Notch8

I went back and read some of my journals when I got sober. I found I recorded my sleep patterns, the nightmares, night tremors, the sweating, appetite (or lack of one!) Drinking gallon after gallon of water and sports drinks and rarely having to pee... wow. I think I was weighing myself every morning just to document weight loss or gain.

Did anyone go into this much detail?

RecklessEric

No, just lying there waiting for day 5 to arrive.
It is sheer hell.

MPRinthewoods

Hang in there man. I just got home from detox, so day 6 for me and feeling pretty good

least

The awful anxiety the first week or so. I'd be so desperate to calm down I'd take a benedryl just to relax a bit. The w/d anxiety was the worst of the effects of w/d for me. Glad I'll never have to go thru that again.

nez

The first few days, I went to a lot of meetings. They got me out of self. Confirmed my commitment to do this. Bolstered my hope. Gave me strength. But in the back of my mind, I also knew this was one hour out of 24 that I was guaranteed not to drink.

VikingGF

Early days for me was a bunch of obsessing over every symptom, clinging to SR and documenting. I'd say that faded out pretty much in the first week, then I started to feel a bit more normal, but those first three-four days were a doozy. Never, ever, ever again.

Evoo

I was a wreck. Unfortunately, I did that same, horrible anxious detox routine several times before I finally did the last one. The worst were at the height of my addiction when I’d become too sick to drink (from drinking) and had no choice but to take off work and dry out/taper back to “functional” drinking levels. No sleep, throwing up bile constantly, anxiety, mortal terror, nightmares, heart palpitations.

I will never go through all that again.

snowboarder1980

I also took Benadryl the first week just to knock myself out of it and “sleep it off” sort of. Days 3 thru 5 were the WORST. Day 26 today and Im feeling 100 times better, maybe 500 times better.

ScottFromWI

Yes, I was hyper-documenting and dwelling on every tiny detail the first few weeks. Probably good and bad - in once sense I spent a lot of time here learning while doing so, but also over-obsessed about some things too. My anxiety also certainly played a part, but I didn't really realize it at the time.