My mom has been drinking for as long as I can remember. She gets drunk. Then the next morning she starts to drink again as soon as she wakes up. It usually lasts a week. I don’t live with her anymore because honestly I don’t want my daughters to see that.
She works for my sister’s husband selling water softens. She is the best in the country and she makes about ten thousand dollars a month. Then she takes that money and goes MIA.
The last couple of years it has gotten real bad. This is happening more and more often, and this time, it has been a 15 days. She missed my daughter’s fifth birthday, thanks giving, and her own birthday. I am getting really scared.
I studied alcoholism in a history class, a drug class, and I wrote 4 research papers on the physical and mental long term effects of binge drinking. Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant. When a person drinks non-stop for a long time, like my mom, their brain tries to counter act the depression by over stimulating it. When the alcohol is suddenly taken away (when she decides to stop, or runs out of money) the central nervous system becomes over stimulated.
The withdrawals from alcohol are called delirium-tremens. It is more deadly then heroin withdrawals. It starts with a really bad hang over. Any person’s hang over is withdrawals from the drug (Alcohol is a drug), that’s why drinking a small amount of alcohol helps the symptoms so much.
After, or during that stage, the person begins to shake. They can’t stop their hands, head and other extremities from shaking. Kinda like boxers who have been hit in the head too many times.
The next step is tingling sensations. It is described as spiders crawling on your skin, and can progress to the feeling of snake bites. These sensations make the next stage even more frightening, hallucinations (delirium). These hallucinations are almost always terrifying.
Once a person reaches the delirium stage, they need to go to the hospital so that a doctor can give them a barbiturate. Barbiturates work because they are and alternative depressant drug, but the doctor is able to regulate this drug better then alcohol and slowly wean the patient off. It the alcoholic dose not receive medical attention, the final stage is grand-mal seizures (tremens). This is often followed by death. Every time a person survives these withdrawals, the symptoms become more and more sever every time.
There are many other ways alcohol can kill you. In the short term, car accidents, falling, etc. ( those thing have happen to my mom) Long term, a person can get a fatty liver that leads to cirrhosis of the liver and death. If they don’t die from it, they will probably loss their mind. Binge drinking has detestation effects on a person’s short term memory, problem solving ability, emotions, and personality. Basically, in the long run, it’s like taking a sledgehammer to the forehead and permanently damaging your cerebral cortex (the part of your brain that makes you who your are).
Most people don’t know about delirium-tremens, or these other horrible consequences. I certainly didn’t know when I was younger. Looking back, I saw some of these terrible symptoms in my mom. Her personality has changed and she repeats the same sentence a lot. The most terrifying, though, is that I have seen her shake, and heard her scream for seemingly no reason when she is coming down from a binge. She blacks out for days when this happens. She wakes up with no almost no memory of this happening, and acts like every thing is fine, but I know she realizes what she did. How can she deny loosing a week on the calendar?
When I’m done writing I’m going to go to her apartment. She might not let me in, but I will get in anyway. Honestly, it has taken me this long to check on her because I am really afraid I will see her dead. I love my mom.
My mom had my sister take her to the hospital last time this happened. They admitted her into the psyc ward. My mom didn’t like that very much. They couldn’t hold, for some reason and let her go. Now she is avoiding my sister and I.
My sister called the cops on her and told them she was suicidal. They couldn’t do anything because my mom wouldn’t admit it. Also, she was in her a apartment, so they couldn’t take her in for public intoxication. What a f*cked up country. The police can arrest a pot smoker who is not hurting themselves or anyone else. But they can’t help my mom who is killing herself, and might try to drive and kill some innocent person.
I really don’t know what to do anymore.
Please, if anyone out there has an idea of a way to get her help against her own will. If I don’t find a way she might die. If she survives this time, it will happen again. She won’t stop until she dead.
