Nice to see your post.
I am now a retired LPN/Paramedic after 20 years nursing and 12 as a paramedic.
I got sober right after retiring from being a paramedic due to PTSD. I worked for over 6 years as a nurse in sobriety before the PTSD also forced me into retirement from nursing.
I am an alcoholic. Pills never were something I got into then or now. For some reason my brain told me that alcohol was ok since it was legal but pills were not. A twisted sense of morality I guess since I abused alcohol to an extreme.
Toward the end of my drinking I was drinking until 3 or so in the morning, getting up and being at work by 7:30am. This was a line I swore I would never cross with drinking. But as I am an alcoholic there are several lines I crossed that I swore I would not. Fortunately during the last 6 months of my drinking I was not working at both nursing and EMT but just paramedic. That allowed me time to get to work and hopefully not have any calls for several hours to allow myself to get a bit sobered up. I am not proud of the fact that I know I went to work still drunk from the previous nights intake but it is what it is, I can not change the past. I am just fortunate that I was an over achiever and made a point to know twice as much as I needed to know to deal with any medical situation. If not for my over achieving my alcoholism would have significantly impacted my patient care. I am fortunate, and so are my patients, that I only was drinking to that extreme for about 6 months prior to the PTSD forcing me to retire from that field. When I retired from being an EMT I went back to nursing. Fortunately, I had received a head injury from drinking right before I started back to nursing and that caused me to once again try to regulate or slow down my drinking. It took me 6 months of trial and error but finally found AA and in the meantime did not go to work drunk or recovering from a drunk.
In recovery I have met many professionals in many fields including; nursing, lawyers, doctors, police officers, fire fighters, EMT's, etc.... None of us are immune to this disease. In fact some of these fields are breeding environments for alcoholism and drug addiction. But that is just my opinion.
Thanks for the thread. It is good to know we are not alone.