The Trouble with Change

I’ve been struggling in my life for the last few months. I’m not so good with change, and I’ve had much of it this year so far. It doesn’t matter that some of the changes are good – aka adopting a dog – change is change, and my brain gets agitated and testy with it.

I like my routines and ruts. They help my particular ship sail more smoothly. 

Midlife has been another (ongoing) change. Menopause isn’t for wimps. Most of the ages we go through aren’t for the faint of heart. Life is a series of challenges, and once we finally master them, we’re punted to the next level, neophytes again.

Once you master all the levels, it’s time to take your leave.

The changes I’ve been experiencing, including dealing with grief, have seen me engaging in much lateral movement. I tend to spin my wheels when I’m stressed. It feels productive even when it’s not. On the bright side, my cupboards are ruthlessly organized.

The Unhealthy Crutch

I like to take problems and make them worse, with either questionable/poor choices, or by hiding the fact that I’m in distress. Making things worse is one of my special skills. This tendency to make poor choices when things are already challenging explains my decision to take up drinking in the evenings. I was looking for something that would quiet the feelings of stress, chaos, confusion, and sadness. I chose poorly.

Regular drinking isn’t a great choice for anyone, even if you’re not using it as a crutch; there are issues aplenty with drinking spirits, including the rather immediate hit to the cardiovascular system. Just one drink makes the heart testy, so using it for denial or escape is a poor choice indeed, best suited to the very temporary.

Then again, “smart” isn’t our species’ defining characteristic most of the time.

Coping Roulette

The big problem with my regularly drinking alcohol, aside from my tendency to embrace vice, and that right quick, is that I take medications – antidepressants, sleeping pills, and antipsychotics, oh my – that don’t necessarily mix well with wine.

On paper. In practice, they’ve done okay. Just look at all the not-dead I’m displaying.

It’s always fun when people minimize what they owe to luck.

I even managed to keep drinking wine while recovering from a recent rope burn to my leg – the antibiotics I was prescribed didn’t require abstaining. That’s a good thing – I was not in the mood.

It’s probably not a good sign when one ignores a possible death side effect just for a few minutes of escape. My tendency towards ideation often sees me playing a bit loose with warnings and contraindications. I’m aware and working on it, so that’s something. ^[i]

I Do Love an Escape

I don’t even particularly like wine. I don’t like much in the way of alcohol, if we’re being honest. What I enjoy about booze is its effects. I don’t drink to savour the aroma or flavour; I drink to get drunk. I drink to feel the buzz and the giddy. I drink to make my brain shut up. ^[ii]

This is a problematic way to approach alcohol, though I’m not sure there’s a good way for people like me to drink, people who never met a bad habit they wouldn’t embrace with alacrity if it promised silence in the brain.

I’ll put up with a lot in the way of negative consequences to keep the hideous and unkind inside voices I live with at bay. How else to explain an eating disorder that spanned decades, hospitalization, and health emergencies, that endured long past the time I knew better?

Though knowing and doing are two different animals.

Alcohol Lies

Alcohol is a liar beyond just the beer goggles and skill level misevaluations. It simply doesn’t do what it promises to do, at least not for long. Sure, that glass of wine smooths out the evening’s rough edges for a week or two, but you get used to the effects rather quickly, and suddenly, the evening buzz no longer feels as good. It’s only escape-lite.

You miss the buzz and the not-thinking, though, so you pour yourself another glass. The bottle that used to stretch three nights now gets emptied in two. The trips to the liquor store consequently get more frequent. You start buying booze in bulk – two bottles at a time, instead of one. You think about maybe getting a box of wine, though you don’t pull that trigger.

There are some advantages to poverty – it’s harder for me to go all-in on vice, unless I’m also going all-in on big debt.

Crutches Bring New Problems

Drinking more wine in the evenings means that the mornings are suddenly less pleasant. You wake up with a bit of a headache or a bit of a queasy stomach. You’re not so keen to get up and get on with the day anymore. You need to hydrate, caffeinate, and sit first, and shake off the effects of those “helpful” drinks.

