(Content warning: Alcoholism, Recovery, Suicidal ideation, Mental health)

Dictacted 11.28.24 from Dane County Jail, Madison, WI

Dear Mom,

Happy Thanksgiving, Mom. I wish we were spending it together. I was happy I got to talk to you today. It was really, really hard. But I’m happy I got to talk to you. Like I told you, we had turkey, mashed potatoes, carrots, and a whole mess of gravy to go with it. You know I don’t really like gravy, but I ate it because the food needed all the help it could get. 

You perfected the art of the turkey over the years and really evolved into, honestly, an impressive cook. Maybe that means there’s hope for me? (My friends might appreciate it if someday I can make them something other than frozen chicken nuggets.) At least I know I can always count on coming over and enjoying a feature item from your garden. 

Today was a pretty normal day in jail overall, though. Nothing particularly special happened, and on one hand, it didn’t really feel like a holiday. But on the bright side, it didn’t feel like spending a holiday in jail. 

So, the last entry I wrote through the lens of alcohol. I wanted to write a little bit through the lens of recovery because, contrary to what everyone seems to believe, it’s not a light switch. Recovery is not the absence of addiction the way dark is the absence of light. It is a zigzag line that goes up and down and sideways and over and under and curves and bends. So there’s overlap here, and it’s probably going to be more than one post. Because to talk about the process of addiction – well, there’s a reason it’s easier to get addicted to things than to recover. While I summed up almost a decade of addiction in one post, there aren’t enough words in the universe to cover even a moment of recovery.

I’ll start here: the words “I’m an alcoholic ” left my mouth for the first time on November 7, 2020, in the back of an ambulance, sitting in the parking lot of the Cambridge High School. I had called it there because I thought I was having a heart attack, legitimately thought I was going to die at any second. Nope, just another round of horrendous alcohol withdrawal. 

I was trying my hardest to quit. I was so convinced I was going to die at any second that I called an ambulance to come and save me. At this time, however, the ambulance showing up at my property wasn’t a regular occurrence, and I was embarrassed. So I told her to come to Cambridge High School (the side where you enter the track), and informed them I would be walking from about a block to the east, just in case I died on the way. 

I climbed into the ambulance, and they promptly hooked me up to machines and informed me that I was in no way, shape, or form in any sort of cardiac distress, and was showing zero signs of a heart attack. In a way, I already knew that. I knew what it was. It took some talking, and God bless the Cambridge Volunteer Fire Department, because they sat there and they listened to me until the words “I’m an alcoholic” bubbled out of my lips. Then I sobbed. I fell into the arms of an EMT, and I sobbed. And he held onto me, and he let me sob. 

I went home, and I made an appointment with my primary care doctor. She’s seen me through the hell of policing, through transition, through everything in between. By the time that appointment came, I figured, hey, they were definitely going to make me stop drinking then anyway, so I might as well get bombed before I get there, one last hurrah. I went to that appointment absolutely hammered. The second my doctor walked into the room, I broke down sobbing, and although it was COVID-era and doing so was practically illegal, I did fall into her arms and hug her too. Thankfully, she allowed me to, and hugged me back even though she was extremely concerned about COVID, I suppose on account of being a doctor and all. 

She sent me to the emergency room, where I registered a BAC of .32. I got sent home with medication to prevent seizures and nausea medication. They encouraged me to stop drinking immediately, as my AST and ALT (liver enzymes) were in the 500s and my liver was pretty angry with me. I believe they are supposed to be somewhere between 30 and 60. 

I stayed sober for a while; of course, then I shattered my leg in four places and ended up in the hospital. I was told I couldn’t drive or really move, and was put on bedrest. And yet, I managed to order a cart and crutches on Amazon, and quickly realized that that was enough to get me in a vehicle and driving, even though it was strictly against doctors’ orders. Of course, driving led me back to Kwik Trip, where I could stock up on vodka. By week two of December, I was back in the hospital again at UW for detox and withdrawal seizures, and was put on Naltrexone. They told me that it would reduce my desire to drink. Mom, I’ll tell you what Naltrexone did, it made me depressed, and, when I drank on top of it anyway, it made me kind of sleepy, but it sure didn’t stop me from getting hammered. 

I came back home from that detox, and picked up the bottle again, discouraged that Naltrexone wasn’t swatting it out of my hands for me. And then I was sent back to Meriter Hospital, suicidal, and headed to the psych ward. Upon being told that I was going to have limited cell phone time while there, I left against medical advice, and took an Uber to the Monona Walmart. And at this point, you know exactly what I went there for. I picked up a full liter of vodka and chugged it in the parking lot waiting for my ex-wife to pick me up and take me the rest of the way home to Cambridge, where no Uber seemed willing to drive. 

