'I'm not an addict'

Updated

Chaos, denial, rock bottom. Addiction is a hell of a disease.

Secrets and lies.

Life used to be awash with them.

There were the lies Amanda French told her husband. That she wasn't drinking. The waiting for Monday morning when he went to work before she started, trying to stop before he got home. Though he pretty much always did know. He knew.

There were the lies she told at the bottle shop. Oh, I'm making red wine casserole, I just need a cheap bottle. When really you've scrounged coins because you told your husband to take away your cards, take your cash. Hide your car keys so you can't get to the store.

And then there were the lies she told herself. I'm not an alcoholic. Why can't I drink? Everybody drinks.

"I was pretending to be normal but every day I was drinking. I'd get up at four o'clock, have a drink, go to sleep for a bit, then I'd be up at eight o'clock, have a drink. I'd cook all this food and wouldn't eat it."

The 50-year-old would run away to the beach. Sit in the sand dunes where no-one could find her. Disappear. Her family not knowing if she was alive or dead.

One night — a couple of nights — she jumped in her car at two in the morning, drink-driving. Went to Kmart, stayed all night.

"I lied and I lied and I lied. I can walk to two bottle shops five minutes from my house in Launceston. But I could go to a different bottle shop every day for a month and they wouldn't see who you are.

"It's just like being sneaky and cunning and I don't want to be that person anymore. No. I just want to be myself. A good person. A good friend, wife, mother, daughter, sister."

The spiral

Mandy always had a glass in her hand, as far back as she can remember.

When she was younger it was always wine or bubbly. You'd have a few drinks before a party to get a boost. To feel more confident, more attractive.

I'll just have one more, you'd tell yourself. And then just one more. And then, by the time you looked, you'd have downed a whole bottle.

"I might not have any more that day but I always liked to have a reserve bottle just in case I needed it. I mean, it got to the stage where there was no wine in the fridge, my husband tipped out all his rum. I never drank scotch or bourbon because it made me sick, but five-dollar bottles of red wine, yeah. It's like you'll do anything to have a drink.

"For me, it really spiralled from being a social drinker to being a heavy drinker to being unable to stop drinking. I was just totally out of control."

Why can't you just stop? Her daughter, her son, her husband must have asked her a thousand times. Why do you do this? You make the choice to go buy a bottle of vodka. Make a different choice.

"I now realise it's a disease. I cannot stop drinking on my own will."

She's ridden that merry-go-round. Sipping non-alcoholic wine all through a party only to get home and drink. Sticking to mocktails all through a 12-day cruise and then finding herself at the bottle shop counter two days later.

It's something addicts are told in rehab: your brains are wired differently to those who can drink or use drugs, even to excess, without ever developing an addiction. Recognising you are powerless over substances is the first step.

"Now I feel like I can admit, you know, I am an alcoholic, I cannot have a drink. So if I go to a barbecue or a party or whatever it's just like, 'I don't drink'."

Delay and distract

Rehab has been hellish. She's hated every day of it.

"I know you're not supposed to be here to break the cycle but that is one of the reasons I'm here: I can't get any alcohol.

"I have therapy once a week and the counsellor's really helped me get through a few childhood issues and stuff like that, so that's been great. But generally it's not what I expected.

"We have to do all the cooking and cleaning. I didn't expect any of that. I'm paying 400 bucks a day — shit, can't they get someone to clean the bathroom?"

It's all by design, of course. Part of discipline and taking responsibility. But if Mandy had thought about it properly beforehand, she never would have come.

That's the way most people arrive. In a chaotic whirl. Whether checked in of their own free will or by a loved one, it's a point of desperation.

She's wanted to leave countless times. It goes with the territory.

At almost any given time, at least one patient is threatening to walk out.

The local police are accustomed to Riverside clients marching up the road, fronting up to the station, demanding out.

"Mate, you're in the best place you can be. Do what you're told," has been the response.

At Riverside, the strategy is delay and distract.