But it’s okay. It’s just for a bit. It’s just until you get your sea legs back, just until your life feels like it’s running smoothly (definitely don’t make eye contact with the dog).

Because alcohol is something that makes people’s lives run better in the general sense?

Besides, I’m probably getting sick. It’s probably just the flu. Or allergies. I should pick up some antihistamines. I could try that new liquor store while I’m out. It’s a little embarrassing shopping at the same store every other day. I need to take those bottles back to the recycling depot, too. It seems like there are so many in the garage all of a sudden.

Danger, Will Robinson.

Chronic Pain, Neuralgia Branch

I was in a car accident in 1997. I was in a couple of them, actually: I had a bad few months. One of the injuries I sustained was to my jaw. The right side of my head smashed into my driver’s side window, crushing the cartilage that lives there. The body doesn’t like the bone-on-bone grinding or jaw clenching that results from its loss. It prefers its joints cushioned. It communicated its displeasure to me via trigeminal neuralgia.

The trigeminal nerve is the major nerve in your head, responsible for providing sensory information to and from the face and scalp, and for the movement of your mouth and jaw. It has three main branches: the ophthalmic, maxillary, and mandibular. That’s a lot of nerve for neuralgia to travel.

If you think you might be headed to hell, neuralgia can offer a glimpse of what you might be in for. It’s agonizing. The air causes pain. Your hair hurts. Forget brushing your teeth or washing your face while in a flare. Forget thinking. Be careful when you change your shirt – you won’t like what happens if you touch the wrong bit of your head. Don’t even think about lying on the afflicted side.

Don’t even think about thinking.

Chronic Pain and Improvements

I get neuralgic flares eight to twelve times a year. They’re a misery I’d wish on very few. You treat the flares with opioids, heat, ice, and time, though none of these options are terribly effective or comforting. A soft food diet can help prevent the trigeminal nerves from getting testy in the first place, though I admit I’m not always happy to follow it. The best foods have crunch.

About ten years ago, however, things improved for the better vis-à-vis flares. I was introduced to a new medication, gabapentin, and we added it to my pain control regimen. It’s an off-label use: gabapentin’s an anticonvulsant medication. It just happens to do wonders for neuropathic pain.

It has been a game-changer. Flares that used to last seven to ten days have been reduced to often under five, and the pain is less severe as well. I no longer contemplate driving my head through the wall.

My first experience with neuralgia saw me trying to pull out my back tooth with a pair of pliers – I thought the pain was perhaps a cavity, and I was that desperate.

The experience of trigeminal neuralgia is not unlike being stabbed in the head with an ice pick three to ten times a minute, every minute of the day, until the flare abates. It feels not unlike being electrocuted (or so I imagine). You can’t believe how frantic a pain you can’t escape from will make you. There’s almost nothing you won’t do.

Life Is Pain, or Something Like That

My life this year has seen me clenching my jaw plenty, and that’s another great way to trigger a flare. I’ve been lucky this year – I’ve only had two minor attacks before the one that flared two weeks ago.

I’m thinking I should perhaps start naming the attacks for easy reference. This most recent one was a doozy. She’d’ve made a good Agnes. I was popping T3S (Tylenol and codeine) every three hours alongside ibuprofen and the aforementioned gabapentin. Relief, however, takes time.

I wanted nothing more in my misery than the escape a glass or two of wine promised. I was in serious pain. I deserved a drink. I needed one.

Needing a drink is a very bad sign. ^[iii]

Hello, To My Little Natural Consequences

Alcohol is a depressant when you consume it steadily, and so my increasingly negative affect has a logical source. It’s unfortunate I so often make poor choices on purpose: my meds had been doing a reasonably good job of keeping depression at bay before I decided to make drinking my evening activity of choice. 

I hate meeting the consequences of my actions, especially when I know better.

