Driving home a message: You can get better
In the summer of last year, Barbra-May* was at her wits end. “I was homeless. I had no job. My car was falling apart, and I had no rights to my son.” Thanks to medications for alcohol use disorder, along with counselling and tremendous support from her family, she is now seven-months sober, has a new condo, a car, a full-time job and is with her son four days a week.
“I’m so much better,” she says, speaking from her car where her son chatters happily in the back seat. “I can honestly see myself as sober forever.”
Barbra-May started drinking at age 13. As she grew older, she continued to drink but she and her spouse were able to hold their jobs, care for their son and keep a clean home. But, after moving up north where her spouse was away at work for months at a time, her drinking took a serious turn. “Things just got really bad,” she says. With her son about to be apprehended by social services, Barbra-May’s mother took him into her care.
Barbra-May stayed behind and continued to drink until a few weeks later, she realized she needed help. “I thought if I can’t get sober for my son, what could I get sober for?” She moved to be closer to her mom and her son.
Barbra-May struggled, quitting drinking for short bursts and then relapsing, and eventually wound up in hospital for a serious detox. At the time, she was prescribed Naltrexone to ease her cravings. Her mom had researched medications through the Canadian Alcohol Use Disorder Society website, and her psychiatrist was familiar with them.
But Barbra-May didn’t stay on the medication. “It’s like I planned my own sabotage,” she says. “You have to want it. I wasn’t mentally healthy, and I just stopped taking it and I drank.”
“I was spiralling downwards,” she says, adding that, a few months later, she had given up her lease on her home to go into treatment, but couldn’t sober up long enough to enter the program. In the heat of summer “I was living in a tent. It was so bad, and I was thinking, ‘How did I even get here?’”
A bout of alcohol-induced psychosis pushed Barbra-May to fully realize the toll alcohol was taking on her body. After just a few shots of alcohol, “bugs were talking to me in the wall. I knew I was not okay.” She was again prescribed Naltrexone, but this time she stayed on the medication. Her cravings eased, and she’s been sober ever since.
Barbra-May credits her family, her physicians, counsellors and AA meeting sponsors for getting her through. “Without all of them, I wouldn’t have been able to do it,” she says. “For the first little bit you have those moments when you want to cave, and that’s when you need those numbers to call.”
She also credits the medications for reducing her cravings so that she could recover and heal. “I needed them,” she says of Naltrexone, which she took for four months. “Otherwise every liquor store I would pass I would have to tell myself, ‘Don’t stop. Don’t do it.’”
Without cravings, Barbra-May gradually grew more confident being around alcohol and driving past liquor stores. “At first, I’d take different routes, or take the long way home. I boosted myself and my confidence.” She glances in the rear-view mirror at her son, who is laughing. ““It’s not even hard at all anymore. Now, I just drive home.”
*Name changed to maintain privacy