Alcoholism Stories

Alcoholism Stories

The most unworthy of these

The nurses were all talking about the two brothers. It’s was at the daily morning meeting, when the interdisciplinary team gathered to discuss the status of each patient in the hospital. The nurses were exchanging notes on each patient and when the two brothers came up for review, the entire mood of the meeting changed.

I have found nurses to be professional and compassionate. Everything was always on a professional level with our group, but this day was different. The gloves were coming off and the two brothers were the cause of it all.

Let’s call them Bill and Bob. The nurses hated going into their rooms. Both were in at the same time, having been discovered by a social worker, who went to their house to check up on them, having not heard anything for a month.

The social worker said they were living in filth. Bill and Bob were literally so deeply involved with drugs that they did not take time to get up off the couch for bodily functions. The description of the house staggered my imagination.

After detox, the brothers were assigned rooms. They treated their stay at the hospital like incarceration. They were rude, vulgar and upon seeing them myself, I could understand the nursing staff’s disgust and irritation. There was nothing lovable about them. They had sheer distain for anybody else and the only thing that mattered to them was to get back to their house and continue using drugs. They had no use for me, of course, but it struck me that they needed to be loved and cared for, even if they want no part of it.

Addiction/Alcoholism did that to them.

I wondered what they were like before, or what happened to bring them to this state. The more vial and defiant they were, the more I was moved to compassion. What had caused them to be at this point in their alcoholism stories.

The two brothers were going to die if left to their own devices. You can argue against that I suppose, but there was no indication that they had any ability to stop using, or any desire to stop using. Living as they did, being in the condition they were in, it was only a matter of time.

Drug addiction and alcoholism are insidious. These brothers were not going to get better, because they had no capacity to connect all the dots. Intervention, albeit forced, was the only thing that prevented death from having its say. They were 48 and 46 years old, but they looked 20 years older. It's seems unlikely that either of their alcoholism stories were likely to end well.

From a Christian worldview, the story of these two brothers is heartbreaking because drug addiction and alcoholism has robbed them of their humanity. We see two nasty and disgusting men, but men who are dearly loved by God. For that fact alone, they are worthy. The lesson I learned was recovery from alcoholism is all about restoration of one’s humanity.

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