Leo17,
Here are a few of my observations from years of drinking. I used to drink Scotch and Whiskey in the early 1990s. By 1995, I had essentially burned hole in my stomach. After giving it 5 hears to heal, I started back on wine and just recently stopped.
In the brief periods when I quit my mind becomes much sharper, my speech faster. I couldn’t have written a coherent novel in two months if I weren’t sober. But once that was done I started drinking again. Christopher Hitchens, another famous lush, once said he could tell at which point his novelist friend Martin Amis, had reached the point of drunkenness because it was evident in his prose.
With respect to the brain – and this is from research that explains what has happened to me recently – alcohol affects two parts of the brain.
1. It slowly eats away at the cerebral cortex, thought to be irreversible (but we always tell ourselves, but we only use 10% of our brains, so we have a lot to lose). This part of the brain controls thought, speech, memory, and other things.
2. It affects a fundamental neurochemical process involving GABA-receptors. Alcohol induces the brain to produce more of a chemical that interacts with GABA, and when we stop drinking, the brain has gotten habituated into producing more of this chemical than it needs. There is a period during which a new chemical equilibrium is reached, and this is responsible for many of the things that happen during withdrawal, like the shakes, hallucinations, tremors, inability to regulate body temperature leading to fever and sweats.
The biggest danger is when the brain sputters or backfires like an engine trying to start. That is when seizures can occur. It’s happened to me, more than once.
Last night I went to the ER to get something to stop the tremors that wouldn’t stop, making it unable to write or use a fork. They gave me Librium, which made me feel drunker than I ever did when drinking. It knocked me out for 8 hours, strange dreams. But now that I’m alive and kicking again, I feel like I’m on the road to feeling as strong and alert as am I when I don’t drink. It’s a much better feeling than drunkenness.
I notice that when I'm drinking, I have congestion in my chest. There is some way that alcohol creates sinunsitis, an infection of the sinus cavity. That is what you are feeling in your chest. I've felt it too. But it goes away once you stop for a couple weeks.
I urge you to do as I did -- and believe I really didn't want to do it -- have a friend take you to the ER, tell them you're going through alcohol withdrawal, and they'll give you something to help you mitigate the uncomfortableness of feelings of withdrawal.
Also consider joining AA and an alcohol treatment services program. I have done both today, and I never want to feel as uncontrollable over my physical fate that I did last night.
Be well.