This was posted on a forum.
My 47-year-old brother is on his way from local er to major hospital with his abdomen so swollen he can hardly sit, veins visible, some bruising.he is a drinker, and has been evidently being seen by a doctor for a year for cirhossis....
what i read on the internet is not good for this situation....
can a young person reverse this if they quit drinking? he has been in AA, etc. But i am guessing if he can recover from this, it will scare him enough to stop, assuming it is a cirrhossis issue. . . .
My brother is "shocked" that he is now in this situation -- he said the doctors would say "you're going to die if you keep drinking" but he didn't think it would be something that would happen somewhat immediately.
It never ceases to amaze me that people seem to think they are immortal until there are imminent signs of their mortality right under their noses.
Benjamin Franklin once offered this aphorism: "A child and a fool, as Poor Richard says, imagine twenty shillings and twenty years can never be spent." But they can be spent, and they will be spent. We can replace spent money. We cannot replace spent time.
The physician who told the alcoholic brother that if he did not stop drinking, he would die, was telling the truth. But the brother thought of this as being later on, after the next drink. "I will stop before I get to death's door." But only when that door opens wide do addicted people stop, sometimes.
In a follow-up forum, we learn that the brother needs a liver transplant. The physician who may be able to supply it has told him that he must sober up for six months, with the first day beginning when he goes to an AA meeting. There will be zero tolerance. One drink, and he loses his last shot at life.
With an alcoholic, there is no way for him to conceal a drink in secret. The secret drink triggers a response. He will take another drink.
Alcoholics know what to do. They need to stop drinking. But they don't. The brother has received a wake-up call. There is no guarantee that he will wake up. "One more drink. Just one more drink. Then I will stop."
The comedian John Candy ate himself to death. There is a scene in one of his movies, Only the Lonely (1991), where he plays a policeman who is overweight. He says that he is going on a diet. His mother, played by Maureen O'Hara, has a pastry on a plate. She does not eat it. He picks it up and says: "I'll start the diet tomorrow." He wolfs it down. Three years later, Candy was dead. He would cook for crew members after a day's shoot. He loved spaghetti. He ate a lot of spaghetti. It killed him. He knew it would.
“I know what I have to do if I want to lose weight and stay healthy: eat a proper diet and exercise,” Candy said. “All I’ve got to do is apply it.”
When you look death in the face, and you are told that you have to change your behavior, which you already knew, you had better change your behavior.
This woman did. They made a Hollywood movie about her, based on her novel, which was autobiographical. Her story is here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/14097.cfm
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