"We can't prevent anyone from leaving but we put it off," says rehab manager Cameron Leiper.

"We have you see the support workers, they delay you and support you. We try to get you in to see the counsellor. We use the community to try to support you to stay."

Plus, you've signed your belongings over to Riverside and they don't have to return them for seven days.

In Mandy's case that included a driver's licence, which she would need to board a plane back to Tasmania. She was stuck.

That, and the knowledge that she had paid $12,000 to be there, cooled her heels until the urge passed.

She lurched through her 30 days, the minimum-length stay.

Surrounded by drug addicts — 80 per cent of Riverside's clientele are ice users, mostly young men — Mandy has struggled.

"I'm a suburban housewife, legal secretary. They're all drug dealers. I feel like I'm in an episode of Underbelly."

Leiper says alcoholics typically present as "I'm going to control everything", whereas ice addicts arrive totally out of control with no sense of time management. "Alcoholics, their rooms are immaculate, they're always on time. Ice addicts, their room's a mess, they're never on time and they forget everything."

He says alcohol can be a much more insidious addiction than ice.

It sounds strange to say, but in some ways, Leiper actually prefers ice, because it brings things to an undeniable head. It demands to be dealt with.

"If you're using ice, you will end up running naked down the street, whereas you can drink in secret for years while keeping up the appearance of a normal life.

"We've all got the same problem," says Leiper, himself a recovering ice addict. "We're all addicts. In that sense there is a one-size-fits-all in terms of, you have an addiction."

In its second year of operation, Riverside has a 67 per cent completion rate.

No sooner is a bed vacated than it's filled by another addict. The centre can accommodate 19 people, but typically has 15 or 16 residents at once, mostly young men.

Rehab opened Mandy's eyes to her own preconceptions.

"My opinion of anyone involved with drugs was always like, 'Oh my god, they're drug dealers, they're selling drugs to people, they're not nice people'. But I've found they are nice people. They're just people like everybody else and sometimes they do it to feed their own addiction.

"The stereotyped drug addict is someone in a park shooting up needles. But at the end of the day, they function really well, they run businesses. If you weren't another addict, you wouldn't know that they were."

She's been encouraged to spend longer in rehab, but she's adamant.

"Thirty days is maybe not enough for some people but it's all I'm doing. At home I will keep doing everything that I've been taught. You know, I wasn't all that keen on going to AA meetings but now it's like, 'OK, I will do 90 meetings in 90 days'. I'll get off the plane and I'll go to a meeting. I already know where they are, there's one every day.

"We'll try to keep me away from situations where people are drinking alcohol for the first while. That's probably the hardest thing, because it is so socially accepted. My mum likes to have a glass of wine pretty much every day. My daughter drinks.

"I can't say what I'll be like when I get out. Only that this time I've surrendered and I have the total willingness to change my life."

Ash

At 39, his body is a wreck.

One weekend, while Ashley Hobbins was on leave from rehab, there was a party. He picked up a stubbie of VB and held it to his head, against the two plates in his face.

"This is what you did to me," he told it. Then he put it down.

It was the car smash that prompted him to book himself into rehab.

He'd jumped behind the wheel after a night at the bowls club. His team had won. He thought he was alright to drive. Came across the West Gate and slammed into a wall, five metres away from a shrine for five kids who died when their car hit a tree in the same spot two years earlier.

Ash escaped with a fractured face and broken ribs. It makes the hair on his arms stand up, how close he came.

"They say about a spiritual awakening. That was f***ing mine.

"To walk away from something like that, I knew if I didn't get the help I needed probably within the week I'd be in jail, or I would have killed somebody or I would have been dead myself."

It began 15 years ago.

Ash was 24 and a ship foreman at the wharf, running the night shift.

He was beneath a 20-foot shipping container when a workmate jibbed it down instead of up.

"I had just enough time to pull my body out of the way but it caught my hand," he says.

"I can still picture it right now. I was running around the hatch and I went to climb up the ladder to get out and I thought, I can't get out of here.