I can mix my meds with liquor, but they don’t work as well. The risk of instant death, however, is fairly low. Drinking and Gabapentin are a different story. You mix alcohol and Gabapentin when the thing you want stopped is not pain, but your heart. I’m not currently in that frame of mind.

Instant abstinence.

Once I stopped drinking, things started improving, pain notwithstanding. I didn’t wake up dehydrated. The vaguely unsettling, low-grade morning nausea disappeared as well. Looks like it wasn’t allergies. I’m glad I can stop with the ginger pills – they’re not cheap, either.

I hate it when denial starts getting tricky.

Things Are Better

I don’t recall every reading an article about the ten ways drinking improved someone’s life. There are plenty of stories about how stopping made things better. Better mornings aren’t the only improvement for me.

The little voice that kept nagging me about the costs of myoenophile phase has been silenced. I don’t have a disposable income that lends itself to a couple of hundred dollars a month in maladaptive coping choices, and my inside voice likes to nag: I’m glad to hear the last of her. ^[iv]

My skin is looking better now that I’m abstinent again. I was starting to look a little puffy around the eyes, and a little rough-textured in the face. It doesn’t take long for the body to object to serious mistreatment, and drinking poison – even tasty booze is poison – is in that vein. ^[v]

The remnants of my eating disorder started to weigh in on my evening behaviour as well. She’s not happy about the approximately ten pounds I’ve added. The body doesn’t process alcohol well, so it prioritizes using it for energy. That means the body stores as fat the other things you consume. It can add up. Especially when you up your chocolate bar consumption at the same time.

Maladaptive Coping and Escapism

I’ve flirted with alcoholism before. The first time was back in university, just after I became legal, but back then, I starved myself on the days I planned to drink. My eating disorder was clear about that requirement – alcohol calories had to be compensated for somehow. They have a name for that now: drunkorexia. Who doesn’t starve themselves before an evening out?

This most recent bout of neuralgia has now run its course. I could start drinking again if I wanted to. I could even set up a wine cellar. There are plenty of wine racks for sale at the thrift stores. I could buy the mullet version – baking storage up top, wine and wine glasses below.

That I thought about drinking wine again so quickly on the first day without gabapentin; however, and that I told myself that I didn’t even need wine, I could just make myself a quick rum and Diet Coke to celebrate being pain-free seeing as I already had rum on hand, were more warning signs.

I have a history of making bad choices in the pursuit of avoidance. I have a history of unfortunate consequences as a result. For a supposedly smart person, I’m a slow learner.

Making Good Choices

I’m not doing dry May or dry June or dry anything. I’m simply shifting my mindset back to where it’s been for much of the past twenty years – most of the time, I’m someone who doesn’t drink.

There are benefits to being abstemious. I can drive whenever I want. I don’t get out of breath walking the dog – alcohol does an instant number on your heart.

I no longer feel like I’m pissing away my money – literally when one is talking about alcohol. There’s a quote about libations I enjoy: You don’t buy wine, you rent it.

I also like not flirting with a major depressive episode. Things are also starting to level off with my mood; depression appears to be receding. Dodging that bullet is always a relief.

I suppose returning to making better choices is a sign of maturity. I was sort of expecting maturity to appear before menopause.   

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If you or someone you know is struggling with alcohol or substance abuse, reach out. There are community groups as well as private options. One thing that is always true with substance abuse: nothing gets better for the waiting.

In Canada, you can call the mental health and addictions line at 1-833-553-6983.

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[i] Suicidal ideation (suicidal thoughts) refers to thoughts or ideas centred around death or suicide. Experiencing suicidal ideation doesn’t mean you’re going to kill yourself, but it can be a warning sign. Treatment is available (Cleveland Clinic).

[ii] One exception – I do enjoy sipping tequila.

[iii] Needing any type of crutch is a bad sign. Unless you happened to break your ankle or leg.

[iv] Fifteen dollars a bottle times three bottles a week is forty-five dollars. Forty-five times four is one hundred and eighty, and there’s tax on top of that.

[v] Alcohol is a serious mistreatment. It’s poison to us.

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