents’ house later that night I walked straight into an intervention. They begged me to get help and the only reason I agreed was because they told me I’d only have to be gone for 2 weeks. At the time, two weeks seemed like a long time but I looked to my girlfriend and she told me to just go. Off I went to Utah, for 100 days!?! I was bullshitting my way throughout my whole stay in rehab. Towards the end of my stay in rehab my girlfriend and I got in a huge fight over the phone and caused me to get my gym privileges taken away. This is where I drew the line. I tried to go anyways and when they wouldn’t let me in the sprinter van all hell broke loose. I started cussing out and threatening the driver and then ran back in to the rehab, to the staff conference room, and I barged up in that shit and started screaming at all of them and told them if they weren’t going to kick me out that I’d give them a reason . I began punching holes in the wall and started ripping the pictures off the walls and throwing them at staff. I then locked myself in my room putting all the dressers in front of the door and fell asleep. Fast forward a couple hours and I was on my way to the airport with Chris Kirby and Matt Fidlow, who happened to be in Utah for a conference. On our way to The Last House, I was communicating with my girlfriend and letting her know that I had to go to sober living. She cussed me out and broke up with me, saying that I played her and broke her heart. Kirby wouldn’t allow me to respond, so coming in to The Last House I was emotionally messed up and I had no idea what I was getting into.
Let just say I had a rough start here at the house. I wasn’t willing to change and I thought it was all bullshit. I agreed with absolutely nothing that was going on here and the only thing on my mind was how I was going to get my ex-girlfriend back. However, you guys didn’t give up on me. Especially David Ford. Through the nonstop grouping and the millions of words I wrote at the house, something finally clicked.
After 9 months of trying to fight and beat the system, I finally surrendered and decided to allow the house to do its thing. It was the best thing I could have done, it made my life so much easier. I actually started to want to stay sober, which was something I did not think was possible. I began to see how A.A. was going to save my life. I saw the steps finally start to work for me. I’ve built such an amazing community here at The Last House and will always have a place to hang out at if I start to struggle. The house has literally completely changed me and for that I am eternally grateful.