"I could see my hand with the pigskin glove on where it basically just burst out the side of the glove, all the meat, you know.

"That's something that will probably never leave my mind and it's probably why I've ended up where I am today."

The surgeons told him he was going to lose his hand.

"It was the size of a football," Ash remembers. "I just said, 'Whatever you do, try to save the hand'."

A dozen operations later — skin grafts, carpel tunnel — he kept the hand but ended up on a "crapload of medication".

OxyContins, Endones. Ganglion blocks infusing anaesthetic into his shoulder. A spinal cord stimulator implanted inside his stomach to interrupt pain messages to the brain. He was so rigged up he'd set off airport metal detectors.

"The stimulator was bulging out my stomach. It broke down three times. The third time I said, 'I don't want it in there'. So I went back to the ganglion blocks to see if that would work.

"My doctor basically said, 'There's not much more we can do for you. You're going to have to be on this medication until it subsides,' sort of thing. I couldn't even function. I was all over the joint. I had a couple of seizures from having too much of it, fell down the escalators at the World Trade Centre and smashed the side of my face."

There's no point in blame, but Ash looks back and sees that's where it all started. The slide into addiction.

Three or four years after the accident, he started smoking dope.

Life rolled on. He became a stay-at-home-dad after a split with his partner. Met a new partner. But in the evenings, he would drink.

"I was a functional alcoholic. I could work, I could play, I could do pretty much everything. But just in between six o'clock at night and ten o'clock I'd drink myself to, basically, blackouts.

"Sometimes I'd get on a few other things to keep me up and keep me drinking if I was out, like speed or a bit of coke or something like that."

Then his partner left. Cue the chaos.

A fight broke out at a party. Ash was hit over the head with a baseball bat, his skull fractured. Post-traumatic amnesia layered on top of the post-traumatic stress he was already suffering from his accident back in 2002.

Recovering from the injury, Ash pulled back on the drugs. But he was still drinking. Down to maybe four to six beers a night, instead of just smashing himself with half a slab. But drinking.

Who are you going to be?

Ash's own father was a mad alcoholic. Five strokes in three years and another three after that. He was still alive but stuck in a nursing home bed.

"I'd only let Dad back in my life in my mid-20s. I remember my kids being around him and I don't want to be that person where I'm on my deathbed and my kids or their kids are going to be seeing me, my grandchildren. So I use that as motivation."

Ash remembers eying himself in the mirror on a daily basis, wondering. Who are you going to be today? What are you going to do?

Now in rehab, Ash hasn't been this dry since the accident. A decade-and-a-half of his life. One big blur. Whether it was medication, or alcohol, or drugs of some type.

"I thought I was 29 but I'm 39. I don't know where the last 10 years have gone. To actually stick my hand up and ask for the help was a massive turnaround for me.

"I know who I don't want to be anymore, I just don't know who I am right now. But this is a great stepping stone for me."

Triggers

Ash is scared to walk out those doors. Rehab is one thing, but the real world is full of triggers.

There are loads in the house where he'll be living, where there are still holes in the walls from his fists.

"But now every hole I'm patching up, it's patching up an old scar."

He believes in AA's 12 steps.

"I'm not one to believe in too many things, but these steps have actually given me a pathway. Instead of going right, I'm going straight. Before it was just like a figure eight, I just kept going around and I always kept coming back to the same point, which was daunting.

"I'd seen psychiatrists, psychologists and all that, but until I came in here and saw things clearly, it was very scary, very scary. I was only in survival mode, I was just getting by. I wasn't living week by week, I was living day by day."

Now, too, sobriety will be a daily proposition.

"I don't think I've felt like this for a long, long time. I'm happy but scared at the same time, but I know we've got a brighter future. I've just got to keep the faith, as my nan would say. I'm doing it for my kids just as much as I'm doing it for myself."

Thanks to Riverside Clinic and its clients for making this story possible.

Topics: drugs-and-substance-abuse, drug-use, alcohol, community-and-society, health, kyneton-3444, vic

First posted