You might remember that night, Mom. That night, you and Dad ended up at my house. I was unconscious, naked in the shower with a broken leg, unable to move due to 0° of consciousness and a completely mangled limb. I believe I was dragged naked out of the shower and into the bed. It was there where I woke up the next morning with you grasping my hand so hard it felt like you’d never let it go. And in a lot of ways, Mom, I wish you hadn’t, but I know you had to. 

We made our way into the living room, and Dad gave me “the talk.” While that whole series of events was a blur, one thing stands out to me. I remember Dad saying, somehow sounding both derisive yet matter-of-fact: “I can’t even call you an alcoholic. You’re not even that; you’re a drunk,” as if I hadn’t even “earned” this accolade with which I had been formally diagnosed by medical professionals. After repeated ER visits, seizures, and medically-supervised detox sessions for the disease of alcoholism, this still strikes me as both inaccurate and unhelpful. 

I voluntarily went back to Meriter right before Christmas. That was my first time in any inpatient psychiatric setting. It certainly would not be the last. I refused to open up or participate in anything. I felt like I’d been thrust into a completely different world where people behaved in ways that I’d never seen people behave before. In the past, medicine had been something that was done to me, was done to a person. It was not something a person actively participated in. 

I’m going to pause for a second because this is something that people who haven’t gone through the mental health system often don’t fully realize or conceptualize. Mental health treatment is not as intuitive as it might seem. I think people believe that asking for and going to get help are the singular battle that one faces. Then you enter the hospital or the treatment center or whatever form of psychiatric care you may need, you receive the help, and you come out better. After all, that’s what happens with medicine, isn’t it? It’s done to you. 

Sure, you could point to physical therapy, following an injury, where you are an active participant in the recovery process; however, there’s still a specific injury that we can see, feel, and point to. It can get labeled and diagnosed. There are prescribed exercises that go with that exact injury that have been proven by science over time to fix that injury, strengthen those bones, change those muscles, and cause greater flexibility. 

Mental health is different. The mental health system felt a bit like I was a piñata hanging from a string, with doctor after doctor taking blind swings at me, trying to “cure” everything wrong inside my head with powerful medications that they’d prescribe despite only treating me for a couple days and having no established therapeutic relationship with me. Each erratic swing as I hung there on my string gave me a new set of side effects to deal with, sent me spinning off in another direction, but never quite unleashed that motherlode of happiness I was told would come if I gave them just one more chance to get it right. 

When I was discharged from Meriter, I was sober for a week. After that week, I was supposed to return to work. But the day I was supposed to return to work I, true to form, got drunk and didn’t call in. I didn’t even realize it; that’s how drunk I was. 

Instead, I showed up the next day expecting congratulations for coming back from such a devastating injury, from which I already knew I would never fully recover. Some sort of warm welcome, condolence that your life is falling apart. Instead, the atmosphere was tense. It would continue to be tense. I would never walk into the East District station again without that aura of tension. I struggled to come up with a schedule while on light-duty, and struggled to stay on task. In the background was a constant battle with alcohol. 

I was taken off Naltrexone mid-January of 2021 and put on Antabuse. There was hope with that; for a while, it worked. While Naltrexone decreases the body’s ability to produce the feel-good chemicals in the brain that make you want to keep drinking, Antabuse makes you physically ill if you drink because it decreases the body’s ability to process alcohol. It worked into spring break in late February, early March. It was around then we went to California to visit Joshua Tree National Park. 

At the time, the degree of my injury was making it clear that my time with the police department was going to be short. I was never going to run again; I was never going to be physically able to do that job again. So, contending with my first vacation without alcohol, normally a prime time to be drinking, and on vacation with a significant other who drank heartily, I stopped and bought legalized marijuana in California. And for the duration of that time in Joshua Tree, I enjoyed consuming marijuana, and I was happy, I was content, the alcohol monkey was off my back. I figured I would never make another arrest again and would be off the police department shortly, so I had no further ethical hang-ups over this.

And then, as you remember, Mom, we came to visit you and Dad where you were staying in Arizona. In Arizona, THC was not legal, and what’s more, we were staying under the same roof as you, and more importantly, with Dad. The devil’s lettuce obviously would not fly with my former-police-detective father. I’d also begun smoking cigarettes to deal with the gap that alcohol left, and that was, at the time, not approved of by Detective Dad. So I was sneaking out of the house while in Arizona to smoke cigarettes and frantically deal with the giant void in my life that alcohol had left. 

At night, my ex-wife would lay in bed with a full glass of bourbon and drink it next to me, asking me if that was OK. And, not wanting to be a bother, I always said yes, it was fine. Every night, I watched her drink straight liquor inches from me. In her suitcase was a 12-pack of Absolut vodka shooters that she mentioned to me she wasn’t even sure if she’d get around to drinking, as if it was nothing, as if they weren’t screaming my name every time I walked into the room. 

