It is 305 days since I last had a drink, and over the weekend I came the closest I've come yet to drinking again.
Diabetic neuropathy is a tricky son of a bitch. It means you lose feeling in your feet except, every once in a while, you get a sudden flare of pain. I haven't felt my feet in a few years except for that pain. It comes out of nowhere, and it takes your breath away, kind of like the second between getting kicked in the balls and then feeling the pain spread up through you. It feels like getting a railroad spike shoved into the sole of your foot for just a second and then goes away for a very long time. It's kind of like a bigger scale version of phantom limb pain. And I guess not a lot of you know what that's like, so imagine instead of the railroad spike you get a thick gauge needle instead. But the point is, the pain goes away almost as swiftly as it comes.
Except for Saturday night. I'd gone to sleep, and suddenly I woke up because of that pain. I cursed and tried to go back to sleep only to feel it again ten seconds later. Right in the heel of my good foot. And the motherfucker just wouldn't stop hammering away at me. It drove me up the fucking wall, especially when I saw that I'd only been asleep for an hour. I knew that sleep was probably out of the question going forward.
And then I remembered what I usually did when it comes to treating pain: BOOZE. I'd take down at least a fifth of whiskey, and the pain would be so distant I wouldn't care about it anymore. That's how I got through a lot of injuries from dental surgery to the time I walked a piece of my toe off (yes, the toe that I eventually lost, but not because of that moment).
Well. What liquor store would be open at this hour? I looked at the clock and realized that Corner Cottage was still open for another two hours. I could go there and get back and drink myself into a blissful pain-free sleep.
Then I looked at my calendar and saw the 302 written on that date and sighed. Nope. Can't do that. What can I do?
When I need to sleep, I take two sleeping pills. You're supposed to take one, but I have a high tolerance for drugs. So on Saturday I took four of 'em and sweated through the pain until Morpheus took me off to the Dreamlands.
And I stayed there until almost noon on Sunday. Not surprising, but it shocked me because I'm usually up--against my will--by seven at the latest.
So yeah, I lost a lot of time because of that, but hey! At least the pain was gone when I woke up.
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