About midway through Arizona, I was off my Antabuse. I was surrounded by alcohol, and I couldn’t handle the temptation anymore. To avoid the purple face, sweating, dizziness and uncontrollable vomiting that would otherwise have come as a result of drinking on Antabuse, I had to be off the medication completely for three or four days. I told no one. And the last few days I was taking pulls of Bourbon and sneaking the vodka shooters. Within a few days back from that vacation, I received an OWI, parked on the side of the road. The world came crashing down around me, and for quite a while after that I bounced back and forth between voluntary psych ward stays and medically detoxing in the hospital. 

That summer I was able to work a factory job, but by August, I had my first serious suicide attempt post-policing. I was placed under something called a Chapter 51, which is essentially an involuntary psych hold in the state of Wisconsin, although “hold” sells it short. It’s an order that can last six months to a year, to years. And part of being under a Chapter 51 was signing rules that are similar to those of probation. In my case, one was not to consume alcohol. The difficulty here, of course, was that I had received absolutely no treatment whatsoever for my alcoholism. Instead, I had been placed in a locked facility for two weeks, where I read books, colored, watched Disney movies, and complained on the phone to you, Dad, and my ex about having to be there. Upon returning home, having received no effective treatment for my alcoholism, I immediately began drinking again. 

Between August 2021 and November 2023 that Chapter 51 hold would return me to the state psychiatric hospital nine times. I was usually there less than a week at a time, offered no or little Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse (AODA) treatment, and was never put in contact with community support upon discharge. Nothing in my life was changed or altered other than attending a few days’ worth of group classes that told me alcohol is bad for me. Furthermore, upon returning home, I was still married to someone who was a heavy, active, daily drinker. There were vast amounts of hard liquor in the house being consumed constantly. 

While the providers at Winnebago tried their best, they were a state facility with limited resources. Between January and March 2022, they did put me through a program called the Gemini program, which is an AODA program/dual diagnosis program. This did focus on AODA treatment during the time I was there; however, it ran into the main problem that it was never meant to be a rehabilitation facility, it was not voluntary rehab, it did zero discharge planning, and put me in contact with no treatment post-release into the community. And so, while good work was done there, and the care providers had the best of intentions, it effectively accomplished nothing other than maybe one month of sobriety. 

I did try to continue my progress there. This transgender atheist attended AA like I was supposed to do in our small town. I was immediately turned off by the location being in the church basement. Looking around the walls, I found what appeared to be all of the second-string Jesuses that didn’t quite make the cut for being in the main church area. It was damp, it smelled damp, and it smelled old. It was a shock to my system. By the end of the meeting, I was so rattled I rode my bike to the gas station and bought a giant bottle of vodka, half of which I consumed on the way home. I wouldn’t return to AA for a year after that experience.

It was that year I worked my first towing job of two. (Side note: both towing companies I worked for in the Madison area were nothing short of spectacular, and more patient than they ever should’ve been with me. They gave me all the chances and opportunities in the world, and I loved working there. But at the end of the day, it’s hard to employ an addict.) In any case, around August or September of that job, in 2022, I was already drinking daily at night, and the withdrawal symptoms were becoming so severe in the morning that I couldn’t get to work without being severely ill, shaking, or calling in. The shaking was so bad that I couldn’t hold the mouse at work and do my job simply due to the inability to type and move a cursor. I found the solution in vodka once again. 

I had an Intoxalock in my car, so it was impossible to drink before work. Every day, I would weather the storm of withdrawal in the morning, throwing up for hours, and then drive myself sick to work. But I had a cure, that medicine I’ve depended on for decades. In my glove box, I kept a bottle of vodka ready for the second I pulled into the parking lot. The moment I could shut down the car, free from the Intoxalock, I took exactly 12 shots, followed by one giant pull of vodka from the bottle. And I learned that by doing this, never any more, never any less, I could be back down under the required .02 to drive my car home in eight hours. 

This would limit me to only really one hour per workday of severe withdrawal symptoms, usually my last hour. Then, I could return home and immediately pour myself a drink that, blessedly, staved off my withdrawal symptoms, at least until the next morning. That ritual lasted until early 2023, when, once again, my drinking spiraled out of control, and the delicate balance that kept me chugging along collapsed, sending me off the rails. 

I’m going to have to get to that in another post, Mom, because 2023, as you know, was a whole different direction. A lot of things changed in 2023. I’ll break that down in the next post. I think 2023 deserves its own post – at least. 

If you ever want to write me a letter and maybe not deal with things so quickly as words come out of our mouths, Mom, I’d love to receive one. I like letters. I like writing. It was good to hear your voice today, Mom, but your voice was sad. I bet mine was, too. I’m getting better, but I feel that same sadness. I love you so much. 

Still me

-Eli